Not to be too presumptuous about claiming as friends people who I don't really know that well... The Japanese describe it as a "dry" personality. Anyway, here are some of the 'old folks' with web pages that I've bumped into on the web. There was a tendency to list them from most 'influential' first, but no insults are intended. When I mean to insult you, you'll know it! Anyway, for now it's in reverse alphabetical order by first names, since the default (forward alphabetical by family names) is so overused. Since I've spent so much of my life in various schools, most of that is handled separately on this page about school's I've studied or worked at.
Steven Rudolph and I taught at KIFL at the same time. In fact, I think we may have started and left at exactly the same time. A pretty dedicated teacher, and more motivated by the teaching opportunities than by the peripherals.
While studying at Yamanashi University in Kofu I met Shojiro Tanaka, a rather friendly professor there. His English is quite good, even though I don't think he'd ever lived in America, as had my own professor, Dr. Yamazaki. Though he's about my age, he's obviously been more successful, and we've kept in touch even though he's moved to Shimane University. It's in a rural area in western Japan.
Running across Paul Weimer from my high school days was quite a surprise. He went to the Claremont College in California when I left for Rice. Later on our paths came close to crossing when he did his Ph.D. at UT (Austin). I still recall a strange old event involving Paul that probably should embarrass most or all of the participants... One day I had a candy bar in my lunch, and somehow wound up auctioning off half of it. My recollection is that Paul was competing with Paul Newman, but Paul 'won', paying about 50 cents for the privilege... It was really a kind of grudge auction, and the real intent was to penalize the winner, but I feel like I learned something that day, though to this day I'm not sure what. The economic power of embarrassment?
I met Michael Stuempel at a then new used bookstore in one of those fateful incidents. He introduced me to IAC, which wound up being a pretty heavy part of my life for a good while. Hey, not to worry, Mike! No hard feelings! ;-) [You know HTML ought to include some special characters for smiley's. Like &wink; and so forth. Maybe you can see this? NN # But I think it's another slimy Microsoft extension, so I wouldn't blame you or your computer for ignoring it... Hey, it's so non-standard it doesn't even work properly for Microsoft's own software.]
Josh Sklar is another friend from Austin times, and apparently one of the most active websters I know. Not much to say about him that he hasn't said better on his own home page or other web sites like Pacific Rim Exports, which is another of his projects. My main memories of Josh are of his being one of the senior sysops of the Austin BBS community, even though he was quite young. He was also able to get several programmers to contribute to his BBS, which isn't so easy, given how hard it is to coordinate software projects and how independent most programmers are.
Joe Dimaggio was one of the leading Weird Scientists of Austin. We often hung out in the same circles, such as the Dull Men's Club, and were sort of running in parallel without collaboration some of the time, as when we wrote and operated our own BBSs. Joe's was better and lasted longer than mine. For a while we both worked for Al Evans, too, but that was unidirectional--Joe wrote Turbo Pascal code that was passed to me and I modified and cross-compiled it to run on the Apple IIc target.... Strange old days those were.
Jim Leth was a fellow traveler in the Frontiers of Science Institute at the University of Northern Colorado way back in 1972, I reckon it was.... Ah, those were the days, and if only I knew then what I know now! I'd have been able to make a whole NEW set of mistakes. Seriously, my main memories of those times are that I needed more showers. I hope your high school memories are better. FSI was actually a special program for specially selected prospective scientists to spend most of their summer getting a taste of university life. Many of the graduates went onto illustrious universities and even careers, and Jim seems to be in that group.
Herman Marshall was another FSIer. He says it was 1973, and that's probably the correct year. Not one of my closer comrades, but I recall him as one of the most clever in a group of pretty clever kids, and his long-term association with MIT would seem to be pretty good evidence that the impression was accurate.
Kimura-san is one of the first Japanese I met when I arrived in Japan. At that time, he was doing some volunteer work helping foreigners who were staying in the youth hostels, and that's where I first wound up when I arrived in Japan. After that, we mostly met at the Com'Inn in Ebisu, where I used to go on a fairly regular basis, usually on Sunday nights. He also introduced me to Matsumoto-sensei, for whom I did part-time work for a couple of years. The link above isn't really a personal home page, but something he helps do for an English study group.