My mentor

Today would have been Owen's 78th birthday. He nearly made it. 

First scene: Owen at 17, freshly out of boot camp for the Air Force, having been tested with a high IQ, gets sent to language school. In classic US military fashion, a major comes in and divides the class: two-thirds will stay in language school, while one-third - including Owen - will be transferred en masse. "You're going to be learning another kind of language," the major says. "Computer language."

This is 1964. Owen has no idea what that means.

Throughout 1965 and 1966 he’s learning things about computing that almost no one else will know for nearly another 20 years. 

Second scene: It’s the very early 1980s. Owen has moved to Northern California, where he lives on a commune full of pagans up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. To make ends meet before he gets his dream job working for Nolan Bushnell – which he will do – he’s working at an art supply store in Palo Alto.

Two men come in one day with a very odd request. They need a surface - about eight inches square. The surface has to have enough ‘tooth’ to be able to roll a small ball around. “What’s this for?” Owen asks. 

“It’s for something called a ‘mouse’”, they said. “It works with a computer.”

Owen cut them what was, in all likelihood, the world’s first mousepad. 

Third scene: Owen sits at a VDT in 1984, hand-typing a set of names and dotted octet pairs. The names map onto the dotted octets - they are IP addresses. 

Owen saves the file, exits, spawns a new daemon - and hp.com is now up and running. He’s put Hewlett-Packard on the Internet. 

Every week, Owen adds new addresses to that text file. Before Paul Vixie’s invention of DNS, that hand-edited hosts file is the only way names can be mapped to IP addresses. 

Fourth scene: I get a call from Owen. It’s Winter Solstice, 1993. He is the systems administrator for the Cyberspace Development Group at Autodesk. Ground zero for the most interesting work going on in VR.

“We had some folks come by today with some really interesting technology. I think you need to see it. So I invited them over to your place tonight.“

That was how I met Servan Keondjian and Kate Seekings, cofounders of UK startup RenderMorphics. Servan gave me a demo of their software rendering engine, RealityLab. Very impressive - exactly what I needed. 

And Owen knew it. 

We drank a little beer, relaxed a bit. Kate fell asleep on my sofa. By the end of the evening, I had a free license to RealityLab - for my crazy idea to slap a 3D interface on the World Wide Web. VRML. 

You’ve probably used RealityLab - but almost no one knows it by that name. It would be another year before RenderMorphics got discovered by someone else who saw what they had achieved - and had a use for it. 

Microsoft's Nathan Myhrvold. 

Today it’s known as Direct3D. The foundation for pretty much every game on the PC. 

Fifth scene: June 2023. My first trip to America since the pandemic and the first since Owen settled down into domestic bliss with his husband Paul.  

The five years they had together were probably the happiest in Owen’s life - because he liked taking care of Paul. It brought him joy.

Paul died a few months later. Owen lost his reason to live. I called every Sunday morning to check in on him and find out how he was feeling, as he passed through grief into a new kind of caring - for his cats.

In the end he was just worn out and alone and there was really no reason he could see to stick around.

Now he’s gone. It’s sad, but not surprising. A good innings.

I cannot say that I owe everything to Owen. I can say that I will never really know how much I owe him. He was a teacher. He was a friend. He was amazing. And hardly anyone knows.

I always did. Now that he’s gone, I need to share it.