hobbitt, the plus signs, and druid labs

I grew up in Kendallville, Indiana, in the northeast corner of the state. My mom would take the four of us kids on vacations to various state parks in Michigan. When I was around 14 she took us to Muskegon State Park, which is on the shore of Lake Michigan. In the evenings the teenagers would head out into the dunes in small groups and drink beer (if they had any). Later we'd all gather at an outdoor fireplace and hang out (trying to pick up each other, I'm sure, although I didn't have a clue back then).

It rained one day, so we couldn't have a fire that night. A couple of other guys and I climbed up inside the fireplace (it was big), showing off for the girls I'm sure. One girl, with a sore foot (interesting the things you remember!), had read The Hobbit and dubbed the three of us "The Dirty Hobbits".

I liked the name, and called myself that in my fantasies.

A few years later, there was a TV show called T.H.E. Cat, about a cat burglar whose name was Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat. It was cute, at least to me then, and I played with T.H.E. Hobbit. That morphed into Theodore Hobbit. Then just Hobbit, and finally hobbit. (I'm partial to lower case, as you can see by the druid labs web site. Probably an ego thing.)

At some point I changed the spelling from one T ("hobbit", the correct spelling) to two T's ("hobbitt"), because it looked better. Not until the 1990's did someone point out that the vowel/consonant pattern in "hobbitt" matches that of my last name ("Carroll").

In the '70's, as I was flunking out of college (the first time, I think), I was involved with a computer-assisted instructional system called PLATO IV. It was being built by the University of Illinois, using plasma display terminals built by Motorola. I was attending the Indiana University/Purdue University combined regional campus in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The plant where the terminals were built was also in Fort Wayne, so the campus managed to get a free terminal, and scavenged a grant for the telecommunications line (U of I donated the computer time, since it was a development system). [An article about Plato is here.]

PLATO had a rudimentary Instant Messaging system. You pressed a certain key on the keyboard, entered someone's user id, and they got "paged" if they were online. If they accepted your invitation, two lines opened up at the bottom of your display. You typed in one, and what the other person typed was displayed in the other. However, the communications line was slow and if you typed quickly enough the other person couldn't "get a key in edgewise". So there arose a protocol: if you got to the end of the line and you had more to say, you typed a plus-sign (+). If you were done you typed "go".

PLATO was my first introduction to an electronic community and being able to create a persona. I was "hobbitt", and was playing around a lot (including being briefly famous – in this small community – for writing a bulletin board system that a lot of people used). The plus sign looked cool, I wanted something to spiff up my signature line, and the two kinda slammed together at one point. One + looks like a mistake, but two look (to me!) good.

I worked for Applied Data Research (ADR), a software company in New Jersey, during the 80's on a product called LOOK. Around 1983 our staff was in discussions with a couple of guys from Texas (Houston, perhaps) about purchasing an automated operations product they were building. (We didn't buy it, and I believe it ended up as Ops MVS). These guys were using (or stealing, it wasn't clear!) time at an oil company to develop the product. We joked about them being the Two Guys In A Garage Software Company.

One afternoon several of us were shooting the breeze and we got on the subject of what we would call our own software company if we ever started one. For some reason "druid labs" popped into my head; I liked the combination of esoteric and hard science. (The only other name I recall was Out On A Limb Software.)

druid labs (remember, I like lower case!) remained just a name for a couple of years. Around 1985 I was ending my marriage and reinventing myself - doing different things, trying new experiences, and the like. I was involved in various aspects of kite flying, including building kites. And I was flying to SHARE conferences (IBM mainframe users) twice a year on behalf of ADR. Sometimes I managed to combine these flights with trips to kite retreats or festivals on the west coast.

On one of these trips I had a book of Japanese family crests (Matsuya Company) that I was going to donate to a fund-raising auction. While leafing through it on the flight I found a design that appealed to me, and I sketched a derivation of it for use on a kite. It actually ended up on a banner as a gift to some friends (we've since commissioned a couple of kites with the design from well-known kite makers - I'm not very good at building kites.)

At kite festivals, some folks had personal cards they would hand out. I thought that was cool and wanted to have my own, so I sketched one up using the design from the Japanese crest, then took it to a local graphic arts company to be cleaned up and made into business cards. That opened the floodgates for druid labs stuff: I had sweatshirts, polo shirts, and folio bags made with the logo. (I was single and had money!) Later on a fascination with collecting and exchanging lapel pins arose in the kiting community. As a well-known person (at the time!), I got many pins at festivals. I finally was shamed into getting druid labs pins made so I could reciprocate; after 15 years I have just a few left.

"druid labs" is really just an excuse to do stuff. I've tied it to things such as editing kite newsletters, editing a book of kite competition rules, developing simple web sites, and so forth. We use it as the name of our house (the land itself we call Awassagame, a Native American word meaning "heaven"). And when the Internet became more visible to "regular" folks, I got it as our own domain name and web site.