I'm rereading 'Cryptonomicon' for the nth time, where n is somewhere between 4 and 8. Last night it struck me that there seem to be discrepancies regarding ages. According to the wiki, the 'present' of C is 1997 (and one has to remember that Randy Waterhouse spends at least a year in the Philippines) but I would peg it a year or two earlier.
G.E.B. Kvistik would have been born in 1943/4, so by 1995 he would be 52 years old. That's reasonable. On the other hand, Lawrence Waterhouse's first child wouldn't be born until 1946. Assuming that the first child was Randy Waterhouse's father, and that this child became a father aged 25 (a shaky assumption but I very much doubt that it was earlier) then Randy couldn't have been born before 1946 + 25 = 1971, making him only 24 years old in 1995. Is is possible that Randy achieved all that he did by this tender age?
I obtained my first email address towards the end 1992; there was no HTML or world wide web then. The attraction of the Internet was indeed email (joining the Richard Thompson internet mailing list was quite an experience); telnet and gopher existed but I don't remember if I used them. I do remember buying a book from O'Reilly that explained the various protocols so I probably tried some of them. Of course, they were shortly to disappear as Netscape introduced the web to everyone. This is why I think that the first present day scenes of C take place in the early 90s, making Randy even younger. Randy came from a university background that would have been much more acquainted with the Internet than me at the time.
There are still some episodes that I don't understand in the book,
primarily those connected with Detachment 2072. What was the body of butcher
Hott supposed to lead to? What about the Trinidadian steamer?
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 258 | The In-basket: the initial stages of designing a computerised exam | Programming, In-basket, Psychology, MDI | |
| 259 | Music and lyrics | Films, Hugh Grant | |
| 1403 | 1400 blogs | Meta-blogging | |
| 1636 | School swimming | Health, Swimming, Bristol Grammar School |
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