was login "milo" and "malice" on UCSCB from 1982 until
about 1986.

Milo was from the book "The Phantom Tollbooth". Looking for Rhyme and Reason wherever I went (and often failing). Many people assumed the name was from "Milo Bloom" of the comic strip "Bloom County", or the more cynical people thought it might be Milo from the book "Catch-22". It was just a quirky, seldom used, and sort of geeky name

"Malice" was the mindfuck account. Trying to walk that fine line between angry young punk, and sweet young thing. Normally, I told people it stood for "Alice Morgan", with the "M" moved to the front. Yes, I did experiment with gender roles with this account. It was certainly interesting experimenting with gender roles in society, and learning what did take to present a convincing male or female persona. It was also a response to the wave of incoming new students each fall, that tried to engage in conversation with the "write" command (essentially a bridge of the two ttys, so that whatever was typed appeared on both screens), a precursor to "talk" and various chat room software that came later. Anyway, the cliche male new computer account had mostly two questions: 1. Are you male or female 2. if female, would you be interested in a date? It got tiresome after awhile, and so people tried creative responses.

Milo and Malice were friends, lovers, or partners in geekdom depending on your point of view. At some point the UCSC policy of one account per student caught up with me, and "malice" lost her account and shared an account with milo.

Together, Milo and "Alice" created and ran "Fantasy forum",
a forum for sexual fantasy creative writing. Milo ran the "geek side", while Alice ran the administrative side. I never wrote the forum software, borrowing the code that was floating around, and mostly changing printf statements to reflect the topic of discussion. (I may have experimented with random prompt generators). Part of the problem with the original forum programs was that by their nature they had to have their data files writable by everyone, so care was needed to hide the location of these files. This took the form of writing smaller programs that were essentially an exec command, but hid the path in various data structures, and often leaving a poem as the only recognizable strings. Files were also hidden by having directories with execute but not read permission along the way. Finally I think I was the one that discovered the Setgid bit, and arranged to form a unix group with a few close friends. Then the forum program could be setgid, and the files could be only readable by that group. It providing an increased security.

UCSCB at that time was a PDP 11/70. One of two in use at the computer center. About the time of my graduation, students convinced the computer center to replace the PDP with a newer computer, that became UCSCB.

UCSCB was sort of a micro experiment in what later become the internet, with email, blogs, and chat. The difference was that you knew the person was a student at the local university, so chances of meeting face to face (if you wanted to) were much greater. There were a
number of "forum potlucks" where active members of the UCSCB community would gather at various residences for a face to face social event. Those were interesting parties....

I also lived off campus, with a modem and terminal, hence where I was living was a Geek house, or "stat lab". I would joke with people I was at the "felix stat lab" since I lived on felix street at the time. At other times, I lived with other geeks, and the number and type of computers and modems varied with who was living in the house at the time. Continuing that tradition today, I'm a full time telecommuter for cisco systems.

I've moved out of the bay area, but can still be reached
at daveu@sptddog.com. milo@sptddog.com and malice@sptddog.com are also valid email addresses, though I don't use those accounts much anymore, in concession to the working world.

sptddog.com was the extension of the geek house, as internet connectivity became feasible for smaller sites (with the advent of TCP/IP stacks for PC bases unix systems). For a long time I ran sptddog.com on a 486/66 running sco unix (pre novel netware), and a modem. I've since moved it to an ISP hosting for better stability. Did all the geek small host stuff, applied for (and got) a class C address space, domain name registration, etc.

Milo, Alice, and dave