strangest systems I've sent email from

On Thu, 21 Apr 2016, John Willis wrote: Yes. It was (and kinda still is) awesome. The coolest thing about it is that, unlike using PPP or SLIP, you don't need valid IPs as endpoints. Slirp was like a poor mans dynamic one-to-many NAT before there was such a beast. That was a great thing when you were a college student without any juice to get an IP from the IT beast that ran the school. Yep. I miss that too. I used to run such an ISP in the 90's and we did exactly as you say. We also ran a finger servers everywhere (and no, not one with a bunch of security problems). People used to use that in cool ways, too (bots, cool services, vending machine interfaces, etc..). <rant> The simple fact is that most folks are too apathetic and ignorant to care about such things anymore. The Internet is a large, but still textbook case of what happens when you let business-weasels in on something good. They "monetize" it and turn it into a combination strip-mall, casino, theatre, porn-shop. Of course, the Internet wouldn't be what it is without said weasels, (certainly not as large) but I think I'd be pretty okay with that. I'd be okay without 80% of Internet traffic being video, too. I guess that makes me a curmudgeon (but I've always hated TV and I resent the forces trying to morph the Internet into on-demand cable television). Yea yeah, I know I'm just peeing in the wind to say it, but there it is. I remember when computers used to come with a programming manual and schematics for the machine, too. Even mid-level stereo equipment would often come with schematics. That's because those folks (the generation before me, I'm a gen-X unit) had a significant population of people who cared about such things and could run a soldering iron. Just like there didn't used to be any such thing as Computer Science. Ie.. you learned electrical engineering (ie.. how the darn chips themselves worked, first) or some other technical discipline then applied that to computing. Now, most colleges want to teach you Java and call you a computer scientist. We get college grads all the time and I'm shocked to see how little they've actually been taught relating to computing. They are marginally more useful than high school kids and that's only because they don't show up quite as late for work. I'm not saying everything was perfect in the 80's or 90's. I mean, some CS professors in the 90's were teaching Oberon, LISP dialects, or Smalltalk. Then if you ever uttered the (completely true) phrase "not commercially viable" they'd launch into some diatribe about how these languages taught you some kind of special spiritual meta-programming that'd ultimately path the path for you to become some kind of code-God (like them?). That is, as long as you bought their 18th edition $160 book (only at the college bookstore). So, no, things were never perfect, and people had to try and do work with Windows for Workgroups 3.11. :-) Point is, I don't have blinders on, but there are *reasons* why I'm nostalgic. Just like I'm nostalgic for the days (before my time) when a person could earn interest on their savings. I'm not saying things were perfect, but some aspects of the past were definitely better. </rant> -Swift