Fred Buck had many names. Online, I recall encountering him first as Enver Hoxha. Later, he became best known as Rogol Domedefors, but was also Cass Gilbert and Yncvic Syrdon. And I know I’m forgetting other names.
As I write this, I’m surprised and a bit dismayed to realize how much else I’ve forgotten about him. Other than that he was a dark-haired middle-aged white guy, I don’t recall what he looked like, or the sound of his voice. And everything else that I do remember, other than what I can corroborate in a few online archives, is suspect, subject to the corruptibility of data within the human brain.
But I do remember his fierce intelligence, his quick wit in online messaging and chats, and the way he could explain things in a way that made you wonder how you hadn’t already realized the point that he made seem obvious. Much of this is what made him, I’m told, a good lawyer. I half-remember some anecdotes that he told me of how he learned to communicate so well.
I first met him, I think, on the Ailanthus Tree, the bulletin board system that I helped develop and run in the early 80s (though, come to think of it, he may have been on its precursor, Stuart II). When the Ailanthus Tree ended (possibly even starting before then), he created his own BBS, the Bonsai Tree, and was active on Magpie-HQ, a sibling system developed in parallel to it.
Twenty years ago today, Steve Manes, the developer and sysop of Magpie posted this message (as preserved on Kim Moser’s archive site):
Msg #53511 *PUBLIC* From MANAGEMENT To MANAGEMENT (#268) Sun Mar 19, 1989 9:04pm (0:03) Obituary Magpie-HQ Management regrets to announce that Fred Buck, known here as YNCVIC SYRDON and ROGOL DOMEDEFORS, was found dead in his apartment today. The cause of death is not known. When further details become public, we will make them available here. Note: Magpie-HQ users may see occasional YNCVIC logins for the next few days. Fred's computer calls Magpie-HQ automatically to download messages; this is apparently still happening. We have advised the police to shut down Fred's system.
Few of us had seen Fred in the time leading up to this, but then, few ever saw him much in person. He kept to himself, communicating mostly online. If I recall correctly, he had passed away some days before he was found. He had set his computer to emulate his continued existence pretty effectively, logging in as him to other systems, retrieving messages, and leaving a few fairly vague messages as him. He had also set the Bonsai Tree BBS to allow people to download their archived messages for a time after he died, then to erase itself and shut itself down.
I think Fred would have enjoyed the Web and how it evolved. He missed seeing it happen, since Tim Berners-Lee’s first proposal also was published almost exactly twenty years ago. Since he preceded the Web, there is surprising little that I can find about or from him archived on it, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there is material around under one of his handles that I might have forgotten.
One thing that I do remember (or, probably, partially misremember): in the aftermath of his passing, and of the discovery that he had died alone in the apartment that he had shared with his mother before she had earlier passed away, Steve Manes posted a message reminding us how important it was to get out and stay in touch with people in real space. He urged us to make sure to encounter at least one person each day, face to face, even if it was just to go down to the corner to get a newspaper.
That message had a profound effect on my life. I have made it a point to do so, every day of these past twenty years. I’ve only missed out twice: on Christmas Day 1997, when, by the time I wandered out of my apartment in Maryland late at night, I found nothing at all open and nobody anywhere around, and one day two years ago when I got so tied up in a writing project that I spent the whole day at the computer and fell asleep for the night at my desk (exactly the behavior I had sworn to avoid).
Others may remember more about Fred, and remember things differently, and will no doubt correct everything that I’ve said here in comments below. But I won’t forget that I knew Fred Buck, and what his life and its aftermath meant to many of us.
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Rogol was never on Stuart I: you and I were the only New Yorkers. I forget which of us proposed him as the third sysop of the A-Tree when it became clear that we needed one, but he was the obvious choice. I do remember fondly his first post as Rogol, which came out the morning after the real Enver Hoxha died, and was a sustained parody of the real obituary from the NYTimes (”He led the Ailanthus Tree through four quarters of strict Stalinism”, e.g.).
In Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, the villain’s name is Rogol Domedonfors, but that didn’t fit the 17-character limit I had put on usernames, so he modified it euphoniously? (Why 17? Two 8-character names and a separating dot, the internal format of Tandem OS usernames, back when we were going to use the thing internally. Silly restriction, but when you use fixed-length fields to store data, changing it later is a real irritation.)
I remember that he also used the alias John Cantacuzene, a Byzantine Emperor in real life, but he never explained that — I only found it out by chance long afterwards. But I too think of him mostly as Rogol Domedefors. Gale and I invited him to dinner once, and he gave us as a guest’s present the book he had bought that day for himself. I still have it — a collection of Barbara Tuchman’s historical essays.
Gale mentions him to me from time to time.
Hmm! An interesting bit of my misremembering: I had thought that the name Yncvic Syrdon, not Rogol, had come from Vance, and had occasionally searched for that name in his works.
He was very mysterious. I don’t think anybody really knew him well, certainly not me. But I liked the parts of him that I did know. The one time he came to dinner, I thought he was a little shy, but also very sweet (and of course very bright). My ATM card (and John’s) uses one of his names as a PIN, so I think of him every time I use it. I wish he hadn’t left us all so soon; he would have enjoyed the Web for sure.
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