So, who is Hobbes?

Roberto H Zakon was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
At age 12, he left his family in Brazil to come to the US.  He
lived with his uncle in Brooklyn for two months and then in
Manhattan with some friends for another month.  From Manhattan,
Robert went to the Peddie School in Hightstown, NJ (yes, the one
Walt Annenberg donated $100M to).  After finishing grades 8-12
at Peddie, Robert was off to Case Western Reserve University
in Cleveland.

At CWRU, Robert earned a BS and MS in Computer Engineering &
Science with minors in Philosophy and Psychology.  Never really
paying much attention to his academics ("There just wasn't
any content to the courses"), Robert spent most of his college
years working.  Aside being an independent consultant, Robert
worked for Apple Computer as their on-campus rep, NCR/MCC in
the Human-Computer Interface group, and at CWRU in various
capacities, including Director of the Distributed Decision Making
Research Lab.

In the Spring of '92, Robert received his US citizenship (at which
time he changed his name to Robert H Zakon - no period after the H please),
graduated with a Master's, got married, went on a Caribbean
cruise for the honeymoon, and the day after accepted an offer
with MITRE.  Two days later, he moved from Cleveland to
Reston.

As for the Hobbes thing, you will have to wait until he
has more time to write it up :-)

...

Well, I have found more time:

The Legend of Hobbes, Part I

While attending CWRU, the university started laying a fiber
optic network throughout the whole campus, including dormitories.
Working for Apple at the time, Robert was one of the first to
have a computer with an ethernet card, and thus one of the first
on CWRUnet.  Others soon followed and with a large Mac
population, the Broadcast utility came into common use.
(Broadcast allows you to send a message to someone else's Mac).
Unfortunately Broacast allows you to send a message to
everyone on the network, and some started sending *not so
nice* messages.  Not happy at being disturbed every few
minutes by these messages, Robert decided to do something
about it.

CWRU = Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio
       "If you love your kids, don't send them here!"


The Legend of Hobbes, Part II

Last we left Robert, he was fed up at getting annoying
messages.  Well, he wrote a program which would determine
the machine sending the offending broadcast message and
would shut it down. (If you are not familiar with Macs,
the shut down command is similar to hitting the big red
switch:)  Needless to say folks learned very quickly (heh heh).
As only a few of his closest friends knew who was doing
the shut downs, the nickname Hobbes came into place.
It is derived from the Calvin&Hobbes cartoon, where
Calvin is the only one who really knows that Hobbes is 
fur [sic] real.  After shortening his name to Robert H Zakon
(when he received citizenship), Hobbes fit quite nicely 
in his single letter middle name (please do not put a 
period after the H)


The Legend of Hobbes, Part III

Not being content at just bringing justice to CWRUnet,
Robert, er Hobbes, set out to anonymously help the
CWRUnet tech staff as well.  They had just installed
two high speed printers for use by the dormitories,
but unforunately could not figure out how to print 
from a Mac.  After waiting three weeks to print 
something, Hobbes decided to give it a try.  Yup,
you guessed it.  Within three hours Hobbes figured
it out.  For the next week, he would send Mac
screen dumps (with Hobbes's image somewhere on it)
to the printer.  Some would have messages asking
whether they (the CWRUnet staff) had figured it out
yet.  Again, with only a few people really knowing
who Hobbes was/is, the CWRUnet staff had no means
of contacting him (they would even watch when people
came to pick up printouts:) Eventually Hobbes let 
them know the secret for printing (without letting 
them know who he was, of course).
---

This has been the two minute typed version of The
Legend of Hobbes.  Grammar and sentence structure
were totally ignored for the sake of getting
something down quickly.  If you don't like,
don't read.


  


PS: Have you hugged a tiger today?