I met Eric about 24 hours after my parents dropped me off at MIT. Fraternity rush, and Beta Theta Pi didn’t need to know much about me to know that I was a real nerd, like Eric (in classic fraternity fashion, people with common first names were known by their last names, so we all called him Mud). We were some of the last nerds who grew up learning programming assembly (called “low level” programming because you are directly controlling the computer’s memory and circuitry).
Eric was a nerd’s nerd. It was a big day when MIT installed high-speed internet in the fraternity house, and it was a big day when he turned over the job of fraternity network admin to a younger fraternity brother. He loved helping people with all things technical; like a good teacher, he knew when to talk through the whole problem, when to ask questions about what they’d tried already–and when to tell them that they didn’t need his help at all, but that they should just sit with the problem a while longer.
Jay