Actually, the original story does say it was Medicine buying the Vax and doing the experiment, with Zoo helping. The VAX 11-780 was the hot machine of 1979/80 ("a 1 MIPS beast!", I heard).
I've seen Laura Creighton's name on Python lists - I believe she's on LinkedIn. The author's "Statistically Invalid Sampling of My Life" (http://edp.org/index.htm) is also pretty amusing - don't think he'd need to embellish that incident.
I've seen Laura Creighton's name on Python lists - I believe she's on LinkedIn. The author's "Statistically Invalid Sampling of My Life" (http://edp.org/index.htm) is also pretty amusing - don't think he'd need to embellish that incident.
P.S. The story is, for instance, alluded to here: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2002-May/756589..., without either rebuttal or elaboration.