Three Years in the Zendo
Copyright: Sanjay Basu Why I sat down For three years I sat on a black cushion for 40 minutes every morning before the rest of the house woke up. I was not looking for peace. I was looking for a way out of my own head, which at the time was running a debugger on everything, including itself. The years were mid 1993 to early 1997 and the place was Singapore. I had taken a contract as a communications software engineer, which in practice meant one thing: designing a TCP/IP stack and retrofitting it onto OS/2, which by the autumn of 1994 had become OS/2 Warp. IBM was betting the operating system on networking, and the networking was late. I spent my days inside RFC 793 and RFC 1122, arguing with retransmission timers and a 16-bit device driver layer that had never expected to carry a 32-bit protocol stack. I had come to Zen the way engineers usually come to anything: sideways, through a book. I was reading about the measurement problem in quantum mechanics and kept running into the ...