Michael A Padlipsky (1939-2011)
All contents © 2011, 2021 The Literary Estate of Michael A. Padlipsky & William D. Ricker, Literary Executor and Editor, except as otherwise marked
Michael A Padlipsky (1939-2011)
Michael A Padlipsky was born in NJ in 1939, grew up and attended school in Westminster, LA County, California, graduated from MIT, attended BU grad school, and worked as a systems programer/architect on
During his working life, he lived in Cambridge MA, the DC area, Arlington MA, and finally returned to his boyhood bungalo in LA County, where he retired.
Mike died in 2011 after a long illness; the irony of the "No Smoking — Oxygen in Use" sign on his door was jarring. He was a loving "official honorary uncle" to the children of several classmates who were likewise only-children, who'd formed just such a pact. He was also survived by a late-life renewed-romance remote fiancée, who hosted our Wake.
MIT graciously returned, in 2003, copyright to M.A.P.'s 1960 Bachelor's Thesis, More than Pulp(?): Science Fiction and the Problem of Literary Merit.
This was for 35 years presumed to be the first academic thesis on SciFi as LitCrit, but no, writer and academic James E Gunn (1923-2020) did his 1951 M.A. thesis first. (Had the Internet been available in 1960, a literature search would have found it, or at least the 1958 reference to it.) Likely still the earliest Bachelors Thesis, and it centers Literary Merit right in the title.
Mike was a Scotch blogger before there was a Web to have WebLogs on - by medium of NetMail (as they called it when they were inventing it, as he'd say) and file transfer of text files.
His primary quest was to find another bottle of the semi-mythical A&N MOHM Glen Grant 14, and secondarily, to determine what was the second-best single-malt after that, which resulted in The Research Notes.
The Research Notes - Scotch notes from before Blogs (198x-1996)
MAP was one of the Old Network Boys (as he said), member of the Network Working Group & Internet Research Group, author of multiple ARPAnet/Internet RFCs and white papers on computer Networking, and recast some of them into a book, The Elements of Networking Style. And also some delicious "constructively snotty" criticism of matters of "technicoaesthetics" in networking.
All contents © 2011, 2021 The Literary Estate of Michael A. Padlipsky & William D. Ricker except as otherwise marked.