Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

When we show up, we win.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Let’s Break It Down

Let’s Break It Down

by | 183 Comments

This post is in: ,

Truth:

Going off the grid is always going to fail for me, and there is a reason I have never spent a couple days off the grid. Mind you, I am clear on the concept, I just suck at the execution. Because I grew up in a college town, I’ve been around computers since 1979, when we had teletypes and a Pr!me mainframe with dummy terminals (hello SSTREK and NEWADVENTURE- tell me if you understand what plugh and xyzzy mean) and then robots we worked on as kids, and then we got a couple Apple computers and and spent all our days dealing with Captain Hack and the BBS boards we could access for Warez (Lode runner and Wolfenstein for the win), and I got college credit in COBOL and Fortran 77 at age 12 and of course basic and Pascal (which may make you wonder as I often do- why can’t this dickhead learn how to build his own website?). And then there were RISK on the original mac and the helicopter game I loved but whose name I can not remember, and later on God Wars muds and the circle muds and Myst and finally, at some point in the 90’s, netscape rescued us from fucking Gopher, and well, you probably remember the rest- blogger, tumblr, etc.

Point being, I can not detach. I’m a child of the internet age, and trying to not check my email or voice mail or my blog for four days is unpossible. So you pricks are stuck with me.

Sorry.

Suck it. I am going nowhere. I give up on this “off the grid” facade.

Reader Interactions

183Comments

  11. 11.

    PsiFighter37

    @Corner Stone: Well, let’s try to be a little topical. Otherwise we’d be making bad nerd jokes about multi foot-long floppies.

    And besides, isn’t it worth it to irk our gracious blog host with smaller numbers?

  13. 13.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    A couple of years ago I dragged my Cromemco out of the basement and sold it to a museum.
    So get off my lawn.
    (shakes cane)

  15. 15.

    mai naem

    It’s funny the way you say it John. Like you don’t realize this is your blog and,like, we need to give you permission to not go off the grid.

  18. 18.

    Howard Beale IV

    Cole, yer just a babe compared to me. Sure, you may have leaned how to program COBOL at age 12, but I learned COBOL before you were even born (much less before I learned how to drive) at 14. At Age 16 I severed my finger running a high-speed check sorter at my first job-thankfully, they were able to re-attach it.

    Time to face reality: If you want to really go off the grid, go to Cancun for 5 days and leave yer toys behind. Otherwise, quit yer bitchin’ and furminate Tunch.

  22. 22.

    lamh36

    I zoned out after 1979…how the hell old are u anyway :-D.

    BTW, am I the only one who whenever I read/hear someone say “I just can’t seem to quit you…” I think Bareback Mountain, darn near every time.

  23. 23.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    John, you’re Eastern Standard Tribe so you’re OK with me.

    I’ve gone offline for a month or two at a time. Mostly when my head was in such a bad place I couldn’t stand the negativity everywhere. And couldn’t trust myself to behave ‘around’ the people I like. Therapeutic isolation; sometimes it’s necessary.

  27. 27.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    @Ahasuerus:

    My Cromemco was S100/Z80/CPM. Not all that old. I wish I hadn’t given away my KIM-1 from the mid ’70s. Those are rare and desirable today.

  30. 30.

    TrishB

    How sad is it that this post is the one thing that has made me literally laugh out loud for the first time in many months. I scared the dogs, too. It was perfect. Oh, and anyone here like Zork?

  31. 31.

    The Dangerman

    @Yatsuno:

    Except he posted last night.

    And he posted about Lacrosse and hockey tonight; shit, if you had Saturday at 9pm, um, my bad (kinda like the Dodgers bullpen).

    ETA: And as a residual of my NW “adventure”, I also root for the Mariners. Clearly, I’m a lost case.

  32. 32.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @PsiFighter37: I’m old enough to remember 8″ floppies. I don’t think it was ever actually used on PCs.

  33. 33.

    nancydarling

    @Redshirt: I think Cole is one of the most self-aware people around. He does plenty of navel gazing and shares it with us.

    I just can’t understand why every eligible woman in WVA isn’t beating a path to his door. I’m too old for him or I might consider pulling up stakes and heading for West Virginny.

  34. 34.

    dmsilev

    helicopter game I loved but whose name I can not remember

    Choplifter?

    I remember playing that on my Dad’s Apple II. I think I killed more hostages than I saved. Usually by accidentally landing on them and squashing them. Oops.

  36. 36.

    Yatsuno

    @The Dangerman: Rooting for the Mariners means assuming the season will suck from the outset until they prove otherwise. My expectations are simple. They just have to beat the motherfucking Yankees. Otherwise I just go with they bite as the default position.

  39. 39.

    davebo

    @PsiFighter37:

    That’s because you’re a kid.

    My Galaxy S3 has more computing power than the room full of Honeywell’s and PDP’s that ran the full motion flight simulators had in the early 80’s.

    Hell the solid state drive on the laptop I’m posting this from has a paltry 256GB of storage yet the first “PC” I worked with had an incredible 20 megabytes of storage on a hard drive that only cost $6,000.0 (not including the controller card).

  40. 40.

    PsiFighter37

    @Yatsuno: I’m a Yankees fan, so you’re going to have to get used to tolerating their existence if you want to have a drank with me.

    Just kidding

    Kind of

  42. 42.

    PsiFighter37

    @davebo: Dude, I am closer to 30 then 20, and I used computers when I was a kid. I may not be as ancient as you, but I remember when 16mb of RAM was the greatest invention since bread.

  43. 43.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Origuy: Or a twisty maze of little passages, all alike, or a little twisty maze of passages, all alike.

  44. 44.

    Ahasuerus

    @Ultraviolet Thunder: If you want an SD Systems S-100 system with a Z80B, 128KB of RAM, dual 8-inch floppy drives, and a SASI 5 inch Winchester drive to replace your beloved Cromemco, give me a jingle. I’m sure we can work out an equitable arrangement. And I think I even have a box of virgin 8-inch floppy disks to sweeten the offer…

  45. 45.

    The Dangerman

    @Yatsuno:

    They just have to beat the motherfucking Yankees.

    Sigh. 2001, a helluva year, but they couldn’t get past the fucking Yankees.

    I wonder what Figgins is doing these days (I assume it ain’t baseball).

    ETA: He was a good, not great, player for the Angels; went to Seattle and sucked from the start. Another head case (see Bradley, Milton).

  46. 46.

    Corner Stone

    @davebo:

    yet the first “PC” I worked with had an incredible 20 megabytes of storage on a hard drive that only cost $6,000.0 (not including the controller card).

    Goodness. Is your dad Bill Gates?
    I remember the things I had to do to get the cash for a memory upgrade.
    *shudders*

  49. 49.

    davebo

    My trusty AB Dick Magna SL (yes that really was it’s name) used 2 8″ floppy drives.

    I’ve seen glaciers move faster. I seem to recall a Xerox 860 as well.

  51. 51.

    Irish Steel

    My inlaws, who include some younger fellas 18 and 23, have shitty, slow, rural internet that they get charged extra for once they go over a certain amount of data.

    I give up on this “off the grid” facade.

    And I was just telling my wife how little I would like that.

  52. 52.

    tybee

    you could get an 8″ floppy drive for your ibm-pc back in 1982.

    i still have an 8″ floppy disk around here somewhere.

  53. 53.

    Tara the Antisocial Social Worker

    Cole, the price of admission is pet pictures. Surely Lily must have done something adorable by now.

  54. 54.

    davebo

    @PsiFighter37:

    It was Bill Gates himself that said no computer would ever need more than 64 kilobytes of memory.

    Then he got to work making sure that would never be true.

  58. 58.

    davebo

    @tybee:
    Get rid of the crap!

    I’m just as bad. Huge boxes of cables even I don’t know what they are for but I can’t seem to let them go.

    I mean seriously, Firewire cables???

  60. 60.

    Yatsuno

    @PsiFighter37: We’ll just declare detene on that point. So no baseball discussions. I do have a friend who grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, so I can hold my tongue on that point. A bit. :P

  61. 61.

    gnomedad

    Lost a cat today; hit by a car. This made me smile a bit. Cole is so reliable.

  64. 64.

    Keith

    It’s interesting to read another generation’s computer history. I started with a VIC-20 and moved to a C-64, then got an 8088 and a 286 before going back to the C-64 when I was in my mid-teens. By then, the C-64 was essentially dead (this is the mid-90s), but there was a thriving BBS warez scene, with several of my friends running multiple phone lines to their house and PBX phreaking/blue-boxing (with a modem, not an actual bluebox) to Germany to pick up cracked warez. The Germans were damn good crackers due to their low-level ML knowledge that they got converting NTSC to PAL. And then there was the demo scene (which was my major programming interest at the time), which was basically just seeing how much graphics/sound you could still squeeze out of the 6501 CPU on the Commie.
    That was the golden age for me, especially since I was able to start playing so many games that were out of my reach during my first period of C-64 game playing. To this day, I still get a kick out of retrogaming on the C64. Got a nice library of emulated games that I will still play for a bit (I’d LOVE to remake Project: Space Station on the PC, but just don’t have the time.)

  66. 66.

    Bruuuuce

    @Cole: Face it, John. You’re stuck in a maze of twisty little blog entries, all different.

  69. 69.

    Corner Stone

    @Bruuuuce: Does he have a match? Can he light the pile of hay on fire to find the key buried within?
    Dammit. I’m going to get some BBQ.

  71. 71.

    NickT

    I gotta admit, the vision of Cole coding up his own website in COBOL or Fortran gave me a chuckle. And yes, damnit, I remember that version of Risk on the Apple computer. Mind you, I also remember Elite and Doomdark’s Revenge on the ZX Spectrum, so there!

  73. 73.

    MikeInSewickley

    Ah… What memories…

    Working on a Radio Shack Trash-80 for a doctor who wanted his receptionist to know what account balance a patient had when they called in so he could prefer the paid up clients – used a cassette tape player for mass storage.

    COBOL on a Univac 9400 with 128K of memory for a whole steel company of 2300 people
    IBM 1401 where we had to occasional tap the tubes down with a broom handle as they would occasionally expand out of their socket. Same machine had drum storage (not disc) – 2 huge cylinders spinning at 1500 RPM – size of 3 refrigerators – and held 50 meg of storage.

    And all this when I was 18 y.o.

    40 years later – all magic and still my students complain it’s too much work to program in Python or create a web page.

    Just shoot me.

  74. 74.

    Steeplejack

    @davebo:

    I believe he said 640 KB (the limit either in vanilla MS-DOS or the hybrid 8/16-bit chip architecture at the time), but otherwise I agree with you about his subsequent strategy. Also, there’s some disagreement whether Gates really said that. But whatever.

  76. 76.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Corner Stone: True: but if you bring anything more powerful than a dumbphone on vacation, yer doing the whole ‘off the grid’ thing wrong.

  77. 77.

    Scott Alloway

    My first experience was DigiComp. Look it up. Fortran cards in 1968 and then Mac in 1986, That MacPlus still works, but we’ve been a computer household since then. Hell, She-who-must-be-obeyed took my computer away when her typewriter died in 1988 and said, “How can I write my reports?”, while sitting next to my Mac. Moments later, my world changed as she sat before the MacPlus. Took it as hers and I had to upgrade. She is and always has been the dearest person in my world (although a PITA with regards to the computers). But don’t get between her and the monitor.

  78. 78.

    davebo

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Hell I’ve got underwear that’s older. But you know, the really nice silk boxer types….

    Hope all have a great weekend. I’m doing three dancing chickens (or beer can chickens) 4 racks of baby backs, three huge sirloin steaks, 5 jalapeno sausages and all the fixens for the family tomorrow for a pool party.

    Have a great Memorial Day and remember what the holiday is all about!!

  81. 81.

    Keith

    @MikeInSewickley: For as popular as the TRS-80 was, I have never actually seen one in person. And this is coming from someone who has a boxed Timex Sinclair 2068 sitting about 4 feet from him.

  82. 82.

    Steeplejack

    @Steeplejack:

    Also, I played blackjack with Bill Gates and Adam Osborne at COMDEX in ’81 or ’82. Put that in your “six degrees of separation” file.

  83. 83.

    MikeInSewickley

    @NickT: Yeah, I’m looking forward to explaining CSS and Javascript to a new set of students who haven’t seen a command line since forever.

  84. 84.

    Steeplejack

    @Steeplejack:

    [Safe version of moderated comment]

    Also, I played blackjack with Bill Gates and Adam Osborne at COMDEX in ’81 or ’82. Put that in your “six degrees of separation” file.

  85. 85.

    davebo

    @NickT:

    When it comes to Cobal, Fortran, etc. I’m reminded of an old oilfield saying slightly modified.

    “God, give me another Y2K panic and I promise I won’t piss this one away”

  86. 86.

    scav

    @NickT: that’s one of the benefits of remembering back to Wordstar pre wysiwyg. HTML rolls by and large chunks are, well, du-uh.

  88. 88.

    Howard Beale IV

    @MikeInSewickley: I fondly remember some idiot in the computer trade press that boldly predicted the last mainframe would be unplugged in the mid-1990s. I’d love to see that twit wrap his head around the latest iteration of IBM’s z/Architecture Principles of Operation manual-damn thing has grown in size by two orders of magnitude since then, and the latest zEC12 has shrunk to the size to two side-by-side refrigerators. Death of the mainframe? a zEC12 can run thousands of Linux instances under z/VM, each one isolated from the others. Who needs thousands of servers when I can replace them all with a few zEC12’s?

    And yes, I do most of my work in assembler. Wrap yer heads around that, you Python pikers. At least the latest gcc compilers are smart enough to understand the pipelining that occurs on various hardware platforms, which is a 180 degree shift from things like Java/CLR/Python-hell, even IBM woke up and implemented mainframe microcode/millicode that makes Java scream like a banshee.

  89. 89.

    MikeInSewickley

    @Keith: It was the only time I worked on the machine. It was the doctor’s own machine. He bought it and had no idea how to use it.

    But what idea popped up? Early managed care… and dollars came first. Some damn things never change.

  90. 90.

    MikeInSewickley

    @Howard Beale IV: The trade mag talking heads… “Paperless Office” “Death of the Mainframe” “Automated Programming”

    Yeah… I remember walking through an IBM 370 mainframe – I mean actually walking through and between cabinets where one side of the aisle was the CPU, another aisle was the communications cabinet, another and another. 5 years later, I’m putting in racks of HP servers running Unix and seeing all this empty floor space at a huge data center by the Pittsburgh Airport start to fill up with racks and racks of servers.

    And the facilities management company we used actually thought they would be reducing floor space with the loss of the mainframes. They had to start adding space by 1998. So these futurists predictions I take with a bucket of rock salt.

  92. 92.

    Howard Beale IV

    @davebo: Get it right: it’s called COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language).

    I actually met the mother of COBOL, RADM Grace Hopper at an ACM Conference in 1979 when I was in University.

  97. 97.

    Howard Beale IV

    @MikeInSewickley: No kidding. We probably have more floor space dedicated to thousands of 1U/2U racks of servers than the zEC12 uses. At least with Infiniband, HyperSockets and the zBX cabinetry we can cut floor-space and power consumption by quite a bit. DASD, of course, is whole separate issue-especially if you’re running split worklaods between complexes or a warm-standby in the case if you need to invoke a BCP/DR plan.

  101. 101.

    Howard Beale IV

    @NickT: Sadly, no-I wasn’t at any session where she was a presenter. I met her in between sessions.

  103. 103.

    Keith

    I’m still trying to get my hands on a Coleco Adam, but damn if they aren’t EXPENSIVE on eBay! When I was a kid, there were all these TV shows about people doing magical things with computers (like Automan, where a guy made a holographic superhero…like Tron crossed with Weird Science, and Whiz Kids….and of course the movies that got me into programming, like Tron and the aforementioned WS). At the time, the C-64 was just a game machine for me (and I also had a Magnavox Odyssey2), but I saw the commercial for the Adam.
    It was pitched like an actual PC instead of game machine, so I envisioned myself getting one and making all the same magical things. Watching someone else talk to the screen as their fingers screamed away on a mechanical keyboard was like a drug for my brain. The nostalgia kick I get when trying to attain these old PCs I could never get as a kid is like trying to chase that high. I’m a way better programmer than I figured I could ever be, but even the super-ambitious stuff I work on now is much less magical than what I envisioned back then, so the high I get from this stuff just doesn’t compare.

  105. 105.

    RSA

    The first computer programming course I took in college, in 1981, used Fortran. Punch cards were fortunately gone by then–I typed programs on 300 baud terminal. I took a Pascal course next, and became an undergrad teaching assistant for that course the next semester. Then I learned C and Franz Lisp…

    I was never a real gamer, though. The closest I came was a mild addiction to rogue, an ASCII-graphics dungeon exploration game (on Unix, using the curses library). The game runs on my Mac today, looking pretty much the same, which is pretty cool.

  106. 106.

    Howard Beale IV

    @RSA: GAAAH! (bangs head against desk)…

    LISP wasn’t named after the composer-it was an acronym of LISt Processing language. Nowadays it’s a historical icon, but many vendors used its power to implement optimized disk processing algorithms-most notably, DP2 in the Tandem Guardian B-series of releases in the mid 1980s.

  107. 107.

    gogol's wife

    This thread is hilarious.

    I certainly can’t keep up with any of this, but I remember an IBM 360 that filled a whole room and had these big tape reels on it that you had to thread.

  108. 108.

    Thor Heyerdahl

    I had an Apple //c when I was a kid. 128 KB.

    Had a Commodore 64 & 128 in my school from grade 4-6. “Load Program_Name ,8 ,1”

    And I remember getting a tour of a VAX server room as a teenager.

  109. 109.

    Howard Beale IV

    @gogol’s wife: That IBM 360 of the the past now exists in your microwave.

    Now war your head around this: The Apollo 11 mission was controlled by 3 IBM mainframes: 2 IBM 360/91’s custom built for NASA, and and 360/67 as a hot backup.

    In 1969.

    Now that same power is in every fscking smartphone on the planet using a Snapdragon SOC.

  111. 111.

    NickT

    @Comrade Mary:

    Threats, madam? I merely speculated that Omnes Varys would be a fine name. What could be more congenial than a pruning of the hairy, overflowing prolixity of Omnibus down to a mild, tranquil Varys?

  112. 112.

    feral1

    The helicopter game you’re think of is Armor Alley and it is awesome. You can find it still online and download it. Maybe still the best execution of strategy and action I’ve ever found in a computer game.

  113. 113.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Keith: I attended CES back in 1984 when the Coleco ADAM was introduced. It had promise, but Coleco could’t deliver on the hardware side, and that year saw the defection of Jack Tramiel from Commodore and take control of Atari, which got spun off from Time-Warner as a money-sink, and a year later the AMiga got introduced, which really made a hash of things when IBM announced the IBM PC and IBM’s second mistake, the PCjr-their biggest mistake was teaming up with Microsoft for PC-DOS, which when combined with Gary Kildall’s blow-off of IBM, has led us to the place we are today.

  115. 115.

    RSA

    @Howard Beale IV:

    LISP wasn’t named after the composer-it was an acronym of LISt Processing language.

    Sure. It’s a pun. From Wikipedia: “Franz Lisp was probably the most widely distributed and used Lisp system of the 1970s and 1980s.”

    After the Lisp machine era, Franz and Harlequin were the two main players for commercial cross-platform Common Lisp implementations (Allegro Common Lisp and Lispworks, respectively). Things have evolved quite a bit since then, though.

    (I became more familiar with Lisp when I started working for Texas Instruments during the heyday of expert systems, using their TI Explorer Lisp Machines. It’s still my favorite language.)

  116. 116.

    Walker

    I remember the helicopter game. We used to have LAN battles in the computing lab at Dartmouth. I thought it was called Air Assault, but a look at Mac Gaarden reveals that was a different game.

  117. 117.

    Howard Beale IV

    @RSA: Ahh-OK-now that you’ve cited your cred, please accept my apology.

    (and for those of you who aren’t in the IT/Tech trade-“Move along, nothing to see here….”)

  120. 120.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Steeplejack:

    As soon as you can acquire a Saturn V and Apollo capsule, and the code for RTOS that ran on the 360/91s, we can make it happen. Problem is that I don’ t think there’s a port of Hercules for Android/iOS-but they’re is one for the late Nokia N900!

  121. 121.

    Keith

    @Howard Beale IV: I can only imagine what the world would be like if Commodore hadn’t imploded. The Amiga was the ultimate for me back then, but by the time it was in my grasp, the PC had already taken over. Once I got Populous on a 286, Amiga was just an afterthought for me (even though DOS absolutely SUCKED compared to AmigaOS.)

  123. 123.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Keith: Indeed: The Amiga was in many ways well ahead of its time by using REXX as its command language and the video chipsets it used-problem was it was too expensive at the time, and eventually lost when the PC and clones started to take off and became more afforable to the masses-but it found a resurrection when it morphed into the Emmy-Winning Video Toaster.

  124. 124.

    Simon Taverner

    The helicopter game *might* have been Armor Alley, as someone else has already mentioned, but then again, he might also have been referring to Apache Strike, which ran on the original Mac and was a wireframe 3D job with an amazing frame rate for the time.

  126. 126.

    Howard Beale IV

    @RSA: Hell, I used to write articles on the TI 99/4A for the Computer Shopper 20 years ago-long before the internet, The Computer Shopper was a 1,000+ page monthly periodical in the mail just chock-full of ads when the late Stan Veit was the editor.

  127. 127.

    Keith

    @Howard Beale IV: Ah, yes, the Video Toaster. My mother picked up an Amiga/Toaster combo for something-or-other when I was in high school. But it had no games on it, and she also brought a Silicon Graphics Iris home from work, so I was more interested in playing the SGI flight sim than playing with the Amiga. Ironic, since I coveted an Amiga so much just a few years earlier.

  130. 130.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Steeplejack: Sleeper did the cover of Blondie’s Atomic for Trainspotting. I remember thinking it odd when that movie came out that my musical taste was remarkably similar to that of Scottish heroin addicts. W’evs.

  133. 133.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Keith: Sometimes paying attention pays off-but given the state of networked communications at that point in time, I really can’t fault you if you weren’t able to make the connection.

  137. 137.

    Comrade Mary

    @Omnes Omnibus: We’re fine, sweetie. I was binging on Bowie a little earlier tonight and am only now calming the fuck down.

    Thanks for reminding me of this, which led me to this. Hot 90s girls!

    I miss Miki …

  139. 139.

    Steeplejack

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I went back to Lola Albright.

    ETA: Another Web site that I failed to bookmark and now can’t find had a marvelous collection of French music videos from the ’60s, when apparently there was a short-lived fad for video jukeboxes in Europe. Mlle. Hardy would have fit right in.

  140. 140.

    Ruckus

    @gogol’s wife:
    Quite a few years ago built a mold to make the front cover for those large tape drives so that they would auto thread. And no we didn’t use any computers to make it.

  142. 142.

    Keith

    @Howard Beale IV: Not sure what connection you are referring to, but I can definitively say that in the mid-90s when I had access to the SGI and Amiga/VT, the only networking I was doing was C-64 BBSs. Houston was one of the hubs of Commie warez BBSs at the time. I wish I could name drop them, but the only one I really remember was run by a guy named Grego…even went to the guy’s house a couple of times for BBQs whenever German warez’ers would come into town. He’d gotten busted (by the feds, IIRC) for handing out PBX codes and had just gotten all his C-64s back. Good times…

  144. 144.

    Howard Beale IV

    @gogol’s wife: Depending on the tape drive, some you had to manually thread, others would use various vacuum systems to thread the reels of tape. When IBM introduced the 3480, all of that went out the window, and every tape drive technology since then uses what what the 3480 laid down, with the exception of DAT/SuperDAT.

  147. 147.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Keith: I was referring to the rise of the Internet and the eventual downfall of BBS/CompuServe/Source/Prodigy as a means of communication.

    Even back in the 1980s, the FBI was well aware of what was happening in the darker side of BBS’s, and had paid informants who provided key information.

  150. 150.

    Origuy

    I was working at the U of I in 1975 as an undergrad. The lab had a PDP-11/10; I remember when we got 8K of core memory which maxed it out at 16K. The card was about 16 inches long and half an inch thick. I programmed it it assembler and FORTRAN to monitor the heart beat and respiration of rats and Psych 100 students. A few semesters later we got an LSI-11, with greater capacity and 8 inch floppies.
    Later, I worked on the FORTRAN compiler at Control Data. Left there to work on the FORTRAN compiler at Tandem, then the COBOL compiler. For a while I was on the ANSI COBOL committee.

  152. 152.

    Keith

    @Howard Beale IV: I think in the case of Grego, he was done in by a feud with another BBS admin named RedBlazer. They had a nasty squabble over something that resulted in the former running an app called PagerHell (autodialed pager prefixes with the target’s phone number) on the latter, causing his phone to ring off the hook for weeks. The suspicion after that was that RB went to the cops with info on the PBX hacking.

  156. 156.

    Steeplejack

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Yeah, it’s working for me again. I had a comment where after I mashed “Submit Comment” the site just churned and churned interminably. And I didn’t see anyone else commenting, so I was wondering.

    And then later FYWP posted my comment twice. Go figure. Maybe there was a hamster shift change below decks.

    Anyway, Sleeper girl and Pauline Croze and their short haircuts led me to Swing Out Sister. Too ashamed to post a link (and I couldn’t find the really good video of “Twilight World” anyway).

  160. 160.

    Steeplejack

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I like them too and make that same mental connection. “Native Land” led me to the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.” They must have been together on some mix tape I had.

    And, goddamn it, YouTube, why can I not find videos that were right there three months ago?! There was a really good “live” video of the acoustic version of this song.

  161. 161.

    Debbie(aussie)

    I feel like such a newb! Most of the peeps here, even more aged than I(51),are knowledgable with regard to computers etc. Me, nah! My. brother had a Commodore 64 early 80’s & we got our first computer in 1995 (whole package cost $3500). But I remain pretty ignorant. Oh well, we can’t all be whizz kidz.
    And sometimes it feels like you are all talking in some foreign language :)

  167. 167.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Steeplejack: They are a college radio staple here in Madison.

    ETA: They seem to catch the vibe of some of the softer Pretenders things from I and II – Stop your Sobbing, Kid, etc.

  169. 169.

    NCSteve

    Oh man, the time I wasted in high school sneaking into the local college’s computer lab to wander Colossal Cave on their amazing superdeluxe Pr!me computer. It was major league because it had almost a megabyte of something not unlike random access memory. And it ran the entire college.

    Then I got a driver’s license and discovered alcohol and girls.

    But I always wondered why they called them “computer labs.” Made me suspect the psych majors were running an experiment on those who used it.

  170. 170.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Steeplejack: One of the reasons I listen to the college radio station here is so that I don’t lock myself completely into a 1977-1999 musical prison.

  171. 171.

    Steeplejack

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Good idea. I don’t have a connection to any college radio station right now (bad radio reception at home and haven’t gotten into the habit of streaming one on the computer), so about all I do is listen to one or another of the “weird” Sirius channels a few days a week.

    I do still stream Clark Atlanta University’s WCLK, which is one of the best jazz stations in the country. Veers toward urban contemporary and smooth jazz during the day, but from sundown to sunrise it’s the best.

  172. 172.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Keith: Sounds reasonable to me. The Bureau has long been aware of computer/telephone crime even as far back as the 1970s; the ironic things is that with the way the internet was designed, combined with the lack of sophistication of perps being able to covert their own tracks, these kinds of stunts are going to be quickly identified and prosecuted, .

  175. 175.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Comrade Mary: Ah, yes: Bowie and the late Klaus Nomi, enshrined in the Venture Brothers episode “Showdown at Cremation Creek (Part I)”

  176. 176.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Debbie(aussie): Some of us have spent our ‘careers’ dealing with computers, Information Technnology, and those who control it to the point that we have to wonder:

    “Do you control the technology, or does the technology control you?”

  178. 178.

    Hunter

    Yeah. I’ve just had the worst week ever with the computer (in the shop three times in five days, then instant malware), and I’m fed up. And here I am, back online. I do have an excuse — all of my writing and editing is for the Internet at this point — I don’t know if I’d know what to do with an actual manuscript or proofs — but still. . . .

    And I’m learning more about software than I ever wanted to know.

  179. 179.

    Maude

    @Steeplejack:
    If the comment doesn’t go through right away, go off the site and come back. It will post once.
    Your friendly dial up helper. My time is slower and so I know these things.
    And, I was online with ???? in ????. So there.

  180. 180.

    phoebesmother

    @nancydarling: Me too. Gee Cole, 2 near proposals in one thread! And I’m a WV native now residing in a neighboring state.

    But I’m so old I remember programming 4K applications in machine language and entering it by flipping switches!

  181. 181.

    Tony the Wonderhorse

    We love you John, do whatever the fuck you want and so will we. Happy day before MemDay

  182. 182.

    JR in WV

    The first computer I worked with ran i/o using 6-level paper tape. It took raw text and justified it into column widths to drive mechanically automated linotypes casting lead type at a newspaper.

    Then they migrated away from molten lead to photo-type-setting with PDP 11/780 mini-computers that bootloaded using 8-level mylar tape. No such thing as a floppy disk!

    In college I used a remote IBM-compatible computer to write and run programs written in PL/1 (programming language one) which was intended to replace Cobol and Fortran (and all the others) with a massively complex single multi-purpose programming environment.

    I doubt if it still executes outside of (perhaps) a computing history museum.

    By the end of my IT career we were using Oracle RDBMS and windows GUI, along with web tools like jason, javascript, etc. Now I’m a user!

  183. 183.

    Bob Munck

    I wrote some of that Primos software that John cut his teeth on, when I was in the OS group at Prime Computer. We called it “MULTICS in a Matchbox.”

    My first computer was an IBM 7070, the big mainframe with 5,000 10-digit words of core memory (yes, all in decimal). A guy named Doug Englebart let me try the first prototype of a thing he invented, a little wooden box with wheels on the bottom that would tell the computer when you moved it.

    I sent email to my girlfriend in 1970 when she was in grad school in Toronto — I was teaching CS in Providence, and we were both using a mainframe in Stamford CT. I first logged onto the net 40 years ago last November.

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