The Oregon Hermit: How a Cabin in the Woods Created Apple Writer
Cottage Computer Programming (1984)
I left NASA to live in a remote Oregon cabin, where I discovered the Apple II and began coding for fun. My first major project, Apple Writer, survived a lightning strike that proved its data-saving capabilities. This experience launched a successful software career from the wilderness, proving that solitude and silence are the perfect backdrop for creative programming.
A mistress of perfect consistency, the computer rejects all but the flawless, offering no explanation.
- ylee
What Lutus talks about exists even when it's not for anyone else.
I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. I wrote 20 years ago a backup script implementing Mike Rubel's insight <http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/> about using `rsync` and hard links to create snapshots backups. It's basically my own version of `rsnapshot`. I have deployed it across several of my machines. Every so often I fix a bug or add a feature. Do I need to do it given `rsnapshot`'s existence? No. Is it fun to work on it? Yes.
(I've over the years restored individual files/directories often enough from the resulting backups to have reasonable confidence in the script's effectiveness, but of course one never knows for certain until the day everything gets zapped.)
- adamgordonbell
This being posted years ago led me to reach out to Paul and ultimately interview him.
It was super fun! You can shoot him an email from his website and he's definitely worth chatting with. He's on hacker news sometimes as well.
He has many wild stories! Steve Jobs melting his software by leaving the disk out in the sun. Being homeless. Working at the JPL. I think he had a hard childhood and went his own way.
- EvanAnderson
Paul Lutus recently commented in this thread that linked this (and other) articles of the era: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830191