This here is Ward Cunningham in 1968 with his “Dial-a-Door. Explained here: It must have been 1968 or so. Roommate Rick Wartzok and I had better than average audio/visual and beverage capability in our Owen Hall dorm room. We shared happily with fellow residents who sometimes came and went without us. But what about keys? We wanted some kind of combination lock that had a shared code that could be selectively enabled, and a longer, master code for our private use. Our solution was Dial-a-Door. Now its 2008, forty years later, when our old dorm room neighbor Chuck Stewart comes across these slides and is kind enough to scan them for us. My contemporaries are most impressed with the glasses we wore back then. But I’m thinking about the door, the lock, and the decoding mechanism. Thanks to quotevadis for posting the photo and sending me on a hunt to figure out what exactly I was looking at. quotevadis: “When in doubt, do the simplest thing that could possibly work.” — Loosely based on the words of Ward Cunningham, a computer programmer, and is best known as the inventor of the first wiki, which was first called WikiWikiWeb (now called WardsWiki), and one of the pioneers of software design patterns and Extreme Programming.

This here is Ward Cunningham in 1968 with his “Dial-a-Door. Explained here:

It must have been 1968 or so. Roommate Rick Wartzok and I had better than average audio/visual and beverage capability in our Owen Hall dorm room. We shared happily with fellow residents who sometimes came and went without us. But what about keys? We wanted some kind of combination lock that had a shared code that could be selectively enabled, and a longer, master code for our private use. Our solution was Dial-a-Door.

Now its 2008, forty years later, when our old dorm room neighbor Chuck Stewart comes across these slides and is kind enough to scan them for us. My contemporaries are most impressed with the glasses we wore back then. But I’m thinking about the door, the lock, and the decoding mechanism.

Thanks to quotevadis for posting the photo and sending me on a hunt to figure out what exactly I was looking at.

quotevadis:

“When in doubt, do the simplest thing that could possibly work.”

— Loosely based on the words of Ward Cunningham, a computer programmer, and is best known as the inventor of the first wiki, which was first called WikiWikiWeb (now called WardsWiki), and one of the pioneers of software design patterns and Extreme Programming.