St. Jude

IRL Name: 
Jude Milhon
Biography: 

Jude Milhon aka St. Jude, was a self-taught programmer, civil rights advocate, writer, editor, advocate for women in computing hacker and author in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Milhon taught herself programming in 1967 and landed her first job at the Horn and Hardart vending machine company of New York before she moved away to California to join the counterculture movement. She worked at the Berkeley Computer Company (an outgrowth of Project Genie), and she helped implement the communications controller of the BCC timesharing system. In 1971 she partnered with other local activists and technologists at Project One, where she was particularly drawn to the Resource One project, with the goal of creating the Bay Area's first public computerized bulletin board system.

In 1973, a subset of the Resource One group, including Milhon, broke away to create Community Memory in Berkeley. Later, she also worked on BSD, a Unix-based operating system developed by the Computer Systems Research Group at UC Berkeley.

She was a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and the author of several books. She was a senior editor at the magazine Mondo 2000 and frequent contributor to Boing Boing.

Facts

She started the hacking group Cypherpunks, not to be confused with cyberpunks.

On July 19, 2003, Milhon died of cancer.

Pictures: 
References