My earlier post regarding my history in Raleigh also brings up another important milestone: this month marks fifteen years I’ve been using the Internet. My first email address was an EOS one at N.C. State’s College of Engineering and I got it August 1992. I spent my early time online downloading bootleg copies of OS/2 from the New Mexico State University’s Hobbes OS/2 collection. Apologies to all the schmucks playing nettrek who’s latency suffered as a result. 🙂 (Apologies also to IBM. Hey, I was young and foolish.)
I remember my first experience with the EOS lab. My classmate buddies and I were sending each other zephyr messages while the instructor was drilling everyone on basic UNIX commands. That may have been the exact moment when I stopped paying attention to engineering classes!
This month marks fifteen years as a UNIX user, come to think of it, but it wasn’t my first experience with a multi-user system. Before State, I was the proud co-sysop of a home BBS system, the Basement BBS, run on an 8 Mhz 286 PC with PCBoard BBS software and DoubleDOS multitasking software. My brother Jeff and I scraped up $350 for the board’s first hard drive: a whopping 30 megabyte, boat anchor-sized RLL hard drive. Now you can buy a terabyte drive (that’s over 1,000,000,000 MB) for the same cost.
It was a pretty sweet BBS for its day. Quite advanced. In its heyday, the board had over 300 registered users and two phone lines. It also had a super-fast 19.2Kpbs FastComm modem (1987 price, roughly $500), when most other boards were happy with 2400 baud. I’m frankly not sure where we got all the money, being that I was a senior in high school and Jeff a freshman. Jeff, I, and our brother Allen spent far too many late nights messing with that computer, that’s for sure. The sysop experience translated very nicely to the duties of a sysadmin, though. In a way I can say I have 20 years as a sysadmin.
I’ve had my current email address for at least ten years, I reckon, and I’ve got the spam to prove it. Still, looking back over that time makes me think that broadband really has stagnated lately. Seen any whiz-bang applications lately? Where are the super-fast speeds that will open up now undreamed-of uses for this astonishing resource? I think if we netizens don’t watch out, the world will leave us behind while it defines what the next twenty years will look like.
Have you read the latest I, Cringley column entitled: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen? It speaks directly to your last paragraph there and the outlook isn’t good. 🙁
Very, very timely, Tanner. Thanks!
I will be one of the few, I suppose, who will actually pore over Cringley’s link to the 406-page ebook describing this mess.