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Owning one my geeknesses
Feb. 21st, 2007 12:53 amAn 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. :)
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. :)
