There are people who pass through your life, and there are people who somehow remain part of it for fifty years.
Beryl is one of the latter.
I first met her long before there was a personal computer sitting on anybody's desk.
I was an IBM System/3 Model 10/15 consultant then, working in and around the Monterey Peninsula. One of my clients was a wonderfully odd little startup in Carmel Valley called Favorite Things.
And Favorite Things had a product.
Oh boy, did it have a product.
His name was Uncle Sherman.
Uncle Sherman was a soft stuffed doll wearing an overcoat. He looked like a slightly disreputable old fellow who might have wandered in from somewhere he shouldn't have been.
But Uncle Sherman had a secret.
Open the overcoat and there, in all its anatomically correct fabric glory, was a rather unmistakable penile appendage.
Yes.
That was the product.
Welcome to the 1970s.
As I remember it, Uncle Sherman made it onto The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and suddenly this strange little Carmel Valley company had a hit on its hands.
I wasn't there to design dolls, anatomically correct or otherwise.
I was there because businesses needed computers, and computers in those days were very different creatures.
There was no Windows.
No web.
No PHP, CSS or HTML.
No laptop.
No smartphone.
No cloud.
And there sure as hell wasn't an AI named Blue sitting beside me while another AI named Codex performed surgery on my software.
There was an IBM System/3.
And there was me.
And at Favorite Things, there was Beryl.
That's where we met.
Somehow, out of that bizarre combination of IBM computers, Carmel Valley, startup-company insanity and a dirty old stuffed man in an overcoat came a friendship that lasted for the rest of our lives.
Beryl and I became lifelong friends.
And now jump forward roughly half a century.
I'm 80 years old.
I'm still programming—although what “programming” means in my life has changed beyond anything that younger System/3 consultant could possibly have imagined.
Today I build BluSup with Blue and Codex.
And this morning we finished something rather remarkable.
BluSup now has its own People system.
It knows recognized people voluntarily by their own four-digit PIN. It can remember their activity, build their BluSup Passport, show the areas they've explored, understand relationships between people and places inside BluSup, and even tell me who appears to be Online Now.
We also built an owner-only System Administration facility so I can maintain that People registry safely.
This morning I used it to clean up my own identity mess.
I had managed to become OMJ, James Hamilton and Jim Hamilton while experimenting with the system.
We retired OMJ.
Then we merged OMJ's history safely into Jim Hamilton.
Then we purged the obsolete identity.
All of the history remained.
The duplicate person disappeared.
And suddenly the BluSup relationship graph became beautifully simple.
There were two recognized people in my little world.
Jim Hamilton.
And Beryl.
I stared at that for a while.
Of all the people who could have become one of the first real members of BluSup, there was Beryl—the woman I first met while I was programming an IBM System/3 for the company that sold Uncle Sherman.
That makes me smile.
The technology between those two moments is almost impossible to comprehend.
From punched cards, RPG and little IBM business computers...
to the personal computer...
to the Internet...
to smartphones...
to artificial intelligence...
to a system I'm building at 80 years old that can recognize Beryl when she walks through the digital front door.
But underneath all that technology, something hasn't changed.
People matter.
Computers come and go.
Languages come and go.
Companies come and go.
Even Uncle Sherman eventually closed his overcoat.
But a friendship can survive all of it.
And now, fifty years later, Beryl and I have somehow ended up together inside BluSup.
This may be my Favorite Thing of all.
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