Ten things meme

[kengr]

(stolen from almost everyone)
Ten things I don't think anyone else on my flist has done

1. gone skinny dipping in the snow. (Yes, walk thru snow on ground to natural body of water, jump in. swim for a bit get out, walk back to clothes)
2. dressed as a Buddhist monk, complete with shaved head.
3. Worn a dress while sporting a full beard.
4. taken 550 V AC across the chest (from one hand to the other, stupid accident)
5. reported a ROM BIOS error and later noted that the error was corrected on the new machines in stores.
6.fed cake to a hunky porn star.
7. keypunched my own FORTRAN IV programs
8. written a login/password harvester
9. installed illegal phone extensions
10. helped hack a mainframe
bonus
11. Own (not owned) a TRS-80 Model I
12. Been BBS sysop
13. Am a member of Fidonet

Comments

[aurictech.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not sure which version of FORTRAN I learned, but I did punch cards for classroom programs in high school (circa 1979). In fact, while all knowledge of FORTRAN has long since been archived out of accessible memory, I have the distinction of being the only person I know of who has used knowledge of FORTRAN as an interrogation tool. While I can't really discuss the details, I can give the moral of the story:

Don't claim "computer programmer" as a cover story unless you are dead certain that hostile interrogators can't find, among their number, someone who knows more about programming than you do. Someone once made that mistake; he turned a lovely shade of pale when I demonstrated superior knowledge of a programming language (FORTRAN) he had claimed to know at a professional level....

Sigh

[sailorjim.livejournal.com]

1. Yup, while stationed in Michigan.
2. Yup, I won a coveted role in a production of The King and I when I was a teenager by being willing to shave my head (they'd run out of bald wigs) and, as a matter of fact, I did play some sort of monk (I dunno if it was Buddhist or not, but this gotta be close enough).
3. Yup (Don't ask).
4. Nope, but close.
5. Nope, not even close.
6. Well, if you make that shrimp and change the "hunky" to "stacked," yup.
7. Been there, done that (still have some of the damn cards).
8. No idea what that means.
9. Hasn't everyone?
10. Military mainframe, at that.
11. Nope.
12. No (thank God).
13. Not even of Pussynet.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Me three on #7. Remember, you're talking to a fair number of Old Phart Programmers here!

[kengr]

Why do you think I put in 13 items? :-)

[badriya.livejournal.com]

13. Is that the bbs newsgroups we used before This Internet Thang? I used bbs and the UK nationwide system, Prestel. The bbs carried newsgroups from the UK and US too. The one I used regularly was The Templar's Rest, which took US groups, but there was also The Animation Station, Drealm, and a few more.

[kengr]

Fidonet wasn't the only network of BBSes, but it was the largest. They were "echoes" not "newsgroups" if you were on Fidonet.

And the Internet predates BBSes. It started in the late 70s. The first BBS was around 1980.

Right assertion, wrong numbers.

[seawasp]

The Internet began as ARPANET in the 60s. The first BBS's were on mainframes in the 70s; I ought to know, as I was ON some of those.

Re: Right assertion, wrong numbers.

[kengr]

The Internet began as ARPANET in the 60s.

http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/docs/arpa--2.html
They were still working on the protocols ARPANET would use in December of 1969.

The first BBS's were on mainframes in the 70s; I ought to know, as I was ON some of those.

Having used computers back then, I know that a few of the timesharing systems were capable of something like that (and in fact, in the summer of 1981, someone set one up on a system that was going to be decommissioned in September), but this is the first I've heard of such being done that far back. And as I recall, it took so weird kludges on the system in question due to userr/directory rights issues.

"The world's first BBS" is considered to be Randy Suess' CBBS in Chicago.

Re: Right assertion, wrong numbers.

[seawasp]

Guess it depends on how you define it; the name comes from "Bulletin-Board System" which describes the way "Talk", the program I used to use on the PDP-11 VAX from 1976 on, worked; multiple users could post to various subjects, visible to all users, just like on a bulletin board, etc. We wrote our own Email programs (the sysop considered such things to be games; "Electronic mail will never have any practical use") and our own real-time instant-messaging program (called "Phone"), all of which we used long before 1980.

[badriya.livejournal.com]

Well, but www and most newsgroups got going a bit later, didn't they? Although I think we had newsgroups around 93, when I came to the internet.

[kengr]

Ok, newsgroups were usenet, which overlaps the internet a lot, but like email also included lots of systems not on the net. uucp links handled a lot of that. And it dates back to 1979. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/software/part1/

Fidonet started in 1984. http://www.fidonet.org/inet92_Randy_Bush.txt
(Randy Bush was our NC here in Net 105. Odds are that I'll be the NC in the not too distant future)

The public learned about usenet in 1993 when AOL made it accessible to their customers.

www dates to 1991. Not sure when it became "known" to the public.

Um...

[seawasp]

...#7, 8, and 10, I've done.