Good point

I don't see much impact of that on this one. Other than editing in his brother's statement that it was a heart attack, I don't see anything obvious in this about whether it was pre-written long ago, or freshly written. (XMODEM was already extremely popular 40 years ago) Would the fact that NYT took 10 days before publishing it be an indication that it was NOT previously written? I would have thought that the reason for a "death file" was so that an obituary could immediately follow the news.

I don't know much of anything about Edson de Castro, other than Data General Nova. But I like to think that if I were tasked to write about him, I would ask around [to people such as you? :-)] and try to find out more about the other things that he did (such as working on PDP-8). But, I don't have your newspaper experience, so maybe that would be unrealistic.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred                 ci...@xenosoft.com


On Wed, 23 Oct 2024, Wayne S wrote:

One last thing…
Most news organizations have a death file for famous people.
Their obits have already been written.

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 23, 2024, at 14:23, Wayne S <wayne.su...@hotmail.com> wrote:

I do understand that opinion in and i agree. It’s that having worked for major 
newspapers for 35 years, i know the way stories are written and how much work 
goes into them and how much editing and fact checking is done. There is only so 
much space for words and can’t be covered,  so the writer and copyeditor have 
to trim the article. Xmodem, while important, is not something the average 
reader would know or remember much about, but a lot of people would remember 
BBS systems since they were all over the news back then.
If you were to write an obit of Edwin deCastro, who recently died, what 
accomplishments would you emphasize?


Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 23, 2024, at 14:10, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

On Wed, 23 Oct 2024, Wayne S via cctalk wrote:
I have to respectfully disagree.
This is an obituary for a person who has died, which is not a complete history 
of his life. The articles are rather lengthy, for an obituary in a major 
newspaper where space is limited. I think the author did do some rather deep 
investigation. He did talk to Ward Christiansen‘s brother for remembrances and 
information.
We can get along without agreeing :-)

If you will pardon some exaggeration to make clear my point,
it is somewhat like going into detail about Henry Ford being co-founder of 
Kingsford charcoal, and then only two mentions, in passing, of making cars.  :-)

Yes, I admit that is an exaggerated analogy.
CBBS WAS extremely important and significant.
But, I think that XMODEM had even more long-term impact.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred             ci...@xenosoft.com

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