Around 1980, we purchased a share in a VAX-11/780 with the intention of
running long mathematical programs during the off-hours when it was
otherwise unused. In the same year, Thompson sent John McKay two papers
[28,29] outlining a connection between a codeword of
weight 12 and a set of fixed-point free involutions. When McKay showed me
the papers, I was finally hooked. We had a computer looking for a problem
and the search for codewords of weight 12 was a problem looking for a
computer. I started by writing a simple computer program to play with the
ideas. Little did I know that it would become a 9 year undertaking!
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