This page provides links to and excerpts from various people's memories of Cam. We invite you to contribute your own links via email, snail mail, in your journals or blogs, or by signing the guestbook. Kris hopes to have some of the memories printed and bound for people to share.

To contribute a link or a memory by email, please email David Bliss at david@dbsi.org.

Contributed Memories || Links to Memories

Contributed Memories

A wiggle of the eyebrows, a movement of the fingers, and a click of the tongue - that is how he communicated with his computer, his friends and the world while lying on his left side - able to be lip read by Kris (even from behind as they communicated mind to mind) by me and by Jon his schoolmate from St Chris and current and trusted carer. Kris, who was Cameron's soulmate, is a VERY special person to me. They and we will meet again, as in the past, and forever.

June, Cameron's mother

St. Chris, like many British schools, had lots of computers made by the British educational computer company "Research Machines." We had a portacabin full of RM Nimbus systems. They were really slow, and were "sort of" MS-DOS compatible. They were also fully networked - everybody had their own username and password.

Cameron and I, as well as a few other miscreants, were poking around them and looking to see what we could do on them. One of the programs we used was called "Clockwork Memory Map." It would let you look at any part of the computer's memory and play around.

One thing we noticed was that certain parts of memory changed rapidly. Looking at them, we realized that we were looking at parts of the networking system. Every time any of the computers sent something over the network, you'd see it at that part of memory.

What was particularly interesting is that every single packet - not just ones sent to that computer, but ones sent to every other computer - would appear there. In other words, sitting at one computer, we could see what every single other computer on the network was sending.

Of course, we wondered whether this included passwords or not. We'd noticed that when you entered your username, there was a delay of a few seconds before it asked for your password. Then, after you typed your password, it would instantly tell you whether it was correct or not. Presumably, it was sendiing the password to the computer you were using,and trusting that computer to check if it was right or not.

So we typed a username in to an un-used computer, and watched the network traffic. We had to hit "pause" on the computer quickly before it went away. Lo and behold, we saw the username we'd typed, and the password - plain, un-encrypted, sitting there. Not only a single password, but every other password in that user's group. It looked like groups were organized by year - First Form, Second Form, etc.

So we had a large list of usernames and passwords. What we really wanted, of course, was the network manager's password. The problem was, we didn't know his user ID. We tried a few possibilities, but none of them were right. We did find out his non-network manager password.

We were keeping notes, of course, as were our friends from different years. We were in a public computer room, so we had no control over who overheard us. Somebody overheard us as we discovered the personal password of Anthony, the network manager, and naturally wrote this down in his notebook.

Our friend had a younger brother. His younger brother managed to get a hold of this notebook, and pretty soon most of the first form learned Anthony's password. I think it was "atlam." Anyway, they did the obvious thing - went up to him and asked him. Lots of them. For some reason, Anthony wasn't happy about this.

Cameron and I were the oldest involved, and were considered the instigators. The next morning, we spent about half an hour or so being yelled at by Anthony. Eventually, he decided that we were banned from the computer room for the term.

This posed a problem for us. Anthony was the St. Chris administrator, but there were two other terminals in the computer room. Specifically, there were Ebenezer VT320's. Ebby was an online conferencing and e-mail system based on Caucus, running on a VAXen at the Education2000 offices in downtown Letchworth.

Anthony wasn't involved in Ebby administration, and we were all Ebby addicts. Unfortunately, the Ebby terminals were in his computer room, and we were banned.

The solution was fairly obvious. The keyboards had reasonably long cables. We'd simply have somebody turn the monitor around to face the window, and hand us a keyboard out the window. Sit on a chair, use ebby, problem solved. It sort of irritated Anthony, but not that much - it wasn't his system, and I think he was amused by our efforts.

Gopi D Flaherty, Cam's friend

From: Paul Glass
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 22:13:46 +0000
I used to care for Cameron when we were both 19 and he studied at Reading University.

I regret not having kept in touch with him. It was a one year voluntary work placement and Cameron transferred to another university for the rest of his Computer Science degree. This was before mobile telephones and Facebook. I spoke to him about a year after he transferred but we lost touch after that.

The voluntary placement was a way of getting out of my small town and doing something worthwhile. Cameron was a bonus (and worthwhile). I was a bit of a mixed up and confused kid at the time and I got homesick. I remember Cameron put things into perspective partly by just being Cameron. It was pretty difficult to feel sorry for myself when Cameron's prognosis was that he may not complete his degree. =

I got a laugh from all the students in one of his lectures once. A lecturer took objection to me reading a book and asked me what I thought I was doing. I pointed to Cameron, sat next to me and said, "I'm with him".

I must admit that I assumed that he had passed away. That may be why I left it until now before looking him up. I was still very sad to come across his memorial page when I google searched "Cameron Grant" and "muscular dystrophy" (which is where I found this email address).

I didn't recognise his picture and assumed that it was someone else. He was much thinner in the face when I last saw him. He looked much healthier. I hope that's not indicative of the care I gave him. I used to go easy on him. If he didn't want to do physio (which he often didn't) we would skip it that morning.

I fell into working in Finance after working with Cameron. It's been 20 years and looking back, working with Cameron was the most rewarding job I ever had (while being the least rewarding financially). =

I think that what prompted me to look him up was that I have been thinking about my time with him recently and have decided on a career change; going back to something similar to my role with Cameron. If it ends up being half as rewarding as working with Cameron, it will be worth any pay drop.

I hope that June is still with us. Please tell her I said hello.

Kind regards

Paul
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Links to Memories

To contribute a link to a post that you or someone else have made, please email David Bliss at david@dbsi.org.