[TriLUG] Old-n-Young Guy Stories

Roy Vestal rvestal at trilug.org
Fri Feb 9 23:28:47 EST 2007


Well, to try and "one-up" ya, one of my former employers took their VAX 
(VMS) offline in 2002. It held some serious critical data (can't tell 
you, but it affected the entire company), and we had to upgrade the 
thing for Y2K. It was online for over 20 years. Oh, and they added 2 
Alpha's running VMS in the early 90's.

Anyway, they took them offline in 2002. The next year, they bought a 
"new" Alpha to, guess what???  Run VMS for a project!

All the stupid old days...

OlsonE at aosa.army.mil wrote:
> hahahahah! hp9000! you're never going to believe this (actually you
> might).
> 
> at the last company i worked for (2003 - 2005), we were using a hp9000
> (this thing was about a good 10-15 ft long). i dubbed it the 'deathstar'
> because it made this really ominous noise when it was powering down (so
> much -- in fact that it felt like the room got brighter when we turned
> it off).
> 
> anyhow, in 2004 we took it offline. we also had a couple of dec alpha
> 4100s (running digital unix 4.0, which i later moved on to tru64). all
> of the above were used solely for sybase. i miss those. they were ROCK
> solid!
> 
> eric
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On
> Behalf Of Roy Vestal
> Sent: Friday, February 09, 2007 9:08 AM
> To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Old-n-Young Guy Stories
> 
> Heh, "youngun's"...
> 
> I guess I'm one of the "tweeners" between the Jim R/Chris C./Glen H. 
> group and the Olsen E./William S./Craig T./Alexis Z. group. Barely born
> in the beginning of the 70's.
> 
> Wrote my first "program" (we now would call it a geneology db) on my
> Atari 400 w/Left Cartridge Basic (pre M$ basic) and "membrane" keyboard
> as a Christmas present for an Uncle (was a sw eng at Apple). Then for
> fun, added peek/poke graphics and ported it to my C-64.
> 
> Attempted to play my first game(s) of mtrek on the school's HP 9000. It
> didn't use a monitor, but a printout. Needless to say, I got killed as
> soon as I logged in.
> 
> The first computer I learned "programming" on the good ol' TRS-80 Model
> 4 with *dual* 360k floppies AND a *green* screen (no crappy orange on
> this baby!). It was one of the *10* that were used at the local High
> School. My dad taught there and was one of the instructors that used the
> computer lab. I would go in and play on that thing for hours after
> school.
> 
> Then there was.... (/me has lots of stories)...
> 
> 
> 
> Alexei Znamensky wrote:
>> On 2/8/07, Craig Taylor <ctalkobt at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Anybody else who was born in the '70s ever use their father's punch 
>>> cards to build card houses? I found that they were much much better 
>>> at supporting my larger structures and hung onto a whole stack of 'em
> 
>>> for about 7 years before they faded out of where I put them... (got 
>>> lost / stopped caring).
>>>
>>> At high school before the Apple ]['s came in we used a teletype that
>>
>> call -151
>> peek -16384
>>
>> ... mind wanders...
>>
>> was hooked up to NCSU where we could run a bunch of programs whose
>>> main purpose I believe was to waste paper.
>>>
>>> I used to know all of the chip-level details (what each chip did), 
>>> memory space, cycle counts etc for the Commodore. Now things have 
>>> gotten so complex and only standardized through driver interfaces 
>>> that I miss the chip-level type programming that you could do...
>>>
>>> On 2/8/07, William Sutton <william at trilug.org> wrote:
>>>> Adding to the younger-but-older stories.  I was born in the
>>> mid-70's.  I
>>>> remember the punch cards, cradle modems, and line printers where my
>>> father
>>>> went to school.  In fact, I actually used the punch cards myself 
>>>> (for bookmarks :-D )
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> William Sutton
>>> -- 
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>>>
>>
>>
> 




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