Last Wednesday (16th May) was a sad day. On that day I lost an old friend. I was, I figure, on the M20 about ten miles from the hospital when he died, and I heard the news from his sister when I finally reached the Intensive Therapy unit some twenty minutes later.

I first met Peter in early October 1980. Fresh out of university, I'd just started working at Seislim House in Petts Wood, and he was a member of the group across the corridor. Our groups were both working on processing one huge seismic survey. I soon found myself involved in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign he was running. We met one evening a week, usually at his house, and then later at mine. We also talked microcomputers. He had an Apple, I had a Nascom. Within the year our office had moved out to a new building in the grounds of Holwood House. Peter continued to walk to work, even though Holwood was three or four miles further from home than Petts Wood. I took up cycling. Peter regarded cycles with suspicion, and claimed to be unable to ride one. He never learned to drive either, but on days when the British weather was at its wettest I'd often elect to drive to work, and usually collected Peter along the way, or phoned to see whether he wasn't yet on his way.

Over the years our careers diverged slightly. I moved into programming, and he moved into testing. His approach to testing was meticulous. The programs I'd meddled with often went through the tests he'd devised, and came back with evidence of some bug or other.

After the 1993 take-over and our office's move from Holwood to Gatwick he moved into a support role, answering users' questions, writing perl scripts, getting involved with that new-fangled HTML stuff, and occasionally sending bug reports up to the programming department. Our offices were a floor apart, and we often stopped by to chat, sometimes about work matters, but often not. We both watched Babylon 5, Peter having persuaded me that it would be worth watching past the first episode, and had plenty of lunchtime chats dissecting plot points in the recent episodes and speculating on the possible twists and turns to come. The take-over also meant we had access to email and to USENet. I plunged into alt.fan.pratchett and alt.fan.pern. Peter took up residence in alt.callahans (Here's his first post: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.callahans/msg/b444bb486a75e47e). Our conversation soon started to use email as its primary carrier, especially once he'd followed me in signing up with Demon Internet.

I don't know quite when he started using IRC. In an age when all phone calls were charged by duration, I was doing my best to keep my connected time short, and reading USENet off-line. Peter picked some strange hours when calls were cheap and his chosen channel was busy, and moved into #callahans.

At the end of 1998 Peter was made redundant. For a while he continued to live not far from the office, and we occasionally met at lunch time in Crawley. Lack of employment opportunities in the area led to his selling his house and moving to Dover, first to stay with his sister, and then to move into a much smaller house for which he didn't need a mortgage in August 2001. Our conversations continued in email, often at the rate of several a day. In early November 2002 he went silent, having mentioned he was going to hospital for some tests. He was in hospital for three weeks on that occasion. I took him a copy of "The Wizard's Dilemma", which was newly out in paperback, as something to read while he recovered. He'd mentioned the earlier books in the series so often in email that I'd finally relented and bought the first four books for myself in April '98. By November 2002 I'd read some he hadn't, so it seemed only fair to give him a chance to redress the balance. It also, of course, gave us more to talk about in email, and the first email he sent after he was released from hospital reported just how far he'd got through the book. Soon our conversations were flowing again. There were pauses, usually because I was away in some foreign country, and occasionally because Peter was away, or our ISP had an email transmission problem. I received my last email from him on April 26th. It ended thus:

It's inconvenient, definitely. I'm not worried about the idea of being kept in, more the idea of not doing the usual moderating stuff on two sites. Even though both have another moderator. To some extent, just relaxing and getting the medical stuff treated professionally appeals to me. But taking up a bed for no good reason would bother me.

Helen's picking me up at 8:50am, so I won't get any email answered before then, and you can see from above I don't know if I'll get any answered after, either.

Over the next three weeks I visited him six times, and on each of the first four occasions we spent two or three hours chatting. The fifth and sixth times he was in Intensive Therapy. On the seventh occasion, last Wednesday, I arrived just after he'd died.

I miss him. Each time I check my email I'm still half expecting to see a message from him; something that'd lighten my mood, offer an insight, point me at something interesting on TV, or send me down an unexpected avenue.

Goodbye old friend. Rest in peace.

Copied here from my LJ (http://hrrunka.livejournal.com/107627.html) because without Peter's prompting I'd probably never have found the Wizardry universe.