Norman De Forest Dead at 63

[Richard Bonner]

The computer world has lost a true guru. Norman De Forest was found
dead at his Halifax, Nova Scotia apartment on February 1st. It is
unofficially estimated that he died January 26th. Cause of death is
unknown at this time, but Norman was a heavy smoker and would have been
64 this month.

Although eccentric in nature, Norman was a very smart person and well
versed in computers. He was with Chebucto Community Net in Halifax for
over a decade and freely volunteered his time with no thought of
compensation. He was a member of the HTML Writers' Guild and championed
web authoring that was text & handicapped friendly.

He shall be sadly missed.


For a time, Norman's website will remain accessible. It gives more
about his life and has some great protests against poor webpage
authoring, among many other topics.

http://www.chebucto.ca/~af380/

Richard Bonner
http://www.chebucto.ca/~ak621/DOS/

[vixen]

Post by Richard Bonner
The computer world has lost a true guru. Norman De Forest was found
dead at his Halifax, Nova Scotia apartment on February 1st. It is
unofficially estimated that he died January 26th. Cause of death is
unknown at this time, but Norman was a heavy smoker and would have been
64 this month.

"will ya still need me, will ya still feed me, when i'm 64.........
hooooo.!"

how many others have left this planet? just hope he knew more about
the reason for being here than what he did about comps, lest his life was
in vain.

[Richard Bonner]

Post by vixen

Post by Richard Bonner
The computer world has lost a true guru. Norman De Forest was found
dead at his Halifax, Nova Scotia apartment on February 1st. It is
unofficially estimated that he died January 26th. Cause of death is
unknown at this time, but Norman was a heavy smoker and would have been
64 this month.

how many others have left this planet? just hope he knew more about
the reason for being here than what he did about comps, lest his life was
in vain.

*** Norman was generous beyond belief. He was on social assistance yet
was known to buy groceries to donate some of them to the food bank. He
also gave a lot of his time to volunteering, including to my very own
Chebucto Community Net.

Richard Bonner
http://www.chebucto.ca/~ak621/DOS/

[Timo Salmi]

Post by Richard Bonner
The computer world has lost a true guru. Norman De Forest was
found dead at his Halifax, Nova Scotia apartment on February 1st.

That is very sad news and a great loss, indeed. It is an inevitable
fact of life that as the net reaches maturity, such news will emerge
more frequently. People one most often only knows from the net will
reach the end of a very productive life.

( Followups narrowed to news:comp.os.msdos.misc )

All the best, Timo

[Pierre Clouthier]

I also knew Norman. I just stumbled on this today. He was indeed a genius, if eccentric.

He developed an acute allergy from being exposed to chemicals on an Air Force base in Germany. His skin was extremely sensitive, he needed special soap to wash. He had to use it sparingly, as it was expensive. He use to joke that the tax on his soap was more than what most people pay for soap.

He told me a sad story about how he finally located his mother after being separated when he was taken away from her when 2 years old. They met and began an acquaintance. Then he left for Europe, she disappeared, did not give him her address, did not know Norm was with the military, and they never saw each other again.

I hired him to do some work for me. I recall him calling me from a phone booth, we were discussing some some code I needed him to write. He was able to recite, from memory, obscure and complex technical details about the Borland font file format. Blew me away.

My son was studying Electrical Engineering at TUNS. He was working with a team that were supposed to write some Assembler code to interface to a PC parallel port. They were using code written by the previous year's class. They couldn't get it to work. I showed the code to Norman, not only did he get it to work, but he proved that the other team had never got it working. He was smarter then university students :o)

When I gave Norm a 286 PC, the first thing he did was manually transcribe the BIOS into a 200-page binder, manually wrote down every machine instruction, and reverse engineered the assembler source code. I've been programming for fifty years, and I don't know anybody that could do that.

He was phenomenal. Alas he marched to the beat of his own drum. I tried to provide him paid work, but I was never able to get him to focus on assignments, he did his own thing.