Awake And In Retrospect

It's about 2:22am.

Alex and I once made a chron job launch on Febuary 22, 2002 at 2:22am. I'm pretty sure that is when it was. We released Trick version 02 at that time.

I was fond of releasing majors and patches on Holidays. We had crypt keys back then, and the keys were always based on whatever holiday it was.

It was a very regular pattern that people never took even yeared releases. 2002 was no exception. Neither was 2000. The irony was that the 2000 release had no new features. It was basically the 1999 release with tons of bug fixes. 2000 was a year of fallow after tons of work from '98-99.

What happened in 2000 was that I spent a crudload of time making patches to the 1999 release, patches that were already rolled into the 2000 release.

If only I would have named the 2000 release 99.3 or something. I wonder if people connected Trick 2000 with the Y2K bug.

2002 was not a year of fallow. I'm glad nobody used that one.

Up to 2002, to build a simulation you had to run commands all over the place... or build a script to run commands all over the place. 2002 was the first year we introduced a single command that would do it all.
The last step in the build process is called CP. That last step became the first and last. Alex and I debated on what to call that command. I suggested "trick". Alex said, "Let it be CP."

Funny though, the behaviour of CP changed a lot. This wasn't your grandma's CP. And for a long time, people still prefered to manually build it all, then CP. But then CP would take a lot longer than it used to, and I got a lot of flack. So we had to put a switch in CP so that CP wouldn't try to be smart.

And Mac's weren't case sensitive and so CP got confused with "cp"... the copy command.

2006, I was no longer in the picture... And Alex just went straight to 2007. I had all these code words for releases by the year:

1997-1999 - Unnamed
2000 - Oh Oh
2001 - Odyssey (2001 space odyssey)
2002 - Oxygen (chemical formla 02)
2003 - Ozone (chemical formula 03)
2004 - Olympia (had the olympics that year)
2005 - BO (Beyond The O's)
2006 - Trix
2007 - Heaven

Maybe I can sleep now.