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Technology and computers and how good everything was in the old days

I used to have a FidoNet node.

In the UK we had something called Micronet 500 (which ran on the Prestel service). They gave away free modems for the Sinclair Spectrum, one of the most popular computers in homes in the UK. You could actually buy software online as downloads by around 1986 or so (Micronet had a mix of commercial and free software, software authors could send in a tape to Micronet, who’d then put it online for download).

The subscription cost was about what an internet subscription costs now…but of course, there were per-minute charges for the phone line (which were quite high if you were on between 08:00 and 18:00) and per-minute charges for Prestel during the same 08:00 to 18:00. My access to Micronet didn’t last long, I ran up a £200 phone bill (more than my computer actually cost new) and that was that.

Later on I ran a FidoNet node. It was the only way I could get online without paying per-minute charges…actually running a BBS! Fidonet networks in thet UK were a little bit odd – in most places they were strictly geographical to make all the NC to BBS calls a local call rate, but the UK had something called the “midnight line” which for a fixed cost provided unmetered calling from midnight to 6am for the whole country. So the NC would buy a midnight line, and BBS sysops would chip in to pay for it, and all our echomail/netmail would be delivered via the midnight line (so for instance network 2:252 (nominally south central UK) had BBSes from places like Leeds). The NC of 2:252 incidentally kept his BBS going until around 2007 or so.

Andreas IOM

172driver wrote:

How about Nostalogy ?

+1

Germany

Didn’t the VAX OS eventually evolve into Windows NT and has become Windows 10 by now ?

That’s another thing, Linux. What would the world look like without it? From Finland originally. I remember I downloaded it from a Finish ftp server in the early 90s. Couldn’t get it to work on my PC the first couple of tries. I was at the university back then, and had superfast internet from the start. We had several Silicon Graphics work stations for CFD. They had a flight simulator on them, with F-16, and I think a couple of other planes as well (insane graphics at the time compared with PC). It could be run in online mode, and 2-3 of us used lots of time on that instead of studying and making CFD plots

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

The original NT was written by an ex VAX programmer.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The original NT was written by an ex VAX programmer.

Sure, and flying was invented by a bicycle engineer.

Dave Cutler practically WAS VMS. He wrote most of the serious kernel code, in VAX assembler. (That was after he wrote RSX-11M for the PDP-11). Then he went to work on one of DEC’s RISC projects (called Prism), moving himself and his team to Seattle to be as far as possible from HQ-think in Massachusetts. HQ got him in the end and cancelled the Prism program, whereupon he popped over next door and went to Microsoft, where indeed he and his team built the first version of NT. There are stories that they used some of the Prism (not VMS) code, which led to a very hush-hush (at the time) settlement between DEC and MS. Not that it did DEC much good.

I doubt there’s much of Cutler’s code left in WIndows by now. But he still works at MS.

LFMD, France

Speaking of Seattle… back then we ran Decnet internally and all the systems had names up to 6 characters long. The Seattle (actually Bellevue) systems were called MILDEW, DRIZZL, DAMP… you get the idea. (This was all at the same time as the Hitchhikers’ Guide, our system in the UK were VOGON, MARVIN… and of course FORTY2, whose Decnet address was 42.42).

LFMD, France

Cutler is now nearly 80. Would he still be at MS? I did hear Mandelbrot worked at IBM until some advanced age too. These great engineers never retire; they just slow down

Compuserve indeed had offline reading and it was necessary because you were paying heavily for each second you were connected. However, the software got more and more unwieldy and the last edition of it was so complicated that you were reading huge long discussions about how to use it! In the end people got tired of it, and I recall that was about the end of CS anyway.

It was the “golden era” where everybody wanted to be in an online community. It was accessible only to the relatively highly computer-literate (I imagine Minitel was a lot easier, looking at home many people in France had it) and that limited its user base. Nobody was driving it forward, and online communities have a natural life and unless they are actively moved forward they will fade out. CS had nobody driving it forward; it just had the participants (selected out of a fairly narrow personality band) and a load of mods who were often extremely strict. I used to be in a Ventura Publisher (a popular DTP tool for some years) forum on CS and others there joked that you had to put on a suit and a tie before going in there, because it was run by self-flaggelating masochists. Not just weird mods (which are actually a common thing in GA too; the UK sites suffered badly from this and continue to do so, with the original old one having a policy where you got kicked out for disagreeing with a mod) but also dominated by anally retarded participants who didn’t tolerate any criticism of the product. Actually that last bit is not uncommon in product-specific communities; the US based Socata owners group doesn’t tolerate criticism of the aircraft (or disagreement with the mod) as I quickly found out And I imagine most/all type specific forums are similar; the Cirrus one (COPA) gets really vicious (and has the usual problems with mods, and with weird people who are favoured by the mods and who can thus do no wrong, etc). So the same old “human” stuff just carries on in different places.

The next spurt happened when the WWW became popular (and usable with what you might call a normal browser) c. 1999 and a lot of forums started then, driven by loads of keen amateurs learning PHP and databases Some of those sites still exist, sort of, but have a very tired look about them and their owners are probably both quite old and no longer interested in the topic.

It is interesting to look at a perspective on this stuff going back years, because a lot never actually changes (it is just human nature) and there are lessons in there on how not to do things, which you ignore at your peril.

The one thing I miss is how much easier it used to be for a fairly clever (and young!) individual to make money in manufacturing, if he/she knew how to use micoprocessors. In the 70s and 80s you were basically printing your own money. Even as a consultant you could get £500/day developing products which were previously impossible. In the 90s this got harder and after that much of “technology” is a domain of big companies only.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

In the 90s this got harder and after that much of “technology” is a domain of big companies only.

Not so in software – the gravy train is still going.

LeSving wrote:

That’s another thing, Linux. What would the world look like without it? From Finland originally

We’d be running BSD instead. Linux had three things going for it: an accident of timing (BSD was mired in a lawsuit, but Linux was not ‘genetically’ related to anything else so could not be stopped that way), and the author’s pragmatism. (I remember the spat between Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tanenbaum, I read it at the time on comp.os.minix, I was at the time trying to find anything better than MS-DOS to run on my PC. I had bought a 386 system from Morgan Computers in London who specialized in liquidating stock, they were actually a camera company, but sold computers cheap from businesses that had gone bust IIRC, so I managed to get a 386 PC in 1990 for a price an 18 year old could afford, working for the very lowest grade job at British Rail!). The third thing Linux had going for it was the GNU userland, many parts which were already pretty mature (including a decent multiplatform compiler). People tend to forget that “Linux” is just the OS kernel. The typical Unix-like userland is all from GNU.

BSD got out of its legal troubles by 1992 or so, but by then Linux already could run X11 and had a stable networking stack supporting all the common ethernet cards, and huge mindshare (I learned C on my 386, running Linux, in text mode. It only had 2.5MB of slow 16 bit RAM though and a plain VGA card so running X was not really an option). The BSDs are still around (in three variants, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD).

There was also the GNU HURD (which was supposed to be the eventual OS kernel for all that GNU userland stuff) but it’s never really come to fruition. I think the Debian project did an experimental GNU/HURD distribution, but nothing much came of it.

Last Edited by alioth at 04 Mar 12:27
Andreas IOM

Regarding GSM, find it pretty interesting that the AKA (authentication and key agreement) protocol introduced in GSM is still alive. Sure it has been significantly advanced, numerous key derivations, mutual auth and integrity controls added to 3G to block the false BS attack, the list goes on, but the basics are there.

I heard a rumor from an old colleague who worked at Ericsson that AKA is still the world’s largest implementation of a symmetric based auth mechanism. Most likely one of the most used auth protocols too. Doesn’t sound unreasonable.

Cutler is now nearly 80. Would he still be at MS?

The last I heard, about 4 years ago, he was working on the Xbox software. Who knows since then.

LFMD, France
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