Sean Reiser

I get asked this question a lot. So I'll let you all in on the secret. The statute of limitations is well up so it's time to let the cat out of the bag, as it were. Let me tell you a story....

The story starts 100 years ago (well the mid to late 80's), when men were men and wrote code in ASM, no C#.NET, no perl, no Ruby. Rails is what TMRC used for trains not writing code. Pascal and BASIC were for children who couldn't handle knowing where things were in memory. It was Assembler or run the risk a lifetime of abuse.

So in those long gone days there was a young high school student and want to be programmer. We'll call him Sean since that was his name. Like many high school aged students playing video games was as important part of life. There was this game Castle Wolfenstein, which had devious copy protection. The manufacturers of the game intentionally damaged a portion of the disk, actually a half of a byte, also called a nybble (or nibble). Most disk copy programs would try and copy a byte at a time, so when it saw the damage it would skip the entire byte or better yet report an error and move on.

The young programmer, just for the purposes of backing up his game in case this disk became damaged, wrote a program which copied the disk a nibble at a time, instead of a byte at a time. He shared to program with friends, who shared it with their friends and much like a shampoo commercial many people began using this copy program. As a result of these deeds, people began calling him Nibbler.

Now, 100 years later, he still has the name, but many people don't remember why. They think it is related to Futurama, or some attempt to copulate. He has tried to shed himself of this name, yet when he walks down the streets of his home city people call to him "Hi Nibbler" so he has given up and accepted it.

And now you know.... and knowing is half the battle.