The "Original Mad Programmer™"

How I got to calling myself the "Original Mad Programmer™"

My hobby of folding my mind with new thoughts can make me look different to people with people that keep their own mundane thoughts locked up in small boxes. My thoughts do not have any one track and my mind often feels like it is bursting with energy. Add to this little fear in being myself, even if different, and people with fixed ideas start to think I'm crazy.

But please understand I do not go out of my way to prove I'm different. I do not have my identity wrapped up in proving I am different. Other people I work with for years may think I am a normal, conservative, and slow guy, which is something I deny. All it takes for some people to think you are strange is to have confidence in yourself, enjoying the many wonderful facets of life. Besides, I notice my creative thought's are vastly more productive when the rest of my brain is not artificially constrained.

My First Use Of Mad Programmer

By the standards of the computer industry, you need to set your "way back" machine really far back... to the late 1970s. This was when Apples grew on trees and most computers had lots of flashing lights and large half-inch (1.5 cm) magnetic tapes on large 12-inch (30 cm) open reels. At this time there was a late night radio show called The Bill Corsair Show, also known as Bill Corsair and His Rascals, on WCAU radio out of Philadelphia whose emissions I frequented. It was an odd call in show with an odd requirement: you could not use your real name. Instead you had to have a "stage name" or "handle" to use on the air. Bill's show kept careful records to avoid duplicate names.

I'm sorry I do not yet have an exact date, but when I first decided to start calling the show I scratched my brain for a handle. Somehow within the name of the Mad Hatter, the delightfully daft character from Alice In Wonderland, was whispered into my ears. The Mad Hatter marionette I had as a child also came to mind. However, I was not a hatter, I was a programmer. As I am a person that never claimed to claim "conventional thinking" as a stong asset the name Mad Programmer was born. As WCAU is a 50,000 watt clear channel station, my first use of "Mad Programmer" was more than a little "public".

Remember, this was way before port 80 on the Internet opened up. Shucks, we had yet to reach 80 in the year number.^{1}

More Mad Programmer

On a more serious note some light verse I wrote has made various rounds. This included the following, which was written during the time of the previous radio calls.

The Little Computer

How doth the little computer,
Improve its blinking lights,
And spew data from the printer
To the ceiling and other heights.
How cheerfully it's disks to spin
How neatly it rewinds its tapes
As it welcomes little buggies in
With crashes and mysterious waits.

The Original Mad

Programmer

(for reproduction see
http://www.exit109.com/~ghealton/writings/).

The Little Computer
How doth the little computer, Improve its blinking lights, And spew data from the printer To the ceiling and other heights. How cheerfully it's disks to spin How neatly it rewinds its tapes As it welcomes little buggies in With crashes and mysterious waits.
The Original Mad	Programmer
(for reproduction see http://www.exit109.com/~ghealton/writings/).

At the time I wrote this I was working on the software for a terminal to sit on the desks of writers at newspapers. Among other features it had a "Save and Erase" function, much like today's copy/paste operations. This feature had ten save areas numbered 0 through 9 text could be saved in. As we were always needing sample text, save area 9 had been preloaded with some traditional, and boring text, such as "Now is the time for all good men...". Tired of this I replaced it with my little poem and included it in our official delivery of the product. It didn't take too long for our customers to discover this and enjoy it (which was part of the idea). I'm told that it it even ran in the classified ad section of one paper when a demonstration went wrong somewhere. Where all this ran I was not able to find out... the reports came back to me second or third hand. (While I never expressly copyrighted this verse, I've never placed in the public domain either.... if anyone uses it, I desire appropriate credit).

One fine day the company decided we would improve the change tracking system for our software. Every developer was assigned a three letter code based on their initials to track their changes by. By the time the person got to me he already had a "GCH". As I was keeping strange hours I was not around to be asked for alternates so he had to come up with something on his own. As a result I was assigned the code MAD for my code. I continued this convention into the next company as well for my first UNIX login name. Back then the login was strictly a LAN with no Internet connection. After Internet connections started I sarted serious use I started using a more professional "ghealton" as my prefered login.

Soon after the first MAD I had a "Mad Programmer" business card and several other Mad Programmer themed things going on to provide comic relief to the life of myself and my friends.

Strange Things

Various newcomers to the computer world (well, "new" relative to my start in the business), have thrown "mad" in their handle and have been active in the cracking and attacking business of the trade. Every once in a while I get E-mail from a hacker in training pants, assuming I am one of "them", asking me about how to assault some chunk of computer software.

I am gleeful to report I do not answer such questions. I have spent most of my professional life putting together wondrous and delicate structures of software. It is hard enough to get industrial strength software to survive the assaults of innocent naïve users doing the unimagined. I simply do not aid and abett the malicious. While the depth and breadth of my technical experiences in computer hardware, software, and use of these, gives me great understanding of both theory and practice of attack techniques, I prefer white hats. Any steps I take toward cracking and hacking techniques are with the intent of providing better protection to the software I write or the systems I administer.

Trademark Searchs

During the early 1990's I did an Internet search for "Mad Programmer", as best I could via CompuServe's low-cost trade mark search, and found nothing. I continued writing some stuff under the handle Mad Programmer.

Around 1994/1995 I repeated the searches and found only a few hits on the early web search engines. This is also about when I started getting the E-mail from people looking for another "Mad Programmer".

Today's Status

In the new millennium I did a search for "Mad Programmer" and got many, many, hits. Casual uses, descriptions, and other uses. With the increase in popularity it seems that people are claiming to be a mad programmer without much in the lines of checks. I'll have all of these people know, that unless they prove otherwise, I consider myself to be the Original Mad Programmer™. I claim a trademark on this term.

Footnotes

{1} Port 80 on the Internet is the main lane of the electronic Internet highway for web browser traffic.

Original Mad Programmer™ is a trade mark of Gilbert Healton.

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