Engraving For Graduation Quotes

recalled Stephen Crocker, a graduate student on the UCLA team who had driven up with his best friend and colleague, Vint Cerf. So they decided to meet regularly, rotating among their sites. The polite and deferential Crocker, with his big face and bigger smile, had just the right personality to be the coordinator of what became one of the digital age’s archetypical collaborative processes. Unlike Kleinrock, Crocker rarely used the pronoun I; he was more interested in distributing credit than claiming it. His sensitivity toward others gave him an intuitive feel for how to coordinate a group without trying to centralize control or authority, which was well suited to the network model they were trying to invent. Months passed, and the graduate students kept meeting and sharing ideas while they waited for some Powerful Official to descend upon them and give them marching orders. They assumed that at some point the authorities from the East Coast would appear with the rules and regulations and protocols engraved on tablets to be obeyed by the mere managers of the host computer sites. “We were nothing more than a self-appointed bunch of graduate students, and I was convinced that a corps of authority figures or grownups from Washington or Cambridge would descend at any moment and tell us what the rules were,” Crocker recalled. But this was a new age. The network was supposed to be distributed, and so was the authority over it. Its invention and rules would be user-generated. The process would be open. Though it was funded partly to facilitate military command and control, it would do so by being resistant to centralized command and control. The colonels had ceded authority to the hackers and academics. So after an especially fun gathering in Utah in early April 1967, this gaggle of graduate students, having named itself the Network Working Group, decided that it would be useful to write down some of what they had conjured up.95 And Crocker, who with his polite lack of pretense could charm a herd of hackers into consensus, was tapped for the task. He was anxious to find an approach that did not seem presumptuous. “I realized that the mere act of writing down what we were talking about could be seen as a presumption of authority and someone was going to come and yell at us—presumably some adult out of the east.

One of Brown’s best monograph sketches, for example, narrates the tragedy of Charles Stull, a deaf and mute man from Philadelphia who decided to cross the Oregon Trail, alone and on foot, during the peak emigration year of 1852. Stull died of cholera at Castle Creek, just west of Ash Hollow. He was found by the members of a passing wagon train, who examined his body and found $2.75 in his pockets, along with a certificate attesting to his graduation from the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf and Dumb in Philadelphia. I learned from Brown’s account how crowded the trail was that year, and new details about the cholera plagues. Brown also portrayed how early-nineteenth-century educators and philanthropists founded schools for the deaf and circulated beautifully illustrated pamphlets on sign language. Stull was an exemplary product of that era. He was one of the first students at the Philadelphia school for the deaf, and he and his brother, an engraver, published one of the first sign-language manuals, an illustrated broadsheet titled An Alphabet for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. The

A rectangular pendant engraved with the town’s coordinates hanging from a gold ball chain, a graduation gift from Paul’s mother so they could always find their way home.