Wesley A. Clark, legendary computer engineer, dies at 88
Here's my Wes Clark story...<p>About 6 years ago I went to his Brooklyn apartment for his birthday.  I had never heard of him, but he's distant cousins with my wife's step father and we lived nearby.  We get to his apartment and I start looking at the book collection... a lot of interesting math and computer science.<p>I started talking with him 1 on 1 and at some point he drops that he created the first personal computer.  I'm ashamed to admit it, but in the back of my mind I was thinking "oh boy, this guy's not all there."  But then he took me to his office and there's a poster of him with the LINC and I'm realizing that I've hit the motherlode of awesome computing history from a primary source.<p>He then showed me his current project: a working model Broadway stage for his granddaughter.  It had to-scale working versions of everything, including the lights and actual mechanisms for drawing the curtains.  Then he fired up his Mac with a 30" monitor and showed me that every piece had been laser cut from schematics that he had designed.  In raw postscript.  The entire thing was programmatically generated from a massive postscript program that was fully parameterized so he could change the dimensions of anything single component and the whole stage would be regenerated.<p>That programmatic modeling project was a big motivation for the work I've been doing to make parameterized 3d models for ergonomic keyboards (<a href="https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard</a>).<p>I definitely experienced some cognitive dissonance watching an 82 year old flying around vim editing postscript.  It was a trip and it was really inspiring to see someone his age still hacking.