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March 23, 2006

I am the Lorvax

"I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines. "

This is a line I stole from a guy I knew at Columbia (Nick Christopher) who used it and left it...and I picked it up and ran with it after he left in 1988. So no, I can't claim it as originally mine, but it's mine now.

If you must know, it is a play on the Dr. Seuss book The Lorax, where a little green critter who speaks out against the deforestation of his home declares:


I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees,
I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues...

You must remember that a VAX was a product of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). They had a whole line of vaxen; at Columbia we had several: the machine columbia.edu was a VAX 750, in the computer center we used an 8700. When I started graduate school at City College of New York, the main machine available for student use was a VAX 780 -- even in 1990 considered old, and jokingly referred to as "measured in BTUs rather than MIPS".