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From: vallor <vallor@cultnix.org>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Ancient Linux (was: Re: Still Going - IRS Still Using JFK-Era Computers)
Date: 21 Aug 2024 12:37:28 GMT
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On Wed, 21 Aug 2024 19:25:29 +0800, Woozy Song <suzyw0ng@outlook.com>
wrote in <va4iri$3rfcv$1@dont-email.me>:

> vallor wrote:

I didn't write the following -- that was "186252".

>>>
>>>     Heh ... I remember visiting a county facility when I was still
>>>     pretty young. The computer room was freezing and the floor was
>>>     laser-leveled for the benefit of the old-style disk drive units
>>>     (and I mean "units", you could physically remove a big spool of
>>>     about 12" wide disks - DO wait until they stop spinning !). There
>>>     were also the boxes with the spinning tapes and the obligatory
>>>     card and paper-tape readers.
>>>
>>>     The "cpu chip" was about a cubic METER in size in the middle of
>>>     the room - DEC I think, PDP-4 or maybe PDP-7 - full of a bunch of
>>>     circuit boards with zillions of individual transistors and perhaps
>>>     a few early "chips". Workers/programmers had serial terminals at
>>>     their desks.
> 
> Yeah, I remember the university had that stuff in the 1970s, and also a
> "concentrator" that multiplexed 300-baud terminals into an ISDN line.

No ISDN back then, you may be thinking of ADN.

Our first Net connection at our campus, in 1991, was a 56K ADN, with half
of an X.25 PAD dedicated to IP to CSUNet...so that was 28Kbit/s for a
sizeable campus.  (Over 20,000 students, most of them night school.)

Didn't matter much at the time, because there was only one host with
a TCP/IP stack, an HP9000 that ran the campus library card catalog.  Took
many months before lab coordinators would allow us to put TCP/IP on
their lab machines.  I was a student worker in Computing Services,
so helped with getting the campus on the Net.

I applied to the CIS department for a project, "Special Studies in
Computer Science", and got 3 units setting up a student-access
Linux host at the end of 1992.  Students could have email, ftp, etc.  
System hardware was a spare Netware server, an HP Vectra RS/20
with 1MB, then later 16MB.  Oh, those were the days...

[ng's trimmed]

-- 
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