Comments on: Remembering Rogol Domedefors

By: Fragano Ledgister

Fragano Ledgister — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 13:59:35 +0000

For some reason, my mind flashed on him this week and I googled his name, which is what brings me here. I only knew him on Magpie, and I remember Steve’s announcement of his death.

By: Gale Cowan

Gale Cowan — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 21:33:24 +0000

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.

By: joseph.zitt

joseph.zitt — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:18:27 +0000

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.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:18:57 +0000

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.