[nflug] New Toy...

[Ken Smith]

On Fri, 2007-04-13 at 12:36 -0400, Mark Musone wrote:
> Funny thing is that when I was typing "old timers" I was thinking of you and
> was hoping you wouldn't get offended! :)

Nah, I'm a dinosaur and proud of it!  :-)

FWIW...  I managed to escape High School just barely before you were
able to do that without having touched a computer (the scary Physics
Prof. had one he and a few of the scarier students did things with but
you were best off not talking to anyone in that crowd...).  My first
encounter with a computer was programming Fortran-77 using punch cards
on UB's CDC Cyber computer (you can see one such beast in the background
of the scenes in War Games when Broderick goes to talk to his Uber-Geek
friends about how to break into the system he found).  And I still have
a good supply of punch cards I use as bookmarks...

The first thing PC-ish I touched was a Timex Sinclair (complete with the
"chicklet" keyboard and audio cassette tape reader).  I can still tell
you what BASIC stands for... :-)

When I teach the Sys-Admin class in the fall I warn them during the
first lecture that I will be telling them stories about "The Good Old
Days".  It's not because I particularly want to go back to the days of
one MIP machines that took up several racks of space (more if you
counted the washing machine sized 400Mb disk drives...).  All the talk
about the old stuff is to give them a feel for how much things have
changed in roughly half a career so they know what to expect if they
stick to this stuff as their career...

The only thing I miss about The Good Old Days is uucp based email.
Somehow I can't get over the feeling that SPAM wouldn't be quite such a
problem if SPAM-ers needed to map out hops through the UUCP sites for
the addresses, and messages travelled through the net one hop at a time
(sometimes with individual hops only happening during a modem-placed
phone call during the wee hours of the night to get the best
long-distance rates so sometimes it was days between being sent and when
the message arrived...).

-- 
                                                Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |

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