13 Years of Harvard Computer Society
Digging into the archives to see what geeks really did back in the day.
Harvard Computer Society, or HCS, was started in 1983 to be a forum for the geekiest of geeks to eat pizza and talk about technology. Naturally, this was one of the clubs I joined when I arrived at Harvard. Among other things, HCS administers most of the mailing lists on campus. One of those mailing lists, HCS-Jobs, is sugar water for technical recruiters trying to advertise hot new jobs and students looking to hire fellow students for side projects.
I dug through the archives and read all 1341 emails sent over the past 13 years, from 2000 to 2013. Here’s a few of the more interesting emails I found. (I’ve replaced some email addresses and phone numbers with asterisks for privacy’s sake.)
July 2000: Baratunde Thurston
Baratunde is a Harvard alum who today works at the intersection of politics, technology, and comedy (great interview of him here). One of the first emails in the archives is from him, and you can see his comic success started early.
January 2001: Catherine Crouch
This website is still online, and I think it might still be hosted on the same 400-MHz Mac.
October 2001: Let’s Go
“…a high profile, glamorous brand using advanced technology (we’ll be using an XML database)”
July 2002: Patrick Chung
Patrick Chung is now a partner at New Enterprise Associates, and is a Harvard JD/MBA. The emails below indicate he might have been working on a financial services startup in college (as if a 4-year JD-MBA program weren’t rigorous enough).
July 2003: David Malan
This is one of the first emails from David Malan, who now famously teaches CS50 at Harvard. Here’s the OpenCourseware archive for the 2005 version of this class—on the syllabus was “secondary storage: floppy disks” and “Mr. Omri Traub, founder of Transformis L.L.C., joins us tonight for a talk on his experience running a small startup during the recent tech bubble.”
February 2005: Startups
The first real mention of university-organized startup activity on the mailing list.
February 2006: LimeWire
Oh, the irony of LimeWire recruiting on campus. “Free copies of LimeWire PRO will be in abundance!”
May 2007: The Social Network
As far as I can tell, Divya sent this email shortly after Facebook started taking off at Harvard. Love the Yahoo e-mail footer.
November 2008: Derek Flanzraich
Derek is the awesome CEO of Greatist in New York City, and on-campus he founded On Harvard Time, which is still around and released the viral Harvard-Yale prank this year.
Two observations:
- There’s clearly a connection at Harvard between tech entrepreneurs and comedy.
- There’s something fitting about finding emails sent at midnight on November 4th, 2008.
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