Date: September 2002
From: Alex K. Angelopoulos
To: Ask Tim
Subject: Go See Alex--He's Got O'Reilly!
Tim,
I just got the Winter 2003 catalog and glanced at the "New Series, New Trends" piece. I happened to start skimming it at the fourth paragraph, and I found myself thinking that this was an excellent way to start reclaiming the word "hacker." Then I read the next paragraph. Great minds think alike. :) [ Editor's Note: See About Hacks for our take on reclaiming the term "hacker." ]
I also owe you thanks for something that happened to me about 12 years ago. Right before I went off to grad school, I did a one-day technical edit validation project for a company in Indianapolis that had done some work with you. They knew I was about to be an impoverished grad student in a technical field, and asked if I wanted some extra Unix books they had sitting in a closet. I wound up with three boxes of books bearing obscure colophons and incomprehensible names on the covers. (I didn't know diddle about Unix at the time.) There were multiple copies of many titles, and I figured I would throw them away later.
As it turned out, I didn't throw them away. Fortunately I kept two copies of the "vi" book, because I wore out one copy; the others made me an instant name in the grad engineering programs: "You want a yacc book? Go see Alex--he's got O'Reilly! And he'll give it to you!"
A lot of things have changed since 1991, but your books are still keepers. Over the last six years while working in IT, I've accumulated plenty of O'Reilly books, but I still have my October 1990 Learning the vi Editor, while books by other publishers have come and gone.
Thanks for everything!
Alex
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