I remember that group well. Damned, I've dated myself too!Quote:
Originally Posted by Lynn Olson
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I remember that group well. Damned, I've dated myself too!Quote:
Originally Posted by Lynn Olson
....ahem.......rec.audio.high-end........wot?.....me?......no, never 'eard of 'em yer Honour!
You can still find it through Google Groups & such things. (....or so some bloke was tellin me!)
Those were the pre-Internet days, when it was called the Arpanet. I first experienced it around 1983 or so, when I had access to the mainframe computer in Building 58 of the main Tektronix campus in Beaverton, Oregon. Tek was very large back then, with 22,000 employees, and Building 58 had two Business Units in it: the Spectrum Analyzer group, where I worked, and Television Products, across the hall.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex_UK
I started as a technical writer, and we were in the word processing era, but did not use PC's. We needed access to the same machines as the engineers, since we worked in parallel on the same projects as they did, and shared documents with them on a daily basis, including e-mails. Unlike them, we needed to generate documents that could be translated into finished manuals, so we took advantage of the early typesetting tools offered by Unix. I was the writer that got our little five-person writing team on to the Emacs screen editor on the Berkeley Unix (BSD) operating system on the DEC Vax 11/780, which I quickly discovered was networked to all the other Vaxen on the Tek campus, as well as the other Tek campuses at Wilsonville and Vancouver, Washington. Better yet, if you jumped through the main machine in Building 50 (the R&D building), you could leave Tek and explore the Arpanet!
Back then, the whole thing only had about 20 nodes, mostly on the West Coast. The primary nodes were Stanford, Berkeley, the nuclear weapons lab at Lawrence Livermore (in Berkeley), Los Alamos, Tektronix in Oregon, Boeing in Washington, MIT in Boston, and a few other sites. The sites were a mix of academic, extending the scope of the Unix backbone of the system, and military and military-contractor sites, since DARPA was/is the prime advanced R&D lab for the Pentagon, and was the sponsor of the Arpanet.
There was no public access to the Arpanet, and not everyone at Tek or Boeing had access. But anyone using Unix could pretty easily get on, and we writers naturally needed access to the same tools as the engineers. So after using the system for a few months, I realized I could send an e-mail to my sister down in Berkeley, since she worked there, and had access to the main Berkeley system. It wasn't the modern e-mail system - it used the "bang" address system that required you to know the routing path for the message - and the transmission was overnight, since the computers only called each at night using very expensive leased lines through the Bell System.
Since this was a limited-access system almost entirely used by researchers and engineers, there was none of the anonymity foolishness that later developed with the public Internet. You did something stupid, and your boss would know in a matter of hours, or even minutes. The saying among the engineers was: "Never post anything you wouldn't mind showing next manager five years from now" - since there never was any way of knowing if messages were *really* deleted.
The freestanding, non-academic BBS community, running on 8086 PCs and even older C/PM Z80 machines, was completely different. These were dial-up connections to isolated BBS's that were only sometimes interconnected thanks to a maze of incompatible protocols - just getting a pair of modems to talk to each other could take an hour or more of puzzling out weird modem lingo (no standards, of course). Most BBS's were focussed on social and technical interests, but a minority became notorious for hacking tips and warez. Since I was almost entirely a mainframe user, I wasn't all that interested in PCs and older C/PM machines. (Linux didn't arrive until the Intel 386 had enough power to support Unix - that was about eight years later.)
Anyway, the habits I developed in the early Arpanet and Internet days stayed with me - keeping my posts clean, and staying as far away from the flamers as possible. Since their only intent was to destroy communication by underming social groups, as a professional writer dedicated to clear communication, I thought it was especially repellent and antisocial behavior.
It took aggressive moderation - which is very time-consuming on the part of the moderator - to keep a group clear of these thugs. With anyone able to post anything, a moderator, or even a team of moderators, could be easily overwhelmed with posts, especially when an skillful flame thread was started. ABX or cable flames was an especially fruitful area for starting arguments that would never end, which was the goal of the flamers. They did this just for kicks. And this tiny minority succeeded; one audio group after another was destroyed by a handful of anonymous sociopaths. The experienced posters would leave for good, leaving behind a small pool of novices who would be preyed on by flamers. I don't need to name names here, but experienced readers will recall the wreckage. The modern forum system, with registered users, keeps the antisocial types away, thank goodness.
The early days of the Arpanet were different; any post could be traced by the system operators (mainframes, remember, and on corporate and academic sites) and reported to the appropriate manager. Make enough offensive posts, and you'd be out the door with a can tied to your tail for the rest of your professional career. That's why folks from the Arpanet days have good posting manners - you didn't have a choice, unless you wanted to buy a $150,000 mainframe, and even that wouldn't get you access to the Arpanet. (Neither IBM or Microsoft were on the Arpanet.)
That's really fascinating, Lynn. I worked on the other side, setting up NEC's first BBS for support of our products. You're right about modem lingo, I learned a lot back then. It was satisfying writing PostScript utilities for our printers in C, posting them on the 'NEC Connection' BBS and watching hundreds of customers come online and download them. psprint.exe made a bit of a name for itself back then.
Dunno why i decided to use mine :eyebrows:
Ha! A change is as good as a rest, matey.
Thanks for the extensive explanation Lynn - fascinating!
Well... My username starts with my initals then it gets audio related. I was thinking about my teac cassette tape I had to splice up when I found this forum. Really simple.
Well... My username starts with my initals then it gets audio related. I was thinking about my teac cassette tape I had to splice up when I found this forum. Really simple.
So simple you typed it twice?!?!?!?!
Hi Leland, nice to have you here.
Cheers