The strandedufo crew

Okay, we are now 'backstage', facing the 'personnel' of the strandedufo. Afraid? No?!? Ok.

The name is Paul Juhasz (Shepherd in English), which won't convey much, apart from geographic origin and gender. Well - a female version would be called Paula obviously. But that is where normality ends to reveal someone who has been thinking in hexa-decimal, with a logic based on bits - ones and zeroes, raised to the power of 2 - and a syntax to match. And not just since the 90s, when most of humanity was touched by the phenomenon, with graphical user interfaces bristling with help, but since the early 60s, when the inherent power was still raw and untamed, as direct and decisive as a logical AND or Exclusive OR can be. A program`s operation was in your mind, or you were facing a blank wall. Well, in fact it was a blank screen with a single green cursor flashing to make you aware of its emptiness.

Times when mainframes with less power than a 386 still took up a large room, and single stepping through machine-code processes, and values displayed as rows of ON / OFF points of lights on a console was the way to go.

Instead of automatic debuggers following your high level source code, when one instruction crashed, we would update memory addresses manually, via dials, toggles and push buttons, inserting sub-routines into memory, and then pencill the changes on a listing, before re-stepping over those changes. Print-out was of course reserved for user data from your program, or the program listing from the assembler.

Testing was usually done at night, when nobody else needed the machine, though that only happened with the smaller systems, like 360/20 or 30. Most of the time we didn`t get to touch a computer, just handed in our cards, tape and worked from listings, the program`s output, and the occasional "core dump" - or memory and registers print-out, when a crash occurred. Only in `70-71 did I get to work from a remote screen and keyboard console attached to the mainframe, where logging in with my handle, I was given a private task running alongside others.

When I was on the PDP, we had no music or games, but as it was a defence related electronics firm, we had an A2 sized flat-bed plotter. It had this roving arm that would pick up one of a row of coloured pens and then draw some random or other math related patterns. Some of these "paintings" were so good, people actually bought them. Untill the boss put a stop to it.

So while most times I was forced to follow a straight procedural route, my instincts led me down a more crazy path, resulting in those less adventurous, tagging me strange or even silly. What people cannot understand, they are weary of, and try to belittle to lessen this fear.

In order to talk to aliens, humanity has resorted to using science - if you remember the gold plaque on the Voyager probe - it was an invitation to `someone out there`, so now they sent us their answer. In two crop circles and internet text. Since I am not really a scientist by education, just a programmer, a maker of artificial and virtual realities, it is that artificiality that will have to tell the full story. My take is that IF fake, I have only wasted a few minutes, but if true, it IS the best thing that could possibly happen to get humanity further up the evolution ladder. It`s our own choice. Do we dare?

If you are suffering from destiny deprivation, remember that Truth is the kind of reality that most of us can share and that most of us can verify with most of our senses. So maybe I will just leave you with this little self portrait I did in DPaint III - it is soo old, it has already faded, like some black-and-whites in grandad's photo-album...