7 Feb
2015
7 Feb
'15
7:04 p.m.
On Feb 7, 2015, at 6:35 PM, Brent Hilpert <hilpert
at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
Hmm, used by a sub-contractor to BC Hydro perhaps? I'd think BC Hydro in-house would
have tended to be doing such stuff on its mainframes. I could see an engineering
department having it's own mini, but payroll would have been more likely to have been
handled centrally.
Did it travel far (from BC) to make it into your hands?
Because of the combined usage, I suspect it was from one of the many subcontractors
working on the project.
It didn?t travel far - I?m in Kelowna. I under-estimated how long ago I got the machine.
Replaying the timeline in my mind, it was 1987 or 1988. A friend of a friend contacted me
because he knew I was into electronics and computers, and said that his dad had this ?old
computer thing? in a barn that he wanted moved. It was going to go to the dump if I didn?t
pick it up. It was this huge blue rack cabinet with a smoked plexiglass front cover. It
was *HEAVY*. I begged another friend to borrow a pick-up truck, and we hauled it out of
the barn, and into my second-floor apartment.
This was before the recognizable internet, so trying to find information was very
difficult. After putting out feelers, I found out that there was an ex-MAI technician in
Vernon (the next town over). That was a fruitful meeting that got me a whole pile of
documentation and other information for the machine - enough to restore it and get it up
and running.
In fact, I guess that machine is what put me on my career path today - that ex-MAI
technician and I formed our community?s first ISP a couple of years later, and my
employment has been directly connected to the Internet ever since. It pains me that the
machine and I parted company, and I?d love to find another one.
Ian