Names from the past

The Friendly Orange Glow is about the PLATO project. I used PLATO as a TA when at U of I, and earlier when I was at SIU I was interested, got an account, and then got distracted and lost it. I wonder if my life would have been much different if I had gotten involved...

The book brought a name out of the past: Bill Roper. He was in the science fiction club, and into computers, and one day was explaining to me the premise of a sci-fi story he was writing that involved a computer program that hid itself in the unused bytes in allocated blocks of storage. I don't think he ever wrote code to do that, but computer viruses took advantage of not-dissimilar hiding places. I give him credit for early warning. You need quantum mechanics for a chemistry degree (and physics, of course), and there was a prerequisite math course to quantum mechanics that wasn't offered often enough, and his advisor slipped up. We parted ways on graduation, but I gather he has had a good career in IT instead.