The Making of a Calendar, 1995

["Pat Parseghian" <pep@research.att.com>]

Setting the record straight about the 1995 calendar:

I conceived of issuing a SAGE calendar for 1995, modeled after the ever-
popular mt.Xinu calendars of the past.  At the time, I was serving a
two-year term on the SAGE's board.

The 1995 calendar was a collaborative effort.  I came up with the theme
and provided the Mayan quotes; I met with the artist in early August, 1994
and we tossed around ideas.  To come up with dates for the calendar, beyond
those that I knew, I polled (among others) Steve Bellovin, Peter Honeyman,
Peter Langston, Brian Redman, Dennis Ritchie, Hal Stern, Armando Stettner,
Ken Thompson, and Tom Truscott.  (Most of these people were involved with
UNIX from its earliest days, and/or made early notable contributions.)

In addition to my efforts, the artist (Ellen Klages), the USENIX staff and
interested SAGE members collected dates and other material from other
sources.  Several people had the opportunity to comment on drafts of the
1995 calendar, and a few changes were made over time.  My notes from the
time indicate that in addition to Elizabeth Zwicky's contributions, we
relied on Evi Nemeth, Rob Kolstad and Peter Salus for input.  We thought
about including the full list of dates from the second edition of the
sysadmin book by Nemeth et al., but decided that most were not sysadmin-
specific (though interesting in their own right).  For readability, we
tried to choose only one event to list for a given day, and not to try
to fill in every day.

The calendar was pretty much done by October 21, when I gave it a careful
proofreading (which caught several minor errors); I'm sure there were other
proofreaders as well.  The calendar went to the printer in early November,
and was mailed to all SAGE members before the end of 1994.

Thus was established a (long, I hope) tradition of the annual SAGE calendar.
I'm sure it's not too early to start planning the 1997 SAGE calendar; if
you have ideas or would like to be involved, I'm sure the SAGE Board would
be happy to hear from you.

Pat Parseghian
<http://www.cs.att.com/csrc/parseghian.html>