[rescue] Wanted: 486 desktop

[Derrik Walker v2.0]

On Monday, March 22, 2010, at 01:05PM, "Tom Manos" <tmanos at concursive.com> wrote:

>
>Hi Derrick,
>

Actually, it's Derrik, no 'c'.  Screwy spelling, drives me nuts.  

>Your story sounds pretty familiar, except I couldn't afford Apple hardware
>that would run Unix back then. Basically, I would have needed a pretty high
>end Mac II, and those were EXPENSIVE. But otherwise, my story is pretty
>similar to yours.
>

Yea, when the Mac II came out, you could get a Sun 3/60 for less that was faster, and Sun OS 4 was a nice OS.  But, I was in highschool in those days and was happy to have my C-64, but boy did I want an Amiga,  Got my first mac in the early '90's when i realized Commodore was dead ( RIP ).

>Except for grad school in the the mid-'80s I was raised more on the AT&T side
>of the house than the BSD side, but was comfortable in either place. If you
>wanted to run Unix on your own hardware as a hobbyist, Interactive or
>Microport on 386 were the only way to go. In school we had a Vax running 3BSD
>I think, although it might have been 2.
>

We had Sun, SGI, and Dec UNIX systems at Cleveland State in the comp sci dept.  I worked in the law library, where they had NeXT boxes.

>I ran SVR2,3,and 4 over the years, so on my own hardware, I had cu instead of
>tip. But I remember doing most of the stuff you mentioned, including hacking
>up my finger server, keeping SL/IP sessions open for long periods, and
>telnetting back to my home machine from work. Life with Unix was so much more
>fun when you had to compile and install everything yourself. No RPM or
>apt-get. You were much closer to understanding the entire system.
>

I kind like yum/up2date for regular sort of things.  I spent my time compiling, now I have other things to do ( like writing my own programs ).

>I also ran a full news feed via uucp on bnews back when a full news feed
>didn't require terabytes per day. I got the feed from Old Dominion University
>here in Norfolk VA. I had to bribe them with a new 9600bps Racal-Vadic modem
>when they first came out. This was late '80s and nobody had v.32 modems yet.
>As I recall, I payed about $600 for the two of them, one on my side, and one
>on theirs. It was expensive but worth it. My geeky friends and I really liked
>having our own feed.
>

A UUCP feed would have been a cool thing to play with.  I did run a INN server for a company I worked for in the mid to late '90's.  But we had a regular nntp news feed for it.

>I really miss the days of a useful and thriving USENET. Google groups is just
>the pits. Things started going down hill as soon as broadband got cheap. I've
>given some thought to starting a dark network running USENET for old geeks and
>by invitation only, but I'm not sure there would be interest. You can do so
>much more with the web these days.
>

There is nothing today that compares to the USENET of old.

>Like you, I have a MacBook with a couple of cores, 4MB of RAM, and a 320GB
>drive. I spend a lot of time at the terminal. Also have a gynormous linux
>server at home for my web site. You can check out my site at thisoldmicro.com
>if you're interested. It's a work in progress, but you might find something
>interesting.
>

It is an interesting site. I'll have to poke around more when I get some time.

BTW: I currently live in Fredericksburg VA.  I have been here since I got a job with government last summer.

- Derrik