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Don Holmes Nix, PhD. aka: "Sluggie" (1939-2017)Elizabeth Eisenstein, in personal correspondence (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) wrote that she wished her study of the impact of the printing press in shaping modern Europe, "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" (Cambridge University Press, 2 vols in 1, 1980) to be titled: "The master printer as an agent of change", but the publisher did not like this idea. The master printers of the late 15th and 16th centuries were prime movers in creating the modern age of the exact Galilean mathematical sciences of nature and Enlightenment liberty and individuality.
Dr. Don Holmes Nix (1939-2017)[1] was not one of them, although he could perhaps have made a greater contribution to the advance of universalizing civilization than in fact – at least to the best of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) limited knowlege as his sometime valet – he did. He is the real life person behind Johannes Guttenberg in the present story. He invented (or perhaps leveraged from somebody else's earlier Smalltalk program without credit?[3]) a computer programming language for children, Handy, which had great educational potential. Handy used fast performance but low-resolution Code Page 437 MS-DOS specific Ascii character graphics. Dr, Nix subordinated possible serious intellectual accomplishment to lust for higher resolution graphics and more adulation from people beneath him or perhaps he did not THINK [about it...] at all.
Dr. Nix had a research project in IBM Research: a computer programming language for children. He quite intelligently called it "Handy", I presume because it was handy. It seemed to me to be a very good one. I do not know if he invented it all by himself. I did at one point find a Smalltalk program that looked either a little or a lot like it which I think antedated Handy, but I have no idea whether Dr. Nix knew about it. My problem was that I was interested in human imagination and he was interested in a combination of higher resolution graphics and further inflating his self-satisfied self-image by helping disadvantaged persons who could never rise to his level and were consequently no threat to his idea of his self-importance. Also, disadvantaged people often look up to prophets who lead them to a promised land.
I took a "rag doll" approach to children: that their imagination could do as well or even better with imagery that was "low resolution" and unrealistic, than with hyper-realistic imagery like Barbie dolls whose verisimilitude constrains imaginative elaboration.[2] Dr. Nix wanted higher resolution graphics. But how good was low-res Handy? With Dr Nix's permission, I gave a copy of it to a friend with two bright young male children who had not done anything with a computer. Years later, my friend thanked me for Handy setting both of them off into highly successful computer innovation careers.
His petty high resolution graphics obsession led to trouble for me, his one and only report (aka: employee/headcount). I am not sure I had the technical competence have coded up for him his high resolution graphics (nor did I lust to become a technical wizard – I wanted to contribute to humanistic education, and if I had to do some computer coding to get there that was what I had to do).
Furthermore! At that time personal computers were so slow that only small – definitely not full screen! – high resolution graphic images could be used because drawing them slowed everything down except his craving for them. The unavoidable result was a mixture of high and low resolution material on the screen: a kludge. Dr. Nix finally paid one of Noam Chomsky's young sons – an enthusiastic techie – to do it during the young man's summer vacation from college, which is how I met Professor Chomsky due to delivering a copy of the Handy code to the son when the Chomsky family were on summer vacation in Cape Cod. (Dr. Nix's friend was the wife, Dr. Carol Chomsky.) That he had to contract this work out won me no points with Dr. Nix. [Aside: At the time (1986?), Professor Chomsky looked like he was near death's door due to severe back trouble.]
Then the wife of an IBM new hire manager came along – like an ion in need of another electron – needing a job (she, like Dr. Nix, had a Ph.D.; she worked with deaf persons). So that made two people superior to me in a 3 person group. Before she arrived, Dr. Nix had even said IBM might do something with Handy that would have given me opportunity for customer contact but that, like some other hopes in my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) life, did not materialize. Once a coder, always a coder.
Finally, Dr. Nix tried to dump both Handy and me onto a couple computer programmers in another group; I did not want a tar baby to stick to me. I graciously offered to help them, which was not at all what he had intended and my offer to help was not welcomed because he wanted to get rid of me. I wanted to become a researcher like him and the young lady.
It takes two to tango. Just like Dr. Nix wanted to use me as his valet, I wanted to use him to become an education researcher and contribute more to both the company (his project) and myself than just schlepping code. He did give me a day off each week to continue my graduate studies in communication in education at Teachers College Columbia University, and I appreciate that. Mea culpa.
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One disgusting experience I had with Dr. Nix. I accompaniesd him to visit a Psychology Professor in a meeting at Teachers College the two of them had about Handy. [These things are so distant now that I only remember remembering them....] He and that [fill in the blank] were talking about objects they disposed over: mentally ill persons. One of them referred to Handy as a "sexy" application. I couldn't stomach this; I politely demurred something about mental patients' sexuality being repressed and therefore the word "sexy" was offensive in the present context. I forget my exact words but I did speak up and I was not heard. [Aside: I did think/feel Handy had application to help psychiatric patients: role playing; I had some interaction with a lovely man: Seth Neugroschel(sp?), associated with a major New York teaching hospital who kept inviting me to his weekly seminar at Columbia University.]
I was not aiming to be a regicide. I did not want o steal his Big Gulp (right) or dethrone his two pudgy couch potatoes from his desk chair. He was the front man; he was the big cahuna. Fine. I would have fed his nnarcissism, and sung his praises to the public. If he was Mr. Zelensky, I wanted to be Mr. Arestovich: the brains behind the green t-shirt. That would have been my fantasy. I had no idea that secretly he was: "Sluggie".
I wanted to run the show with him, help him at the executive level, not the step-and-fetch-it level. We should hav e had a person on the team who did not aspire to be anything other than a computer programmer, but a competent such one, one I could have dealt with in mutual respect for our respective roles, i.e.: I would not have had to fer being reduced to his role. I wanted o be a researcher not a coder, but to repeat: I did not want o replace Dr. Nix, but to rise to his level instellectually and in wht I did in assisting him to be Fuhrer (or the "Slugggie"). Was he so small that me getting bigger but still beneath him would have threatened him?
I would have liked to see Dr. Nix grow "bigger" by nurturing me to grow "bigger" and in that way he could always have remained "bigger" than me without keeping me down.
I cold av ebeen his St. Paul or St John the Baptist, spreading the Gospel of Handy to those did not yet know the Good News. And even there, Idid not want o hob-nob with Shool system Commissioners, just classroom teachers. I would no hav ewanted to compete with him in powsy-wowsying with the rich and famous so he could keep expanding his bloated self-image (which wwnt with his bloatmobile automobile). And I would ha had time to continue to study philosophy while Dr Hix continued to read WashingtonThe New York Post. (Dr. Nix could also have tasked me with tracking down the Smalltalk program I had come across that looked to me a lot like Handy and may even have antedated Handy.) It's a big world; we could all have made out well. No such luck even though once he speculated to me about the possibility of something like it (which never materialized).
I wonder what he did in IBM after he got rid of Handy. Dr. Nix was a very small person, to be precise: a foetus that never would have let itself be born had the adults not defeated its efforts with foeceps, a "Sluggie".
