Owning one my geeknesses

[libertango]

Three-in-One
Originally uploaded by halobrien.

An unexpected surprise about the new job is, I get to use a Dell Latitude D820 notebook. Core2Duo, 80GB HDD, 1GB RAM, and a 15.4" screen at a monstrous 1920x1200 resolution. (I'm using it to write this.)

Since it's more capable than anything I've had in the house for years, I decided to push the envelope a bit re: virtualization.

What you see here is the result -- three OSes on one system. Left-to-right, Fedora Core 6 (a flavor of Linux), Mac OS X 10.4.7, with Windows XP SP2 as the host.

Kids today probably won't be impressed. But since I can remember running VM/SP on Pomona's System 370/4341 (the VM stood for, you guessed it, "virtual machine" -- just on a mainframe scale), I'm vastly amused by both how far the tech has come (look, ma, three-in-one!) and how little (that 4341 had 60-some terminals on a machine significantly less capable than this one).

If it comes to that... Recently I stumbled upon this history of RELAY, the original chat program that ran on BITNET. IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, was a lineal descendant, and all chat programs since owe a great debt to RELAY.

If I'm reading that piece correctly, I was one of the first few hundred people to use a chat program -- anywhere -- once Pomona was added as a host. From Claremont, I had regular chats with people in far off places like Durham (Duke) and Regina. I could observe the patterns of people logging on globally through that early network, and visualize it as a wave following the sunset terminator, continent after continent. I remember the BITNET and RELAY topologies were different, so when RELAY splits happened you could still send command line point-to-point messages (the trilobites of IM) if you knew how to address them correctly to the recipient.

And, like fandom in the 1950s, I can remember when the online world was 90/10 men-to-women. Thank god that's changed -- to raise the median intelligence, if nothing else. And all praise to the brave hardy women of the time.

A bit rambling, perhaps... But like John Muir said, if you tug on something, you find it connected to the rest of the universe. :)

Comments

[genders.livejournal.com]

Ah, the good old days. Now, "it's always September..."

Ironies

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, I've never fully agreed with that.

I found it very amusing when what I'll call the early Wired/GBN crowd (Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, Louis Rosetto, etc.) would say in the late 1980s, "Hey! Wait until everyone has access to this stuff!" Then, "everyone" actually did get access to this stuff, and the response was, "Ew! We didn't mean them!"

I'm enough of a small-d democrat to think the broadening of the tech base is a Good Thing. Especially since, as I see it, the net is The Revenge of Text against the evil adversary broadcast network TV.

I've been around long enough to see that even if the semi-literate are more visible in absolute numbers, their proportion has been declining. And that is due to, yes, the Endless September, because the numbers have going through the roof.

But as Dennis Miller used to say when he still had a vestigial sense of humor, that's just my opinion, and I could be wrong. :)

Re: Ironies

[genders.livejournal.com]

Especially since, as I see it, the net is The Revenge of
Text against the evil adversary broadcast network TV.

Ah. I once got into an entirely fruitless argument about why books were better than TV, which I consider myself to have "won" by pointing out that rarely, if ever, do books contain any advertising whatsoever. Magazines are another story, but, you can't win them all :)

[urlgirl.livejournal.com]

Haha! That was a fun trip down memory lane, thank you! By the time I got on in 1989 (as a student at UofU) access was pretty tight. But then I came back at it in 1991-1992 as a lab admin and the problems were largely fixed, causing no amounts of wasted time on my part talking to random people in the math department at BU.

Honestly, I don't miss those times. It was nice feeling like I knew who everybody was and all that, but I could get the same kind of drama just by walking down the hall. IRC didn't get interesting for me until '94 or so, when I started playing around with bots. And then the web happened and who cared about IRC anymore? ;-)

Memory Lane

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

(and if Kingston [or another manufacturer] hasn't prevailed on their city in getting that address, why not? :) )

Haha! That was a fun trip down memory lane, thank you!

Yer welcome, as always.

...but I could get the same kind of drama just by walking down the hall.

Yes, but the net lets you pick and choose (somewhat) who you share the drama with. The good news about that is finding out you're not alone. The bad news is the attitude implicit in, "Not our kind, dear."

And then the web happened and who cared about IRC anymore? ;-)

The thing IRC (and chat in general, including IM) has that the web doesn't is immediacy. To a feedback junkie like me, that's fairly potent. (Not that I use either very much anymore.)

Looking at DALnet recently, though, I'll tell you who still uses IRC -- non-anglophones. :) That actually makes sense, as I think about it. It may well be easier in countries where the net cafe is the prime means of access to just fire up an IRC client and be social than to bother with webhosting of whatever stripe. IRC leaves a much less traceable archive, if one is worried about prying eyes, eh?

Re: Memory Lane

[urlgirl.livejournal.com]

Re: "Not our kind, dear" - I remember that! I remember it because after I quit school and went off the reservation, as it were, my only means of stable access to "my people" was via AOL. I was there when AOL opened itself up to Usenet, for instance, and that attitude there was rampant for a while. Of course, that's Usenet for you. Has it changed? I really don't know.

I forgot to mention, too: congrats on the new machine, it sounds great! :-)