Anyway, Randy finished his software after a year and a half. It was a success; Chester and Avi liked it. Randy was moderately pleased at having built something so complicated that actually worked, but he had no illusions about its being good for anything. He was sort of embarrassed at having wasted so much time and mental energy on the project. But he knew that if he hadn’t been writing code, he’d have spent the same amount of time playing games or going to Society for Creative Anachronism meetings in medieval drag, so it all zeroed out in the end. Spending the time in front of the computer was arguably better, because it had honed his programming skills, which had been pretty sharp to begin with. On the other hand, he’d done it all on the UNIX system, which was for scientists and engineers—not a savvy move in an age when all the money was in personal computers.