My old buddy John passed away last week. We'd lost touch and I hadn't seen him for over 20 years, but he was still my friend.

We met sometime in middle school, not sure exactly when. We connected over a common interest in science, computers, and geeky stuff in general. He lived in town when we met. Later on his family moved into a country housing development just a couple miles from my house, and we would ride our bikes to our respective houses and have occasional sleepovers.

I had a couple shortwave radio receivers that we would play with sometimes. We would play with tape recorders to make wierd sounds. We'd ride our bikes around our country neighborhood and pick up old tube TV's and radios that people would put out for trash pickup; back at his house or mine, we'd tear them apart for fun. We had Radio Shack electronics kits that we'd use to build noisemakers, radios, digital counters, clocks and other such stuff. We went dumpster diving in the telephone company dumpster in town and got enough parts to build telephones and other gadgets; with this stuff we learned how to tap into rural phone junction boxes where we would make phone calls on random phone lines.

When we were old enough to drive, we would go to electronics surplus stores in and around Madison and rummage around, reveling in all the cool junk. We would invariably purchase something, which we would take home for some project. Once, John bought a fully functional 75-pound surplus radar/oscilloscope unit. He took that home and hooked it up to his stereo to generate funky patterns on the display. A few weeks later he told me his folks made him get rid of it; he had left it turned on 24-7, and at the 500 watts or so that it consumed, it had created a sizeable bump in the household electric bill.

We were very interested in computers. As freshman in high school, John and I were allowed to use the one and only teletype terminal that the school had at that time for students. This used an acoustic modem to connect to a university computer. We taught ourselves BASIC and entered programs from listings we found in magazines like Byte; computer games, ASCII art pictures and other such entertainment.

Eventually we each had our own computers, as well as 1200 baud modems. We would dial into the BBS's we could reach with a local phone call - there were several dozen of them - and stay up late into the night goofing around on them. One day I was at John's house and he logged into one of our favorite BBS's, me looking over his shoulder. The login had some problem, and we observed a response of C:\. I did not know about DOS, but John knew a little bit. He typed dir and we got back a file listing from the remote machine - cool! Then he typed del *.*, followed by dir and there were no files. With nothing interesting left to do, he logged out. After that, we were unable to dial up that BBS - it was dead. A week or so later it came back online, and the Sysop's opening message stated that "somehow, the whole system got deleted." We knew.

We learned how to make black powder using saltpeter and sulfur that we bought at the drugstore, and powdered charcoal brickets. We'd burn piles of this, making thick clouds of black smoke, and sometimes we would use cardboard tubes from cash register paper rolls to make black powder firecrackers. We also got into making small model rockets, and would launch them with black powder payloads to watch them explode high overhead with a big puff of smoke.

Once old enough, I was allowed to use my dad's .22's, and eventually was old enough to buy my own ammo. We would open up the shells to get out the gunpowder to make little firecrackers. John's dad was a gun guy, and had reloading equipment, and gunpowder and black powder, and so we would snitch some of that to play with as well. We learned about fertilizer-based explosives (you can learn almost anything at a public library!) and discovered that we could buy the needed materials at Radio Shack, as they sold chemical refills for chemistry kits. My mom worked in Madison, and one summer day she took us into the city so we could bum around while she was at work. We proceeded to ride the buses across the entire city, visiting every single Radio Shack and purchasing every available bottle of fertilizer. This we used to make a couple of "special" pipe bombs, which turned out to be a bit more frightening than we had expected. We didn't make any more of those. But when John turned 18, just a few months before me, he bought gunpowder from the gun shop, and we made much larger gunpowder bombs, just to see what they would do. There was an abandoned gravel quarry a few miles from our houses, and we'd go there to blow them up.

After high school we didn't hang out as much, but would still visit and have long geeky tech discussions about computers and science. Eventually, these visits became less frequent, replaced by occasional long phone calls. I left Wisconsin for graduate school and jobs in other states, but when I came back to visit, I would make it a point to visit with John. After we'd each gotten married and started families, the visits and calls became even less frequent. I think the last time I saw or spoke with him was around 2002, when he, Barb, Troy and Anne visited Pamela and me in Minnesota.

John was my one friend who I never stopped thinking about as my friend, even after we lost touch. At my 40-year high-school class reunion this past summer I got John's number from his brother Troy and I reached out. We exchanged a couple messages, but didn't manage to make an in-person connection. I will always regret that.