I remember the first time I came across Pat. It was at Walter Johnson High School in the math lab and he was the kid with the loud gravelly voice. When I took the Fortran programming class it quickly became evident that he was the person to ask when you had a problem with your program. I think he could almost always find the problem in under 15 seconds. We became friends and spent a lot of time writing programs, playing games and doing math homework. I remember going to Pat’s house a bunch of times for a pizza lunch and playing with his newest gadget, an electronic game called Pong (pretty much the first computer game). In 12th grade I remember driving the card decks for the Fortran class up to Comsat Labs twice a week (nobody had computers back then, not even the school).
After graduating from high school, Pat went to Montgomery College. I remember spending a lot of time at their computer lab working on programs, helping people with their programming projects (Pat could still solve most problems in a few minutes) and eating pizza. I remember him and Steve Eylar figuring out how to break out of the Montgomery County School’s programming environment. Not to cause trouble, but just to explore. It was a little dicey for a few days when someone at the School Board’s IT department figured out what they had done, but it ended up as a summer job for Pat fixing their system so no one else could do what they had done.
We carpooled to the U of Md for two years (along with Gil and Guy Richardson) after he transferred over from Montgomery College. Pat and I took most of the same computer science classes and while most people spent a week doing a programing assignment, we would start the evening before it was due with a pizza then work past midnight until it was done. I don’t think we were racing, but I think Pat usually finished first.
After graduating from school, we started out on our careers. Pat had started working at Dialcom while he was going to U of M, and that’s where he stayed. I remember still more pizza, playing Frisbee, shooting pool at his parent’s house, playing badminton, playing volleyball, going bowling and the start of the Friday night poker game (which, of course involved pizza). I remember standing in line for hours and hours on opening day of the first three Star War movies. I remember Pat, along with Steve Eylar finding out how to get onto Arpanet (a research project that led to the internet) and exploring that and finding the Colossal Cave Adventure game (the first interactive fiction computer game) and spending hours mapping it all out. Then, we found the Zork game that was an order of magnitude larger than Adventure. Pat and Steve spent months mapping that out on a huge piece of paper until they finally solved it.
Things went on like that for some years until life started to happen. Our friends starting getting married and I remember Pat meeting Mary and them starting to spend time together. Long about there I got married and a few years later Pat moved to Virginia and I lost touch with him.
Pat was a great fiend and I’ve forgotten way more than I remember about all the things we did. Peggy and I send our condolences to his family and friends. He will be missed.
