[interpunct]

I went to RPI's summer program for high school students in the mid 80s. I was hand assembling and linking assembly for a PDP-11 in the computer lab for a class, and I struck up a conversation with the sys admin of the "big" VAX-11 machine. The load over the summer on the VAX was low, so he was using the whole VAX to calculate the digits of pi. When I asked him "Why?", he said he hated to waste all those cycles. I remember less about the technical details of what he was doing than I do about PDP-11 assembly language. And pi is 3.1415927..., right?

Now that I am reading Meagher on octrees, I kind of wish I had met him--I think he was there at the time. I did get a tour of the image lab, and remember the colorful monkey on a monitor.