Flashes of Panic

This weekend was A’s sister’s wedding. The groom is a CS professor at my College’s biggest rival in nearly everything—an old, cherished rivalry as close and heated as only two nearly-identical institutions can manage.

Early in the weekend I overheard him (I think I was meant to overhear) remarking that the College was an “offshoot” of theirs. This is not far from the truth; the College’s founding was made possible by the defection of their president and many of their faculty, who considered their location too remote and advocated its wholesale relocation to Amherst.

Failing that relocation, they arranged, with many of the leading citizens of this town (including Noah Webster, he of the dictionary, and Emily Dickinson’s grandfather Samuel,) to launch a new college. I’ve taken a lot of words to explain this (and the Wikipedia links above use even more), but as usual, the hacker culture has boiled it down into a two-word phrase.

I think the founding of the College may have been one of the earliest code forks.