From: kilroy@gboro.glassboro.edu (Dr Nancy's Sweetie)
Subject: ``Unfortunately, She Was Also Wired For Sound''
Organization: Glassboro State College
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 03:35:50 GMT


Vicky Chai and David Richmond relate a tale of romance over the net, and ask
if anything similar has happened on Christia.  I can't answer that one, but I
do have a story that might be interesting (and it has an unusual twist).

It's a bit Unix-specific, so I'll give a basic explanation of some Unix
utilities.

The `finger' program looks up information about a user; if you run "finger",
it tells you about everybody who's logged on.  If you run "finger <person>",
you get a printout of that person's full name, userid, last time he logged in,
how long he's been idle if he's currently logged in, whether he has mail, and
then a `plan', which consists of anything the user wants to put in.  Most
people put in something funny.  Most systems let you abbreviate `finger' by
just running `f'.

The `talk' program connects you to another user, divides the screen in two,
and lets both people type at once.  Whatever they type is displayed on one
half of the screen, so it is possible to have electronic conversations.

 --

On Monday, 21 March 1988, Vick Khera (who worked downstairs from me in the
AV Williams building) wandered into the computer lab where I was, and asked
if anything was going on.

I said that no, it was a pretty slow day.  And after considering it for a
while, I decided that I'd like to have a pen pal, so I said "We need a pen-pal
someplace."  Vick replied `Where?'

It had been a chilly week, and there was a bit of snow that morning, so I
said "Someplace warm."  The reply: "Well, how about Duke?  It's down south
someplace..."

So we looked in the host file for some networked computer at Duke, and found
an entry for "cs.duke.edu".  We ran "f @cs.duke.edu" and got all the names of
the people logged on.

Then we started running long fingers of the people whose names we had gotten.

Well, as it happens, everybody at Duke has nearly identical plans, or at least
formats.  It's a box of some sort, with info in it, like this:

	++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
	+ Name: Norman Bates                                 +
	+ Research: AI, Inference systems                    +
	+ Office number: 201                                 +
	++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This was a depressing development: how can you tell who is interesting by
their plan, if everybody has the same basic one?  UMD has a bunch of weirdos,
so it's easy to tell what someone is like; but these held little hope of
finding an interesting correspondent.  We were about to give up on Duke and
switch to Georgia Tech.

But then we came across one that was so terrific we started laughing at
it; in a sea of conformity, one plan stood out.  It looked like this:

	+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
	+ Name: Nancy                                       +
	+    [...]                                          +
	+ Shoe Size: 6 1/2                                  +
	+    [...]                                          +
	+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

So Vick & I sent her a letter (with a subject line that said "Unfortunately,
She Was Also Wired For Sound") and she replied.

And I sent sent her some more letters, and she sent some more letters, and we
used `talk' over the ARPAnet, and we talked on the phone, and since we had
lots in common, we decided we should meet.

The truly amazing part of this is that it was totally out of our hands: if
Pete Cottrell hadn't hired me for the job, or if Vick hadn't walked in the
room, or if Nancy had been out to lunch, or if she didn't have her shoe size
in her plan, or if I had gone home after class . . .

At the time, I didn't read Usenet news or participate on any mailing lists;
barring this `random' network connection, there wasn't any obvious way we
could meet.  This is one of those cases where God has plans that you can't
even imagine.

On Friday, 20 January 1989, Nancy proposed in the Duke Gardens, and I
accepted.

And, after 1298 electronic letters, 250 paper letters, several hundred hours
on the telephone and using `talk', 29 visits totalling 163 days together,
18,000 miles of driving/flying/railroading, and 670 extremely long days apart,
we were married on Saturday, 30 June 1990.


Darren F Provine / kilroy@gboro.glassboro.edu
"And they lived happily ever after . . ."
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