[TUHS] Masscomp Engineering Mailing List, Custom Products Engineering and the Manatee

Semi-Unix History.... Dave's "this date in history stuff" has reminded me of a great Masscomp story that really needs to be written down and not lost to Unix history. I'm hoping Warren can forgive me a little as the Unix history is the Masscomp part and people involved; but I think it is fun and should be more widely known. Some of you may know who Jack Burness is (and even be part of his humor mailing list - which is one of the most amazing who-is-who of the industry). Jack is probably most infamous for his being the author of RT-11 Moonlander <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game_genre)>. Some of his stunts over his career are legends, as our old friend and colleague Mike Leibensperger once said, I want to be like Jack, when he grows up (at ~70, I can assure you that he still has not). After Jack left DEC, he became the original one man Masscomp Graphics group. While the year really does not matter, at some point, Jack had been given a tear off desk calendar as a Christmas present from his girfriend called the 'Sex Fact of the Day Calendar.' Like Dave's daily reminders to us on TUHS, every morning he typed in the one line factiod and passed it on to the Masscomp Engineering Mailing List. This is important because the VCs had just given us a straight laced ex-IBM guy as a president named Gus Klein (aka Mr. Potatohead), who did not read email, and of course did not read the engineering mailing list. He wants to workspace to be 'professional' and look like his idea of an 'office' and his 'memos' were amazing as you can imagine. The other important note to the story is that the late Roger Gourd, our direct boss, had just created Masscomp's new Custom Product Engineering (CPE) group; to be the analog to DEC's CSS. When Roger had left DEC for Gould he had of course, moved to south Florida where they were based and become quite a fisherman and protector of natural resources. When he was recruited to come move back to New England to take on the reins in development at Masscomp be brought some of south Florida back with him. Well from Jack we had learn two important facts and from those facts realized that mediterranean fisherman were liars: at some time in March it was reported that fisherman in the med that caught a female manatee in their nets and brought it into their boat considered it bad luck unless they sodomized them because the manatee were thought to be mermaids; and some time in May we learned that the Roman Catholic Church would excommunicate any fisherman if it was discovered that said fisherman had caught a manatee and that manatee had been used as a sex toy. Upon learning this interesting catch-22, Gourd immediately sponsors the "Save the Manatee Society in South Florida" and makes it the Group Mascot for CPE. Well, manatees start popping up all over engineering. Mr. Potatohead is clueless of the significance of course. At his memorial I gave Roger's widow a stuffed manatee I still had from my desk from those days, she knew and laughed and laughed knowing that Roger would have approved. BTW: I do however, still keep 'Darth Tater, on my desk at Intel'.