Radia Perlman at the table

In the computer labs of MIT, DEC, or Sun, meals were hardly ceremonial: you ate fast and close to the machine. The day was organized around three moments — the "brown bag" lunch (a sandwich brought in a kraft paper bag), the coffee breaks that punctuated long debugging sessions, and the potlucks (shared meals where everyone brought a dish) that sealed team life. It was a pragmatic structure, inherited from the North American intellectual work culture: feeding the body without interrupting the mind.

The official fuel of network engineers, drip coffee flowed constantly from the lab's coffee maker. Bitter, hot, endlessly refilled, it paced the debugging nights where you tracked down why a network was "looping" — precisely the problem that Radia Perlman's Spanning Tree Protocol came to solve.