By Lawrence Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 16, no. 5, May 1994, p. 9.
There are two legends concerning the TCS penguin.
First legend:
Back in the dim past, a Pi volunteer asked, “Is it possible to pipe Usenet news feeds into the TCS bulletin board?” He pondered this greatly, ran sample code on his Timex Sinclair computer, talked to great sages, explored PUl, COBOL, and APL. Frustrated, he decided to do something else for a change and took an 8,000-mile hike to the North Pole. Many months later, as he passed some penguins cavorting on ice floes, it suddenly dawned on him: “I’m going in the wrong direction! The TCS runs on Apple II computers! I should be using AppleSoftBASIC!” At which point he turned around, moved to San Diego and worked at the Sea World penguin pavilion, and discovered there are no penguins at the North Pole but there are thousands of them in San Diego.
Second legend:
Back in the dim past, a Pi volunteer decided, “why don’t we set up a computer bulletin board?” So the necessary equipment was gathered from the four discard piles — er, four corners — of the earth: obsolete disk drives, cast off keyboards, recycled code. It was all put into a closet and after months of programming, a bulletin board was born. But the equipment tended to overheat the closet, so an air conditioner was installed, and all was cool. But the users tended to get frostbite, sitting in front of the equipment with the air conditioner blowing on them for hours on end. Then someone had the bright idea: “Hey, let’s use modems!” And so people (at least most people) no longer have to freeze their buns to use the TCS. But the memories of the early years, and frostbit tushes, endures in the TCS penguin.
