No Pig/Toyota content here.
Just personal remembrance.
Skip at will.
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Just found out that an old friend I’d lost track of, Bill von Hagen, died back in 2022.
Bill was the focus of the groundbreaking 1980 documentary "Debt begins at Twenty”
, and was the drummer for three of Pittsburgh's most iconic punk bands: The Puke (Pittsburg’s second punk band, after the Shut-Ins), the keyboard-powered New Wave outfit The Cardboards, and the earliest version of garage-rock band The Cynics.
Of the punks, he was proud to declare on a local TV show "30 Minutes" that "we are not musicians." During his run with The Puke, he played a single bass drum with one stick. By the time he was in The Cardboards, one of Pittsburgh's edgiest and aggressive bands, he was opening for such artists as Gary Numan and Duran Duran.
The film depicts him going through his daily life of living in a dive apartment, going to the record store, reading comics and playing shows at parties. His attitude, as he stated in the film, was that "anything new is intrinsically better than something old simply because it's new."
Years later he wrote, "Trying to avoid a haze of nostalgia, there were good and bad aspects to the fact that people were playing a new kind of music. 'Punk' was new and nasty, so the range of clubs which bands could even think about playing was nonexistent. Bands played mostly at parties, played occasional gigs at risque clubs or did shows for local television for the same reason that there are freak shows at carnivals."
He got a CS degree at the University of Pittsburgh in 1982, and began working on UNIX systems as a system administrator, programmer, software developer and development manager, among other things. Kinda like me, except a few years older.
He authored several books: "Linux Filesystems," "Installing Red Hat Linux 7" and "SGML For Dummies," and co-authored the Mac OS X Power User's Guide.
His career also took him to IBM, Transarc Corp., Timesys Corp., and Voci Technologies Inc. Maybe none of those (except IBM) mean anything to the sty. Think “1980s tech companies”
He was the only person I’ve known who had to buy a second house to live in, because his first house (that he kept after getting the second house) was so full of old computers that there wasn't much space left in it to actually live in.
Not PCs. Old iron: PDP-11's, Symbolics Lisp Machines, PERQ T2 workstations...
Bill was actually called as an expert witness in the Apple vs. Microsoft look and feel lawsuit because he had old Xerox workstations, in operating condition, demonstrating that both Microsoft and Apple had actually copied their UI ideas from Xerox..
Bill and I had a running joke that some day, I'd probably be sitting in my house, minding my own business, and Dorothy, his wife, would break down my door with a battering ram, and come in armed to the teeth, Rambo style, to exact revenge, because I was the one who started Bill down the "collecting old/historic computers" path. I gave him a pair of Perq T2 workstations that I’d been using as end tables.
Anyway, I thought the group might enjoy “Debt begins at Twenty”. It’s a great depiction of life in the punk scene in Pittsburgh back in the day, and only about 37 minutes long, so not a huge time investment, and definitely worth a watch.
William von Hagen, computer scientist and Pittsburgh punk pioneer. May 17, 1955 - Jan. 17, 2022
