Unlike a lot of the people of my generation who got into computers and programming, I didn’t grow up with one.  Home computers were still kind of an oddity then, and the price tags made them seem about as accessible to me as having my own jet plane.  So my first programming experiences were fairly short and pointless: some character graphics stuff on Apple systems at College for Kids at QU; fiddling with Pascal on a visit to Purdue when I was 16; and finally some real Z-80 programming on the Sanyo CP/M machines we got at St. Thomas in my senior year.  Computer class focused on word processing in Wordstar and saving our work to disk, but somewhere I managed to run down some info on the Z-80s registers and assembly language, and did some simple programming like a tic-tac-toe game.  I even remember programming on paper, writing out the lists of instructions that I’d type in later when I got access to the systems again. Read more »

(Despite the title, this is a technical screed, not a religious one.  You have been warned.)

I started using FreeBSD about ten years ago.  A new client had it on his web servers, and I was impressed enough by it to start running it on my own machines, including my desktop.  In the late 1990s, the various Linux distributions were like fraternities making floats for a Homecoming parade: they turned out some impressive work, but you had to put up with a lot of drunken brawling to get there.  I bounced from one Linux distro to another, never really satisfied with any of them.  The BSD community seemed more mature (I saw a poll once that said FreeBSD developers were ten years older on average than Linux developers)  and it showed in the software.  I liked the stability of the software and the release process and the way it was all designed.  It just seemed like the free Unix operating system (OS) for grown-ups.

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Sometimes I hate computers.

That probably seems like a strange thing for someone in my line of work to say, but it’s actually true.  I enjoy software–creating it, debugging it, using it.  But all I want the hardware to do is work, so I can do my thing with the software.  If I’m thinking about the hardware, I’m probably cussing it because something’s stopped working.

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Way back when I got my first computer, in the olden days of 1988, it was mainly a game machine.  The Internet was mostly a military and university project back then, and a modem was an expensive add-on piece of hardware.  There were some BBSs around, but all were on long-distance numbers at the time, which put them out of my budget. On the output end, I didn’t get a printer for a few years, so I wasn’t producing documents or computer art either.  Every computer was an island, for the most part.

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Believe it or not, the Internet used to be fairly organized.  If you wanted to exchange or download files, you did it on FTP servers.  Text documents and small bits of information were on the web, or before that, on gopher.  Long-term, BBS-style discussions were on Usenet, which was organized into a simple hierarchy of groups, so everyone on the net who wanted to discuss Cardinal baseball subscribed to alt.sports.baseball.stl-cardinals. For real-time discussion you went to IRC, which had a channel for each topic. Everything had its place.

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I got my first computer pretty late in life, compared to most people in the business. I gazed longingly at the Commodore systems in the Sears catalog as a kid, but hundreds of dollars for what was basically a toy at the time wasn’t even conceivable. Once I got out on my own and didn’t have anyone around to tell me to be sensible with my money, I hustled down to Sears and spent around $700-800 on a Commodore 128DCR. I didn’t have a printer, so I really couldn’t do anything productive with it. (Nor did I have anything productive to do.) There was no Internet to speak of then outside colleges and military bases, and no home computer software to access it anyway. There was an online service specifically for Commodores called Q-Link, but I couldn’t afford the long distance charges from my small town.

What I could afford was blank disks, and I had Commodore-owning friends with lots of games; so for the few years before I got online, my 128DCR was a glorified C64 game machine. But what wonderful games they were. My current computer has 5600 times the CPU speed and 15,625 times the memory, but I haven’t found many modern games more enjoyable than the ones made for that slow, primitive system. We waited minutes for games to load, we fought with poor interfaces and buggy software, we listened to screechy sound effects, and we got stuck on games because there were no walk-throughs and Internet forums to get help from. But they were fun. Modern games blow them away in audio, graphics, and complexity; but often they forget to be fun.

M.U.L.E. was one of the funnest. It’s the only game I remember that let all four players play simultaneously during some parts, two with joysticks and two with portions of the keyboard. The back-story was that four colonists were dropped on the planet Irata, and would be using Multiple Use Labor Elements (MULEs, basically robots) to mine plots of land for food, energy, smithore (used for making more MULEs) and crystite (a mineral worth lots of money). There were 12 turns representing 12 months. On each turn you could buy plots of land, buy MULEs and send them to develop plots, assay plots for crystite, buy and sell goods at the central store, and hunt the mountain wampus, a beast that would pay to be released if you caught it.

At the end of twelve months the colony ship returned, and the colonist with the most stuff was the winner. A nice twist, though, was that the game praised the winner based on the total wealth of the colony. So winning by stomping the other colonists wasn’t as rewarding as winning while everyone else prospered too. The game was created by the late Dani Bunten, who wanted to create a non-violent game that encouraged cooperation but was still fun and competitive. Judging by how many times we played it in the middle of the night after work, despite the 2-3 minute load time and the fact that a 4-human game could take a few hours, it succeeded in those goals.

I still fire it up occasionally in a C64 emulator and play against three computer players, and it’s still fun. They aren’t all that smart, though—AI hadn’t really come very far in those days at one million instructions per second—so they’re easy to beat. There have been attempts to remake the game for online multiplayer, but they always seem to die out. I’ve been kicking the idea of a truly turn-based web version around in my head for about a year now, and I think I’ve worked out the basic structure of it, but we’ll see if I ever get the time and ambition to actually do it. I was starting to think I’d do it in Java, but Jason says Java still stinks, so that’s disappointing. Thinking about doing it all via HTTP makes my head hurt, but maybe it’s doable. It’d sure be fun to be able to play against three real people again—and if I don’t have to huddle around a keyboard with three other drunk guys to do it, so much the better!

Jason reminded me about the Geek Code; that really takes me back. Those were the days when nearly everyone on the net could do a little programming, people waited until the low-usage late-night hours to access servers overseas, and Internet polls for president gave the majority vote to whoever promised the smallest government. How things have changed.

Like everyone else, I had my Geek Code proudly displayed in my email signature for a while.  Unfortunately, due to the Great RAID Disaster of 2002, I don’t have my emails from before that year, so I can’t pull it out and dust it off.  So for nostalgia’s sake, I made up a new one.  Enjoy.

G d>+ s:+ a c++$ UB++++L+++HISCX P++++ L++ E+ W++ N++(-) o? K- w— O- M- V PS— PE++ Y+ PGP>++ t+(—) 5? X++ R>+ tv– b+++ DI+ D+ G e* h— r+++ y+++

Recently I’ve tried watching a few new shows in what I think of as the X-Files genre, like Heroes and Eureka.  Science fiction mixed with supernatural and some mystery; what’s not to like?  I just can’t seem to take them seriously enough to stick with them, though.  They seem to be trying way too hard stylistically, and it’s off-putting to me.  I feel like they’re reaching through the screen and poking me in the shoulder, saying, “Isn’t this just sooooo cool?  Isn’t it?”  Maybe it is, but I’d like to figure that out for myself, without the show yelling it at me.  They seem way too self-conscious about striking the perfectly hip pose right from the start.

The looks of the actors don’t help.  They all look like they were pulled out of ads for jeans or cologne.  On the pilot of Eureka, I started laughing when the third or fourth incredibly hot babe was introduced to the superbly hunky male lead, and they turned their noses up at each other.  It’s downright distracting when everyone involved in the story is so ridiculously good-looking, and they act like it’s no big deal.  It’s like if they made a show set in Kansas but used only 7-foot-tall Chinese actors, and never explained why.

So anyway, since these new shows weren’t doing much for me, I thought I’d go back to the one that started it all.  I’ve seen a lot of the X-Files episodes, but only in reruns; so they were out of order and I’ve missed some, especially toward the end.  I’d forgotten how good this show was, and it’s refreshing to watch a show that just tries to tell an engaging story at its own pace.  What’s funny is that The X-Files became a show that was considered super-cool, but it didn’t just declare that in the first episode; it built that reputation over time.

Mulder starts out as kind of a geek, and in four episodes he hasn’t shown off ripped abs even once.  Gillian Anderson is certainly a beautiful woman, but not so distractingly Dallas-Cowboys-cheerleader-hot that you can’t imagine her being an FBI agent and going on a stakeout without a crowd forming around her.  In the early days of the Internet, her picture may have been on more screensavers and backgrounds than any other person’s, but that was because of the whole character, not just her looks.

The show took its time, too.  After four episodes on the first disc (I’m Netflixing it), we’ve gotten a little of Mulder’s backstory, but we haven’t seen a single alien yet, we don’t know much about Scully, and we have no idea who Cigarette Smoking Man is or any of the other conspiracy stuff.  Two episodes have been monster-of-the-week stories, so they didn’t advance the main arc at all.  I don’t know what’s coming in the next few episodes, and I’ve probably seen them!  That’s refreshing, to watch a show that’s subtle about its mysteries and takes the time to develop them slowly.

Duchovny and Anderson are great, both in their individual roles and as a team.  The guest stars are convincingly spooky or scared or whatever they’re supposed to be.  It’s just a really solid show, and I’m looking forward to working my way through it, in order this time.  I remember it got pretty flaky toward the end, so I don’t know if I’ll make it all the way, but we’ll see.

Funnily enough, I actually missed The X-Files the first time around because I kept hearing how cool it was, and I’m contrarian that way.  If “everyone” likes something, there’s a good chance I won’t.  That helps me avoid a lot of garbage, but occasionally it means I miss something that actually is good, at least at first.  That happened to me with The Matrix, which I didn’t see until a few years ago.  If something’s really good, though, I seem to eventually discover it after the hype wears off and people still recommend it, and that’s fine.  I prefer it when the whole show is on DVD so I can watch it at my own pace anyway.

I thought about reviewing the episodes as I go, but if any show has been reviewed enough times on the Internet, it has to be this one. I may write about particular episodes that strike me as special, though.

Last month, Comcast, my Internet provider, dropped its Usenet service.  I’ve been meaning to write about Usenet and its decline ever since Joey did, so this seems like a good time.  It wasn’t any big surprise; ISPs have been running away from Usenet ever since the feds said they could be held liable for illegal files passing through their servers.  Since a large part of the data passing through Usenet is pornography and pirated software and entertainment, and customers who actually used Usenet for anything legal were becoming scarce anyway, it didn’t really make sense for them to keep providing it.  I suspect most ISPs would have dropped it a long time ago, if not for one old sysadmin keeping it running out of stubbornness or nostalgia.

In its heyday, Usenet was simply awesome.  If you weren’t online in the early 90s, you have to realize that communications for most people were so slow that you could read data faster than it came across your screen.  I used to search the net for files by sending off an “Archie” search by email and getting the results back the next day.  There was no world-wide web; so other than Usenet newsgroups, the main things people did on the net were sending e-mail, getting files from FTP servers, and chatting on IRC.  (IRC deserves its own article.)  Everything was slow.  But with your own Usenet server, regularly pulling a feed from a neighbor and storing it locally, you could have thousands of worldwide discussion groups on nearly every topic imaginable right there on your local network, where access was more-or-less instant.

Usenet predates the Internet, so you didn’t even have to be connected full-time to use it.  People set up modem and radio connections to stream Usenet feeds into their networks.  It gave them a way to have conversations with people all over the world on all sorts of topics—not in real time, by any means; but fast enough that the conversation continued every day and you could get useful information out of it.  And all this was done with software that hasn’t changed much in 30 years, and hardware that was long since tossed in the garbage.

Nowadays, though, the main reason for running your own Usenet server is gone: pulling information from across the globe usually doesn’t take any more apparent time than pulling it from down the hall.  So ISP’s were farming out the service anyway.  Comcast was paying Giganews to provide Usenet to its customers, and who knows where Giganews’s servers are located.

But Usenet, like FTP, IRC, and other services, has been becoming more and more of a backwater anyway as the web has gotten more useful.  “Newsgroups” (or “groups,” as Usenet’s discussion forums were also called) that used to be full of interesting, on-topic conversation have dried up as web-based forums drew most of the traffic.  The St. Louis Blues group, alt.sports.hockey.nhl.stl-blues, dried up when a St. Louis newspaper started a Blues web forum that got popular.  And so it went.  With most new Internet users knowing nothing but the web, Usenet has become a hangout for those of us who have been online 10 years or more.  But that makes it less useful even for us, because most of the people we might want to talk to, whether we’re arguing politics or trying to get help fixing our car engine, are discussing those topics on the web somewhere.  So even we old-timers drift away and use it less.

It’s a shame, because Usenet worked so well.  No web forum has come close to it yet for ease of use.  With a basic Usenet newsreader, I could access thousands of discussion groups through the same interface, follow conversation threads, post to any of them, create my posts in whatever editor I liked, have it ignore the posters and threads I’m not interested in, and more.  In 2003, I posted 2043 messages to Usenet, containing over 300,000 words.  Most of it, I probably wouldn’t recognize if I saw it now (but I have it all saved), but it seemed important at the time—or at least fun.

Now, if I want to keep using Usenet, I’ll have to pay Giganews or some other provider for an account.  They don’t cost much, but honestly, I hadn’t been using it much in the last year anyway.  Most of my favorite groups had dried up, and the ones that hadn’t yet, like alt.support.diet.low-carb, were mainly the same old group of people running out of things to say.  Some groups have been stagnant so long, the participants have beaten the group’s topic to death many times over, so they’re just old friends chatting about everything else.

So, I guess I’ll wait and see how it goes.  If I start to miss it, I’ll sign up with Giganews or someplace.  I’d hate to think I’ve made my last Usenet post—especially since it was the one where I predicted the Chiefs would go 6-10 this year!  But I don’t use gopher or Veronica or any of those other obsolete services with names much cooler than “WWW” anymore either, so I guess all good things come to an end.  Probably I’ll do without, and just end up cussing every now and then that no one can make a web forum that works as well as ‘tin’ circa 1992.

Joey wrote recently about some old Unix hardware he bought.  Those were certainly sweet machines for their time.  Every company—Sun, HP, NeXT, SGI, etc.—produced machines with its own style.  PC hardware at the time was all the same: boxy off-white towers and boxy off-white desktops, all with noisy fans and lots of screws you had to take out to get at anything.  Nowadays PCs are starting to have some personality and user-friendliness, but they still don’t match up to those Unix boxes that were recognizable from one glance.

Once upon a time, I happened to acquire four HP Apollo systems.  With 33mhz processors and 48MB of memory, they competed pretty well when PCs were only 5-10 times that fast, but eventually I had to admit they’d become doorstops and get rid of them.  I kept them longer than really made sense, because they came with 21-inch monitors, at a time when a new 21-inch PC monitor cost thousands of dollars.  They just didn’t have the power anymore to run modern software on those big screens.  Still, it was cool having four of them in a Domain ring, all recognizing each other and sharing data in an odd system like Apollo Domain OS.

Joey’s right about the old HP Laserjet printers too; they’re workhorses.  My Laserjet 5MP is at least 10 years old and going strong.  Not that it gets used much; I think I’ve only bought four toner cartridges in that time.  It been powered up all that time, though, and it’s outlasted several PCs, mice, UPSes, and other hardware.  HP really built things right back then.