Where did the waldo come from?

It actually has nothing to do with the game. Back in the late 1980's, some unsung hero made a startup screen on the Mac Plus that looked like Walden Pond. I was searching for a corresponding hard drive name to match this miraculous image, which had a seemingly Ansel Adam quality (and was seen every time I started up my computer) — please remember these were real b&w images, i.e. 1-bit, black or white pixels only! I decided on "waldo", in honor of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This hard drive name continued with me over the years, in various forms (waldo II, waldo IIci, etc). My older son Tim even had Waldo Jr. for a while. When I started at Apple in 1993, the Internet was young, and my last name too long, so waldo@apple.com became my email address. Even though I left Apple in 2001, I still have waldo@mac.com.

Why waldo647?

When I started at Stanford, I had to come up with a university ID. There already was a waldo, so I chose something certain to be unique: waldo647. That became my email address, too. The 647 was for June 1947, my birth month and year. Over time on various other forums and websites, waldo647 became a quick, easy, and unique ID to use, so it began to proliferate.

As I pondered a domain name, I thought about a lot of catchy photography names; all the good ones seemed to be taken. I considered ChristopherWesselmanPhotography.com, too. It made a really long URL, and my younger son Chris was already becoming known for his video work in New York, and I wanted to avoid potential confusion. There were also other Wesselmans in the arts and photography.

At one point in this process, I Googled myself; and not too surprisingly, waldo647 appeared a bunch of times in the search results. I remembered back to a Steve Jobs pep talk, soon after he'd returned to Apple, about the value of the Apple brand as something unique in the world with considerable value. Not that waldo647 had that kind of value, but it was unique to me.

Uniqueness is very important to me, since my own vision, how I see and understand the world around me, is very much part of the images I've been fortunate enough to capture. And, yes, I think there is a lot of luck, and a certain amount of karma, involved. I've just been in too many right places, at just the right time...

To honor that uniqueness, I decided on waldo647. Perhaps also to honor whoever created that amazing startup screen on the Mac Plus circa 1987, and, of course, to honor the Waldo: