thumb|Jude's mugshot from her civil rights days.
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. 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. 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 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.
Bibliography
- The Joy of Hacker Sex (proposed)
- How to Mutate & Take Over the World: an Exploded Post-Novel (1997) (with R. U. Sirius) Random House
- Cyberpunk Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook (1995) (with R. U. Sirius and Bart Nagel) Random House.
- Hacking the Wetware: The NerdGirl’s Pillow Book (1994) (internet release of ebook)
Activism and Vision
St. Jude had her hand in many different causes. She was active in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement helping to organize the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Milhon once noted that there was a conspicuous lack of female hardware hackers, and while working at Community Memory she worked against this exclusion and worked to get new, inexperienced users to experiment with Community Memory. She did so by writing open-ended questions in the system about available resources in the region (such as “Where can I get a decent bagel in the Bay Area (Berkeley particularly)?”