Why did you choose that handle?

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Yep, I remember hooking up DECsystem10's together with orange juice cans and string back in the 70's to the arpanet. I think we had 300baud working pretty well with something resembling flow control but not a lot of luck at 1200.

However the vast majority of people are unaware of arpanet and milnet and just think of the internet as that thing that showed up in the early 90's.

Dory, you've had an even and fair hand so far, whatever you decide will be the right thing. Do you still sway on dry land? Thats the part that I found funny about being on a boat for a long time...getting off and walking funny for an hour or two before I got it right.

We could always have an "early retirement" get-together in Broomfield and glare at everyone until someone looks guilty and uncomfortable.

 

[Chuck-Lyn2]

Hey Hyper, I thought Gore invented the web.

Cheers,

Charlie

 

[Marshac]

Yep, I remember hooking up DECsystem10's together with orange juice cans and string back in the 70's to the arpanet.  I think we had 300baud working pretty well with something resembling flow control but not a lot of luck at 1200.

*sniff* I wish I could have been there for that. Too young. Since computers have invaded every aspect of our lives, all of the 'magic' is gone it seems. I miss the 80s and early 90s.... THOSE were the great days of computing IMO

 

[Hyperborea]

Hey Hyper, I thought Gore invented the web.

IIRC Gore wrote one of the bills that funded the early ARPANet.

TH

However the vast majority of people are unaware of arpanet and milnet and just think of the internet as that thing that showed up in the early 90's.

Yup and ever since it's been "September all the time".

I remember the early days to some degree though I'm not quite as old as you though I was precocious. I got a UUCP connection set up long ago when the rules were basically an honour system. If somebody gave you a feed then you were obligated to pass it on down to a few more sites.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

*sniff* I wish I could have been there for that. Too young. Since computers have invaded every aspect of our lives, all of the 'magic' is gone it seems. I miss the 80s and early 90s.... THOSE were the great days of computing IMO  

I can tell you that the crappy computer conventions back then were a major hoot. You walked from booth to booth to see visionaries creating really impressive stuff that laid the groundwork for what we take for granted today.

I remember the guy (Russ something or other) who was the first guy who crafted up a graphics card for an S-100 bus machine...the merlin. He used to let me borrow his suzuki ricegrinder every now and then in exchange for some time with the different boxes we had in the computer store so he could work out compatibility problems. I wrote a crappy 20 line 8080 assembler program that turned the bits on and off. Called it "ants in sugar". I was majorly surprised when a half dozen people paid me $30 a pop for a snippet of code that turned some bits on and off through an i/o port.

I remember the guy who went on to invent Suns microprocessor architecture. Wish I could remember his name...but he looked exactly like Jim Cramer.

I remember hanging out with Neil Colvin, who wrote software for Xitan and Technical Design Labs and went on to write the first BIOS and start Phoenix Technologies...and then going in 10 years later to sell him his companies first local area network.

Knowing what piece of code was on a tarbell cassette by the specific screeching it made. The first 90kb floppy disks. The first 5mb hard drives. The first time we played with dynamic ram (in the early apple machines) and how we distrusted its nature and how often the chips burned up.

(enough boring the non nerds). We've come a long way in a short time...

 

[dory36]

OK, for those who have a problem logging in...

OK, almost for sure it is something called "cookies" that are causing the problem.

A quick bit of useless tech info: under normal circumstances, a web site does not store information about you on the site itself. (By "you" I mean such things as your login name.) So how does the posting page of a site know that you have already logged in on a previous page?

A web site does this by storing notes to itself, called cookies, on your computer. So when you go to a page on the forum, the first thing that happens, invisible to you, is that the page sends a message to your computer saying, in effect, "do you have any notes for me that I may have left the last time I was here?"

Those really concerned with privacy sometimes recommend disabling cookies, so that when you go to a web site, it cannot retrieve anything about your last visit there. Personally, I believe this is hooey, because if the web site programmer wanted your info, he'd capture it and store it in a database on HIS computer, not in a cookie on yours - and you'd never know. But because of the privacy uproar, Internet browsers let you turn off cookies.

The result is logins don't work, you can't see what messages have been read and which are new, and so forth.

So... enable cookies and I expect you'll be fine. To do so, see http://scholar.google.com/cookies.html.

Dory36

 

[dory36]

Yep, I remember hooking up DECsystem10's together with orange juice cans and string back in the 70's to the arpanet.  I think we had 300baud working pretty well with something resembling flow control but not a lot of luck at 1200.

As long as everyone is on memory lane, the clash between the DEC10/20 world and the world of the PC probably had more to do with where I wound up in life than anything. A dean at the university where I was a grad student was going to try and write a book using a 300 baud line and the DEC computer, while on sabattical in England. I told him to buy a microcomputer instead (don't think the term PC was in use until a few years later). So I wound up writing a file transfer program between a DEC10/20 and the CP/M operating system of his microcomputer, and porting a version of EMACS to the micro.  

Did I get any kudos for that? Of course not.  But the night before he was to fly to England, and he is furiously downloading all his material onto 80kb hard-sectored floppies, he needed to format some new floppies. The typical "This will erase everything, are you sure?" message popped up, and the floppies were never formatted when he typed "y". I suggested capital "Y", which worked. For this, he decided I was a computer genius. We went our separate ways.

By chance, he became my boss years later, and years after that he was on the board of directors of a company I went to work for.

All in all, 80% or more of the jobs I had were directly or indirectly related to that capital "Y". And I just guessed that that, knowing that lower case was pretty new to microcomputers at that point, and suspecting that the operating system wasn't yet checking for lower case.

I probably retired the last DEC 10 running; I got hired to run a medical school computer center in about 1987, and they still had a couple of DEC 10s as their primary computers.  We immediately retired those and paid for their replacements with the maintenance savings in the first 3-4 months.

Dory36

 

[hocus]

Great story, Dory36.

It brings to mind the Woody Allen line about how "90 percent of success in life comes from just showing up." It sounds like such a small thing, but if you want to make things happen in this world, showing up really does make a big difference. It's critical.

 

[Hyperborea]

Those really concerned with privacy sometimes recommend disabling cookies, so that when you go to a web site, it cannot retrieve anything about your last visit there. Personally, I believe this is hooey, because if the web site programmer wanted your info, he'd capture it and store it in a database on HIS computer, not in a cookie on yours - and you'd never know.  But because of the privacy uproar, Internet browsers let you turn off cookies.

There is a potential security issue to this though and it's not usually the site that you surf to that's the problem. It's the advertising on the site that might be the problem. They too can store cookies on your machine and of course read those cookies back. When you visit many different sites that the same advertiser has ads on they can track that you've visited those other pages and build up a profile of what kind of pages you visit. Security issue or not? Depends.

What I would recommend is the half-way point. Turn cookies on to be "accepted only from the site that you browse to". Don't turn on "accept all cookies". The exact wording of these options will vary depending on your browser.

 

[RatherBeFishn]

Well, I'd rather be fishn than working. I also use this name because most people assume I'm a guy when I do.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Hey Dory, I worked at Digital for my first real job out of high school...five years worth. Too bad they never released the Jupiter...the large scale dec10/20 architecture machine meant to compete with IBM's mainframes...decided the VAX was the way to go and didnt want to muddy the waters. The same decision also killed my pet project at the time, the kdj-11a...a PDP-11/70 on a single chip that was intended to be released as a "desktop mainframe".

Good thing Ken Olson was right and "there is no reason why anyone would ever want to have a computer in their own home". Another one of those "wish I hadnt said that" sayings.

Ironically, I was uncertain about putting all my money into Digital Credit Union, concerned about the long term prospects. Sad that the captive credit union outlived the company that spawned it. But it turned out to be a good bank and my money is still there.

Digital did come back to me years later though, after a fashion. Compaq bought Digitals microprocessor business and then sold it to Intel. The Digital people were freaking out because Intel was the "evil empire" and they had been indoctrinated into believing that Andy Grove had horns and a tail. Which he did

So since I had spent considerable time at Digital in MPU and OS development in the "golden years", I got the job of going back for a while and calming their fears that we were going to kill them all and eat their children. Sigh. It actually worked out well. In fact, the ideas for the multi-processor cores that Intel is rolling out right now came from some of the Digital architects.

Dory...I used to write BIOS/BDOS customizations for CP/M back when I was a teenager in the 70's...the upper case 'Y' was to force the user to hold down the shift key and press "Y" to avoid accidental formatting. Apparently pressing two keys causes one to be less dumb...

 

[dory36]

this thread captured by geeks

Interesting coincidence. I was TH's customer!

We were holding promised delivery dates for Jupiters when they pulled the plug. My boss and I had flown to Boston and then on to DEC on "DEC Airlines" to get the sneak peek. I think that was around 1985-86, iirc. At that time, I was over computer operations at Carnegie-Mellon Univ.

I used to write BIOS/BDOS customizations for CP/M back when I was a teenager in the 70's...

For those not familiar with this, when you got CP/M (the operating system before Microsoft showed up), you received something that was, well, not as complete as what you get today. I bought a copy to install on an early Radio Shack computer - their "Model 2", with 8" floppies (500k of storage!). What I got was a core operating system with no drivers for the keyboard, disk drive, screen, or anything else. Those you had to write yourself. So we did. Sort of like ordering a car, and getting a frame and an engine in a box, and a note telling you to figure out how to build the transmission and the steering mechanism from any spare parts you had laying around.

OK, sorry for the geek attack. You can have the thread back now.

 

[Cut-Throat]

For those not familiar with this, when you got CP/M (the operating system before Microsoft showed up), you received something that was, well, not as complete as what you get today.

I am not familar with the 'birth' of PC's, as I came from the Classic IBM Mainframe environment of the 60's and 70's. DOS/VS, VSe, VM, OS, VS1, VM. Yes I was a Cobolasaurus. - Did not get envolved with PC's until 1995.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I am not familar with the 'birth' of PC's, as I came from the Classic IBM Mainframe environment of the 60's and 70's. DOS/VS, VSe, VM, OS, VS1, VM. Yes I was a Cobolasaurus. - Did not get envolved with PC's until 1995.

THAT explains it...

Dory...you missed me by thatmuch...I left DEC in early 1985. When they bagged my project I decided that VAXen werent the future and there was something to this PC/networking stuff and went off to do several startups over the next few years. Apparently a good choice.

Although I think one of them (Interlan) had CM as a customer...in fact I was flying around doing board installs in PDP and VAX machines from 85-87 with them. You had to remove wire wraps from the backplanes to install our DMA network cards and I was the only guy they trusted to do it. I dont remember if I went to CM during that time, but if you remember any of that old ethernet gear, I was probably the guy who put it in.

And you silly people thought you were going to get this thread un-hijacked...

 

[JonnyM]

Talk about a Geek-fest. My current career started soon 'after' the IBM PC began to catch on. Our agency had 3. Dual floppies, no hard drives yet. 512k. Lotus 123 was the killer app. I got interested as a lowly Account Clerk. Some years later I became the first dedicated PC support type job classification. Now I'm the Senior Systems Engineer, with a staff of 14, and we have well over 1,000 PC's to support, plus Servers, Routers, Switches, Printers, Laptops, Palms, CrackBerries, Cameras, you name it, if it's EDP related, we have a hand in it. And for me it was because I was interested, went back to school, learned all I could about the subject material, and wormed my way into the good graces of management. Still here with a year to go.

But the Thread needs to get back on track. Back in the year 2000 it was possible to publish Independent (Indie) music to various websites and get paid for it based on the number of "plays". They called this P4P or Pay for Play. I needed a band name for my Solo recording projects. I took the name on my Birth Cetificate (that I've never used for anything except my Driver's License) stretched it a bit, and added my last name initial. Hence JonnyM

Unfortunately the Tech Boom crash killed all such sites and the gravey train of P4P with it. It was fun while it lasted.

 

[laurence]

LOL! My first full time job was working on a Windows 95 machine, yes, I'm a punk kid compared to y'all.

Handle is just my name shortened and squished.....boring I know....

 

[lswswein]

Digital did come back to me years later though, after a fashion.  Compaq bought Digitals microprocessor business and then sold it to Intel.  The Digital people were freaking out because Intel was the "evil empire"

I got the job of going back for a while and calming their fears that we were going to kill them all and eat their children.  Sigh.  It actually worked out well.  

Wow TH
I still work for that group - Were you by any chance in Shrewsbury, MA in the summer of 2001? I would atleast have seen you then.
I don't post much here but used to at nofeeboards and raddr-pages under bigboy8888. Interesting that I used to read your posts and think hey fellow engineer from the same company, now it turns out I might have in fact seen you!!!

-h

 

[charlie]

HI dory36,

Enableling cookies was not enough. I had to disable
my McAfee Privacy Service altogeher.

Thankks for your help.

Cheers,

Charlie

 

[charlie]

P.S.

For my cyber friends, I am also known as Chuck-Lyn.

Cheers,

Charlie

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Wow TH
I still work for that group - Were you by any chance in Shrewsbury, MA in the summer of 2001? I would atleast have seen you then.
I don't post much here but used to at nofeeboards and raddr-pages under bigboy8888. Interesting that I used to read your posts and think hey fellow engineer from the same company, now it turns out I might have in fact seen you!!!

Entirely possible! By summer of '01 I was just ER'ing. I'd have to dig out a calendar to remember for sure but I believe it was in the winter between '97 and '98 when I was there (just as we were finalizing the acquisition), and I was mostly at the Hudson facility. I met for a couple of weeks with the fab groups (who took a beating from the intel mfg guys and their 'my way or the highway' methodology), the microprocessor architecture groups (smart guys who were already mad that they werent taken seriously enough), and the IT groups.

Its a small world...

 

[fire5soon]

fire5soon... I want to FI/RE, 5 is my lucky number, and I hope I fire 'soon.'

 

[dory36]

HI dory36,

Enableling cookies was not enough.  I had to disable
my McAfee Privacy Service altogeher.

Thankks for your help.

Cheers,

Charlie  

I bumped your message count arbitrarily to 500, since seeing single digit counts would be really strange for one of our regulars, and your guest posts weren't counted. So I just guessed at your message count.

This puts you in the bottom few of the top 15 posters -- sorry if I bumped someone else unfairly.

TH remains #1 at 2729 , followed not too closely by Cut-Throat (the real one) at 1848. johngalt had 437 (ranking at #15) before he stopped logging in and started posting as a guest.

 

[charlie]

Thanks, dory36.

Charlie

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

TH remains #1 at 2729

Crap, now I have to go out and get one of those big foam hands with the raised index finger. Oh well, I need a new spare tire on my truck anyhow...

 

[AltaRed]

Nothing particularly creative about my handle. AltaRed is simply a short form of Alberta Redneck...

Which for those geographically challenged, Alberta is a province of Canada north of Montana with right wing tendencies like Montana, Wyoming and Texas.

The redneck part is meant mainly to yank other peoples' chains which I tend to like doing from time to time. Truth of the matter is that I am slightly right of center in political and social views, but consider Texas sentiment too far to the right for me.