Just call me Athena
In college my free time was spent playing D&D and using IRC. IRC being Internet Relay Chat. IRC was a text-based method of communication before the internet as we know it started. I was working on two majors at the same time, Psychology and Computational Mathematics (which was the version of computer science at my university at the time). To get homework done I would spend as much time as was possible in the computer lab…. I remember a janitor joking about moving a cot into the room for a few of us.
At the time the computers were really just workstations for unix and hooked to a mainframe. For many of our computer programs, we would write the program and then write a copy of JCL to submit our program. We then would submit the job to compile and then run on the mainframe — I current (at the time) version of the IBM 4381. Paper copies could be printed and picked up at the job window. Programs for the business department were written in COBOL and for the math department we used Assembler and FORTRAN. One class even took a short break and used SNOBOL to parse some math equation and process them. Throughout my time in college, I also completed classes that took short breaks to work on languages like TruBASIC, Pascal, and Lisp.
My own computer at the beginning was a Commodore 64 (c64) that I had begun programming on in BASIC. Surprisingly my first paid job was writing an inventory program for a supply computer on the C64 moving on to work on the mainframe programming for payroll and human resources while finishing my degree.
While submitting my jobs to compile on the mainframe, and waiting for the job to run, my friends and I would sit around and play on IRC. We would get a laugh also out of naming our jobs funny things like Finally. The system would send a message when the job finished running, and we would love seeing the Job Finally Completed…. Job names like Hopefully would get us a laugh “Job Hopefully Completed”. In the late hours in the computer lab the funniest things would get us laughing.
IRC network would allow us to connect with people all over the world. None of us used our real name, names had to be unique, and we wanted names that would be recognized every time we signed in. I had friends using names like Delphi, Kahn, and more…. Somehow at the beginning I chose Athena. I’m not positive how we each decided on our names, but they stuck. This was the eighties and doesn’t seem that long ago to me, but really it was over 30 years ago now. Even with all that time passing we all still use the names that were our handles all those years ago. One of my friends from that time even has his ‘name’ on license plate.
As college had gone on, I was able to get a Tandy 1000 and finally a 286 computer. I remember being able to connect to IRC from home (dial up modem) and friends coming over to take turns. The internet finally taking off, and finishing my degree was the end of IRC for me, but my name stayed on. I’ve since used my IRC name Athena in everything from business names, grant applications (name of deliverable products), and even the name I write under on Medium.
I still keep in touch with some of my friends from college and several are still at least connected to their old IRC names. Sometimes I wonder what happened to all the people that we got close to online.
