[TriLUG] Old-n-Young Guy Stories

[Roy Vestal]

lol! Sounds like we could be talking about the same company!

Kevin Flanagan wrote:
> I know of this local company, had an Alpha running VMS, just the end of 
> last year they wanted to move it to another location.  They needed to 
> move data around to get rid of external disk arrays, but didn't know 
> what to do.  It seems that they had been running that system for 2 1/2 
> years without an administrator, it just didn't need attention.
> 
> They found someone to move the data around, and are still running that app.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Roy Vestal wrote:
>> 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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>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>