Judith

ude The Unix Desktop Environment (UDE) is a desktop environment for the X Window System. Given its efficient and lightweight design it can be used on almost any Unix-like operating system, mostly without any porting effort. User interface UDE's user ...

Milhon (March 12, 1939 – July 19, 2003), in

Washington D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, Na ...

, best known by her pseudonym St. Jude, was a self-taught programmer, civil rights advocate, writer, editor, advocate for women in computing,

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term ''hacker'' has become associated in popu ...

and author in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

. Milhon coined the term

cypherpunk A cypherpunk is any individual advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Originally communicating through the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, informal g ...

and was a founding member of the cypherpunks. On July 19, 2003, Milhon died of cancer.

Life

Judith Milhon was born March 12, 1939 in Washington D.C., raised in Indiana, to a military family of the Marine Corps. She married Robert Behling in 1961 and had one daughter, Tresca Behling, with him. Attracted to the growing countercultural movement, Milhon moved near Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and established a communal household with her husband, young daughter, and friends. In 1968 she moved to San Francisco with her friend and partner Efrem Lipkin and divorced her husband in 1970. At the time of her death in 2003 from cancer, she was survived by at least one child, Tresca Behling, and one grandchild, Emilio Zuniga, as well as her partner of over 40 years, Efrem Lipkin.

Professional projects

Milhon taught herself programming in 1967 and landed her first job at the

Horn and Hardart Horn & Hardart was a food services company in the United States noted for operating the first food service automats in Philadelphia, New York City, and Baltimore. Philadelphia's Joseph Horn (1861–1941) and German-born, New Orleans-raised Fra ...

vending machine company of New York before she moved away to California to join the counterculture movement. She worked at the Berkeley Computer Company (an outgrowth of

Project Genie Project Genie was a computer research project started in 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley. It produced an early time-sharing system including the Berkeley Timesharing System, which was then commercialized as the SDS 940. History Pr ...

), and she helped implement the communications controller of the BCC timesharing system. In 1971 she partnered with other local activists and technologists at

Project One Project One is a DJ and production supergroup consisting of two hardstyle artists, Willem Rebergen (Headhunterz) and Joram Metekohy (Wildstylez). So far, the act has released an album, an EP, and several singles. "Headhunterz and Wildstylez Pre ...

, where she was particularly drawn to the Resource One project, with the goal of creating the Bay Area's first public computerized bulletin board system. In 1973, a subset of the Resource One group, including Milhon, broke away to create Community Memory in Berkeley. Later, she also worked on

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

, a Unix-based operating system developed by the Computer Systems Research Group at UC Berkeley. She was a member of

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) was a global organization promoting the responsible use of computer technology. CPSR was incorporated in 1983 following discussions and organizing that began in 1981. It educated policymakers ...

, and the author of several books. She was a senior editor at the magazine ''

Mondo 2000 ''Mondo 2000'' was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs. It was a more anarchic and subversive prototype for the later-founded ''Wi ...

'' and frequent contributor to

Boing Boing ''Boing Boing'' is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice won ...

Bibliography

* ''The Joy of Hacker Sex'' (proposed) * ''How to Mutate & Take Over the World: an Exploded Post-Novel'' (1997) (with R. U. Sirius)

Random House Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Germ ...

* ''Cyberpunk Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook'' (1995) (with R. U. Sirius and

Bart Nagel Bart is a masculine given name, usually a diminutive of Bartholomew, sometimes of Barton, Bartolomeo, etc. Bart is a Dutch and Ashkenazi Jewish surname, and derives from the name ''Bartholomäus'', a German form of the biblical name ''Bartholo ...

) Random House. * ''Hacking the Wetware: The NerdGirl’s Pillow Book'' (1994) (internet release of ebook)

Activism and Vision

St. Jude had her hand in many different causes. She was active in the 1960s

Civil Rights Movement The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation, Racial discrimination ...

helping to organize the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Dedicated to protest, Milhon was jailed for trespassing in Montgomery, Alabama as well as for civil disobedience in Jackson, Mississippi. Activism within the cyber community was important to Milhon as well. She frequently urged women toward the internet and hacking while encouraging them to have "tough skin" in the face of harassment. At a time when the internet was dominated by men, she was an ardent advocate of the joys of hacking, cybersex and a woman's right to technology. She often said, "Girls need modems. Women may not be great at physical altercations, but we sure excel at rapid-fire keyboarding." Milhon once noted that there was a conspicuous lack of female hardware hackers, and while working at Community Memory she worked against this exclusion and worked to get new, inexperienced users to experiment with Community Memory. She did so by writing open-ended questions in the system about available resources in the region (such as “Where can I get a decent bagel in the Bay Area (Berkeley particularly)?”), which would get curious users to try out the system. She also wrote "The Cyberpunk Handbook" and coined the term "cypherpunk" for computer users dedicated to online privacy through encryption.

References

External links

* Milhon, Jude. (AOL homepage). Retrieved August 24, 2013. Archived August 14, 2007. * The WELL's Virtual Wak

* Delio, Michelle.
"Hackers Lose a Patron Saint"
', Wired magazine, Wired News. July 22, 2003. Retrieved March 8, 2018. * Welton, Corey.
"St. Jude Gets Verbose"
', Verbosity Magazine. August 1996. Retrieved March 4, 2006. {{DEFAULTSORT:Milhon, Jude 1939 births 2003 deaths Cypherpunks American feminists American women's rights activists People from Anderson, Indiana People from the San Francisco Bay Area Deaths from cancer in California Women Internet pioneers American women computer scientists American computer scientists Hackers 20th-century American women scientists 20th-century American scientists American computer criminals 21st-century American women