[TUHS] Coffee

Early on when I was consulting for what would become my company, I got stuck on a weekend to fix something with the coffee pot and a box of Entenmann's chocolate donuts. These have a coating that's kind of like wax you have to soften up in the hot coffee to be digestable. As a result of that weekend any crunch time was referred to as waxy chocolate donut time. Another crunch weekend I was working on the firmware for an esoteric digital data tape player. I would test it. Find the fault. Go to one machine running Xenix on a 286 which had the editor and the assembler. I'd then floppy it over to a DOS machine that had the EPROM burner. I then would take the eprom and stick it into the controller. The president of the company had two jobs. He was to follow behind me and refill my coffee cup and scarf up the used EPROMS and dump them into the eraser so we wouldn't run out of ones to program. For years, we were a six person company of which only me and the president drank coffee. When the one pot we made in the morning was gone, that was it for coffee. As the company got larger and there were more coffee drinkers, people would just make a new pot. This coincided with me having my office moved adjacent to the coffee maker. Every time I had a long compile or something I'd look down and see my cup was empty and I'd pop outside and get a new cup. Not surprisingly, I started to get heart palpitations. The doctor asks how much coffee I drank, and I tell her something like thirty cups a day. She tells me I may want to cut back on that. My best job was working for a friend whose company operates out of his home. He'd make espresso for me and we'd drink that (and eat his wife's excellent leftover food) until about six and then being another wine judge, we'd switch to wine. -----Original Message----- From: Tim Bradshaw [mailto:tfb@tfeb.org] Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2017 8:51 AM To: Ron Natalie Cc: Dave Horsfall; The Eunuchs Hysterical Society Subject: Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies? I don't know about other people, but I think the whole dope thing is why computer people tend *not* to be hippies in the 'dope smoking' sense. I need to be *really awake* to write reasonably good code (if ever I do write reasonably good code) in the same way I need to be really awake to do maths or physics. So I live on a diet of coffee and sugar and walk around twitching as a result (this is an exaggeration, but you get the idea). I have the strength of will to not use stronger stimulants (coffee is mostly self-limiting, speed not so much).