Re: Geek Reminiscing

[will@mindspring.net]

Robbie Honerkamp <robbie@opus.shorty.com> writes:

> I miss..
> -sitting up all night in front of my Apple IIgs with
>  a 2400bps modem, calling long lists of BBSes to leech files.

1200bps, but dialing the ~20 BBSes in athens was automated, thanks to
TELIX.

> -When Windows users had a hard uphill battle ahead of them
>  to get on the Internet? (early winsock problems)

The first time I was able to use Netscape from home, it involved A)
Dialing in to a nearly dead Sparc 5 for Math undergrads I could never
get the fscking trumpet script to work.  B) Bringing up slirp. A
couple of years later MCI snowballed the university, and it became a
major no-no for sysadmins to support it. [0]

> Servers of yore..
> -http://akebono.stanford.edu/  (Yahoo's original URL)

I remember when they got the yahoo.com URL.  How 'bout
http://galahad.ucns.uga.edu. Tom White, who's now in the Ph.D program
at MIT set up UGA's first WWW server. It had one page. If it saw an IP
ask for robots.txt, all subsequent pages consisted of a
dictionary. Beutiful, no?

[0] The math sysadmin was and is the mother of all bofhs. He didn't
give of shit. If you reported that autoconf failed the "Checking to
see if gcc works" test, he would blame your code. I just checked and
the POP daemon works for the first time in ~3 years.

-- 
William Young|will@mindspring.net|MindSpring Web Engineer|C-u N UNIX!
There is ageneral social trend in English-speaking countries (and most
likely elsewhere) to treat technically-educated people as the social
inferiors of non-technically educated people. This is a terrible ill
affecting our society --Bruce Perens