Jude Milhon

Judith Milhon (March 12, 1939 – July 19, 2003), best known by her pseudonym St. Jude, was a self-taught programmer, civil rights advocate, writer, editor, advocate for women in computing, hacker and author in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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

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.

Milhon taught herself programming in 1967 and landed her first job at the Horn and Hardart 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), 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, 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, a Unix-based operating system developed by the Computer Systems Research Group at UC Berkeley. In the late 1990s, Milhon worked in Oakland as a web designer and consultant for internet start-ups.

She was a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and the author of several books. She was a senior editor at the magazine Mondo 2000 and frequent contributor to Boing Boing.