On Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:00:05 -0600, Joe Pfeiffer
<
pfei...@cs.nmsu.edu> wrote:
>I am very, very sorry to learn this. While I never met him in person, I
>remember his many valuable contributions to this newsgroup. I hope that
>if anyone is in contact with his family they will convey my condolences.
Chuck's last post on alt.folklore.computers was in June of 2009, I
believe. We exchanged email off and on back in 2004, when I sent him
some Pascal books I'd rescued from a book recycle bin. When he
mentioned that his wife had passed away unexpectedly in August of that
year, I sent him a condolence card. And now he's gone.
If anyone *is* in contact with his family, it might be appropriate for
someone from a computer museum (preferably in New England, and the
Rhode Island Computer Museum comes to mind) to contact them, express
condolences, and offer to provide a home for any books the family
might not want to keep.
True story: My employer's Boulder, Colorado office was started by a
gentleman named Steve who died a few years ago. A few weeks after his
passing, while I was recycling some old computers, I noticed a huge
cardboard box full of discarded books. Since nobody told me I
couldn't do it, I dug through the books and found a few, like an
original K&R C manual, with Steve's name inside. I took these back to
the office with me, and I gave the K&R manual to a colleague who
wanted it.
If I hadn't taken those books, they probably would have had their
covers sheared off and their pages turned to pulp. We have to save
this stuff when we can.
Louis