Dave Mock remembers...

Submitted by admin on Tue, 08/25/2009 - 23:34
  • We began the Baker House Snack Bar, generally known for massive scoops of ice cream and immense milk shakes (although don't ever call them milkshakes in Mass). :-)  Paul Malchodi could fairly reliably be found behind the counter.
  • Some creative person [Wayne Seltzer] came up with an electronic box that interfaced the laundry room to the phone system, so that people would not have to travel many floors just to discover that all the washers or dryers were taken.  A phone extension was added for the laundry room such that when called, you would hear up to 4 high beeps and up to 4 low beeps, each beep indicating a washer (high) or dryer (low) was available.
  • Steve [Leighton], one of the Resident Assistants (can't remember what we called them - the resident grad-students), began a campaign to find free or inexpensive pianos offered in the newspaper, then rent a trailer, and go pick them up and fix them, with the goal of having a (working) piano on every floor.  He was mostly successful, and the leftovers fueled the piano drops nicely.
  • Miller beer started a contest which motivated us to use Miller at all house functions.  I don't think we ever won any prizes but we consumed a LOT of Miller beer.
  • Circa 1977, Rich Perlstein of Baker House, who was a bass in the Logarhythms at the time (I was a tenor), left the Logs to start a new male-female group called the Chorallaries.  At the time, MIT was roughly 6:1 male:female, so it was a rather bold step. I doubt that they lasted. :-)  [The Chorallaries are still going strong...] I stayed with the Logs and didn't have time for both, but I remember loving their concerts.  The first year, the Chorallaries borrowed a few songs from the old Logarhythms repertoire, which created opportunities for the two groups to occasionally sing a tune together.  I also remember one weekend evening at Baker, after chatting with Karen Altman & Sue Hansen (charter Chorallary members), I took the middle shower of the coed bathroom, and Sue and Karen took the other two showers, and the three of us sang a cappella harmony while we showered.  We set a new quality-standard for "singing in the shower".
  • Phone pinning - If you called someone's phone and they picked it up, that phone would remain "busy" forever, until BOTH ends of that connection were hung up. "Pinning" someone's phone meant going to an obscure phone somewhere (eg, the cafeteria) and calling a person's phone and then leaving the calling phone off the hook, so the callee would have to hunt all over the dorm to find the calling phone before they could use their phone again (until then your phone was "pinned").
  • Door knobs - The metal shaft that went between the inside and outside door knobs on a dorm room door, almost always stayed attached to the outside knob. This meant that if you used a crow-bar to forcibly pry off the outside door-knob, the shaft would come with it and the now-useless inside door knob would fall off into the room, making it impossible for the person inside to get out. For this reason it became advisable to keep a flat-head screw driver in every room, which could be inserted for the missing shaft, and open the door.
  • DOPEC - In 1973, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries or "OPEC" was a household word, because they had essentially held the entire world hostage by controlling world oil exports.  In 1974 or 5, a group of Baker guys in co-located rooms declared themselves "DOPEC". I remember some of the members included Leor Zolman (aka, Brain Damage) who went on to create one of the smallest (and therefore fastest) commercial C-compilers, under the name BDS-C, where BDS stood for Brain Damage Software, a reference to his Baker House name.  Another DOPEC member I remember was Larry DeMar, who while still in school designed some of the more famous early video games, eventually including the wildly popular (in its day) "Robotron", where you had to save the "Last family on earth" from invaders.

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