Ancient Linux (was: Re: Still Going - IRS Still Using JFK-Era Computers)

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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