A little irony - 15 minutes of fame

20 years ago I pieced together an Apple //e, AppleCat modem, and a tape recorder to build a computer controlled answering machine. It had some basic speech synthesis and DTMF decoding (to leave a message, press 1). This got me some notoriety at the time and I hooked up with a lot of the southern California hacker community. Names like The Gonif, The Anarchist, Dead Banshee, The Freeze, The Jerk, and others turned into a first name basis.

Twenty years later, my recent PBX project gained me another "15 minutes" by making the headlines at Slashdot. Ironically (to use the term loosely), one of the same people I had known 20 years ago contacted me to ask if I was the same guy from back then.

The fact that it was originally an answering machine and now a PBX is quite interesting I think. In 20 years will I be posting about a build it yourself holographic receiver that you can build from those spare emitters you stored away out in the garage?

Anyway, for those of you who are wondering but didn't ask, yes, I am the same Kerry that went to Anaheim High School, graduated in 83 and went by "Mordo". So if you knew me then, drop me a line.