Re: old school

[John Garison <john -at- garisons -dot- com>]

Responding to a mish-mash of comments in the thread ...

I still have some old Boardwatch magazines ... the ones with BillGatus 
of Borg on the cover, and the one with Vint Cerf and his infamous " IP 
on Everything" t-shirt. They make for fun reading. Of only slightly more 
recent vintage, I just came across my multi-generation Xerox copy of 
"Zen and the Art of the Internet" ... Remember Archie?

When I started using AOL in '89, it had a GEM graphical UI that ran on 
DOS prior to the advent of Windows. My AOL ID was (I think, it's been a 
good long while since I managed to get them to finally stop billing me 
...) JPG3 -at- aol -dot- com -dot-  

I have a old hard drive platter downstairs ... a 5-meg drive IIRC. It's 
about 18" across and made of aluminum. Has the pitted marks of a head 
crash, too. I recall when I was at DEC and we were moving to a new 
facility that one of the security guards stopped me trying to carry out 
an 8-layer disk pack that had the RSTS/E operating system source code on 
it. "Don't worry, it's only software!" I told him. "Oh, OK" he said and 
let me take it out without a security pass.

I used to lead the team that documented Wang OIS and WP systems. I 
remember Glossaries well. When I inherited the docs, they made you read 
through 5 or 6 pages (and about 33 steps) of how to record a macro. 
Then, at the very end, they told you "Or you can just press F16 and then 
do the actions you want to record." One of the first things I did was 
move that to the beginning ...

And anyone who had car decks they needed learned early on to take a 
magic marker and draw a diagonal line across the top of the deck ... 
made getting the cards back into order a little easier than reading the 
sequence numbers.

Yr ob't crusty old curmudgeon,

John G

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