Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [6]
Peri was finding it a little weird the way Bob avoided eye contact. ‘So you and the Doctor stopped him?’ she prompted.
‘You bet we did. You bet we did.’
‘The Doctor said you should come back to my hotel room.’ Her ears turned bright red, but Bob was looking around the room. ‘We only got into Washington last night, and then he just disappeared. He called me and said to keep you by the phone in the room until he called again. And there was something else.’ Bob sucked out the last of the coffee and balled up the cup, an enthusiastic look on his face. ‘He said he wants us to steal something.’ Bob’s head bounced up and down in agreement.
The moment they got back to Peri’s hotel room, Bob fell face-first onto the bed and started snoring again. He had brought a huge bag of supplies, ranging from an Atari 400 to a half-empty jar of instant coffee. He’d insisted they stop by a 7-Eleven so he could buy two two-gallon bottles of chocolate milk.
Peri sighed, hung up her coat, squeezed the milk into the hotel fridge and got room service to send up a mushroom and avocado sandwich on rye and a grape soda. She thought of asking Bob if he wanted something to eat. His mouth was slightly open, and he was drooling on the bedcover. She decided he needed his beauty sleep more than he needed his lunch.
Bob Salmon was, obviously, also used to sleeping in odd circumstances. The sleeping bag was a permanent feature of his office, in case a bout of programming stretched into the wee hours and he needed to snatch some shuteye before getting back to the keyboard. Once he had programmed for three days straight, chasing a bug in the university’s electronic mail system, turning his monitor from green-on-black to black-on-green so that his burning eyes could go on reading the screen. An alarmed student found him unconscious in the sleeping bag after the marathon session, and almost called an ambulance before the janitor explained it was perfectly normal.
Bob had developed the ability to work for inhumanly long hours while still in high school, so he could study and still have time for computers (or the other way around). His father, a programmer for the military, encouraged his interest but didn’t realise just how far it went. More than once Bob had hacked away half the night, and spent the other half cramming for a test.
Programming is not a spectator sport. Bob spent long hours of his teens alone, hunched in front of the monitor in his bedroom. But he also spent hours with his father by his side, thumbing through manuals while Bob hammered away at the keyboard. Mr Salmon was delighted at the prospect of Bob following in his footsteps, and knew it wasn’t always the case that teenage boys had something cool to talk about with their fathers. Unusually, his mother would often sit with him as well. Mrs Salmon was no programmer, but she loved puzzles, especially crosswords and chess puzzles. She could often follow the steps Bob took to solve a particular programming problem, despite the arcane tongues of the machines: Unix, VMS, Pascal.
The high school had a TRS-80 connected by phone to a nearby college for a few hours of connect time each week. The keyboard was prone to doubling the letters you typed, producing meaningless syntax errors like NNEW and RUUN.
It was Bob who solved the little mystery of why the machine seemed to freeze up altogether when someone inadvertently told the machine to LLIST; the command meant ‘line list’, BASIC-speak for ‘print out my program’. Over at the college, the program got stuck in a lengthy print queue. Bob was able to cancel the unwanted printout and get the machine working again. After that the teachers let him stay back after class and work on the TRS-80.
Mr Salmon indulged his son with as much computer equipment as the family could reasonably afford. He even provided him with a limited dial-up account to his ARPAnet-connected machine at work – on the understanding that Bob would never try to break anything or break in anywhere.
The ARPAnet is the Advanced Research