I wrote "Alice" during my first year on the staff at MIT, but the villain of this piece dates from an earlier era. Back during the late Mesozoic period of computer science (otherwise known as the early 1980s), I was working part time as a systems programmer while doing my level best to flunk out of the small liberal arts school I was then attending. We had one, count it, one DECSystem-20 which was used for everything from introductory computer science classes to the university payroll accounts. Nowadays, when a few thousand dollars will buy a timesharing machine one can stow in a briefcase with room left for a bag lunch, it's hard to remember that in those days a -real- computer was one that took up only slightly less space than an 18-wheel tractor trailer rig and cost rather more to feed. Or that's how we felt about it at the time. Then, in early 1983, Digital announced the cancellation of the Jupiter project and their intent to phase out the 36-bit product line. But, they said, it's ok, all you DEC-10 and DEC-20 users can just migrate to VAX/VMS, the system of the future. Gosh, thanks, DEC. We don't mind throwing away all our programs and learning a user interface that was already obsolete by the time it first shipped. That's another one of those feelings that's hard to remember these days, what with the way that weird PDP-11 operating system from Bell Labs has spread like kudzu within DEC itself, but even after I got to MIT, I still felt that VMS was The Enemy. Hence "Alice." When Eric Raymond first asked for permission to include Alice in this anthology, I extracted from him a promise that it would appear verbatim. I figured that Alice had become a piece of history, and that nobody, myself included, should muck with it. A few days ago I saw Arlo Guthrie in concert for the first time since the year before I wrote "Alice's PDP-10," and damned if he isn't still changing the story here and there to suit the times. So I've taken the liberty of cleaning up a few rough spots and inside jokes that no longer seem funny even to me. A dead TOPS-20 RM03 pack awaits the first person to spot one of the changes. The only thing I've ever regretted about "Alice" was using Ann Finn's real name. Ann and I shared an office during my first year at MIT. She was a good friend and was very patient with the obnoxious kid from the hinterlands away from the ARPANET. When I originally wrote "Alice," it was intended for private consumption by the other people on our floor at the lab; I'd never really intended for it to travel quite as far as it did. A few months after "Alice" escaped into the outside world, Ann and her fiance were in the process of leaving MIT, and Ann went for a job interview in the city that was to be their new home. When she came back she told me that all had gone just fine until her prospective boss had taken her to the company lunchroom to introduce her to the people with whom she'd be working if she took the job. "Ann Finn? Ann -Marie- Finn?" Ann's reponse: "I'm going to kill him." Well, it's been long enough since I wrote this thing that the statutes have run, but just in case, Arlo, if you're reading this, I've got another dead RM03 pack reserved for you if you want it.... --sra, Thanksgiving Day, 1991