Born December 1949.

After starting a degree at Oberlin in 1967, dropped out without
completing 3rd year.

Out to BC with Katy in the fall of 1969, back to Cambridge and
Philadelphia to see respective families.

Had to get out of the US (draft), so that winter took over the old job
of his brother Arnold in an NRC high-energy Physics lab, living with
Katy and Arnold in an old farmhouse in a posh neighbourhood in Ottawa.
Very snowy winter, record-breaking, 18 feet?, long driveway and a lot
of shovelling, piled up to the 2nd floor.  Involve with Ottawa QUaker
Meeting, a youth group, and a Mennonite youth group.  Stayed through
the several years.  March 1971, employer partnering with the Univ. of
Chicago Physics dept and LRL in Berkeley, went there, installed a
PDP-9 / 15, in a 40-ft Fruehof trailer, moved from Ottawa to Fermi
Lab, where Brian's office was.  Programmed in machine language (see
below).  He could 'program like crazy' in the air-conditioned trailer,
high-volume music in head-phones, but couldn't write English.  Lived
in a hotel in Hyde ? park.  They owned an Austin Mini bought for $100
in summer of 1970, working at a Quaker peace conference on Rhinestone
island in lake near Ottawa.

Katy went out to Berkeley that spring, where the experiment was to
take place.  Married in June of 1971 at Pendle Hill / Swarthmore, then
back to Berkeley.  Lived in a back yard house at Telegraph and Shannon
(?).  Legally a Canadian resident notionally in US on a business trip.
Experiment ran, wrapped and went back to Ottawa.  He wanted to stay in
US, they ended up (autumn 1971?  1972?) living with his parents in
Cambridge, where WCS was by then head of the new Center for the Study
of World Religions at Harvard.

[Applied to Graduate School at MIT in EECS, started taking some
courses, but eventually MIT admin said be couldn't be admitted w/o a
UG degree.]

Interested in being a social inquiry major, in order to study the
politics of high technology, how we get to transferring to EECS from
that goal is not clear.

It was very quickly clear that the understanding of computing that the
social scientists were critiquing was not [Programming in machine
language] the computing that I know.  So I need to get clear on what
computing really is, so that I can legitimately critique it.  So I
thought I had to go into the heart of the beast, as it were.

Terry Winograd provided the friendship and both social and 'official'
support-structure to allow Brian to start to express himself out loud,
as it were.  

Saying to Fodor, ref. Tom Swift and his procedural grandmother, that
"this is not how compilation worked", Fodor was blustery but
open-minded enough to say "this is your subject area, I'm sure you're
rightl tell me how it does work".  He and Fodor were friends, but
later Fodor "curdled".

Dog hanging on to a scented cloth -- sitting at the console of a 360
and keying in instructinos and debugging by staring at the pattern of
lights that the console frooze in.

Articulating an understanding of computing that would do justice to his
intuitive understanding of computing as he had experienced it is the
theme of all his intellectual work.

"Course on compilers, I had written a compiler, I'd written a tiny OS
for a PDP-9 running a physics experiment".  Pat Winston sat me down
and took me through the requirements for a CSEE degree, and decided
he'd satisfied them all.  But he needed a Batchelor's thesis, so they
took a paper from a course he'd taken in the autumn, called "Comments
on Comments", and added some stuff, it got marked and accepted as his
thesis, so awarded the degree and could actually be enrolled as a
student under the supervision of Peter Szolovits.

[CSLI not particularly relevant]

[CPSR?]

------------
Foundations of/Philosophy of Computation

Lisp was 'broken', 2-Lisp was a flawed attempt to fix it, 3-Lisp takes
us in to new territory.

Don't think you have to be a specialist to read this book.

Effective vs non-Effective is actually new: at the book boundaries,
project onto the effective [?]