23 May
1998
23 May
'98
11:11 p.m.
Bill/Carolyn Pechter wrote:
Unix came along after I was hooked on RT11, RSTS,
VAX/VMS.
One of the things that made Unix successful was it's spread through
universities. Once you get hooked on an OS you tend to want to
stay with it. AT&T was very lucky with Unix and no one's been
able to duplicate the spread except Linux.
If I'd stayed in college instead of enlisting in the USAF due to lack
of funds for things like tuition and food, chances are I would have
gotten into the DEC systems at Georgia Tech.
(Now I'm at Lucent Technologies in Holmdel and
I'm being pushed to NT
and Microsoft OS stuff... 8-( )
Yeah. I still regret assembling that NT network at AT&T Corporate
Security in Bridgewater, but that's where I was sent by my boss at
the Lincroft (GIS) facility a few years back, and I _still_ have
that damned addiction to food.
The problem is I need to be "MS Word and MS Excel
bug and file compatible"
to do my job (Sys Admin)... this gets me to using Win95 on my
desktop.
At Prudential in Roseland last year, my desktop was running Redhat
Linux with Caldera WABI -- so I was able to get away with it almost
unnoticed running the 16-bit MS Office and Lotus Notes modules. Of
_course_ that was contrary to corporate standards.
(I know NT's better -- but the @##$%&^*
desktop's a 486 with 16MB memory).
NT's better than what? (I have NT Server on my desk at work now,
and I can't lose it because nobody's come out with a Linux driver
for the plug & play version of token ring card I've got -- the rest
of the building is 100 Mb Ethernet, but _my_ lab is still token ring
and probably will be for longer than this contract lasts. (I gotta
get away, after all these years as a Sysadmin, I got roped into doing
software QA again -- been there, done that, burned the t-shirt).
Oh, OBclassicmp -- at the Lincroft NJ AT&T facility two years ago,
there was at least one 3B1 still in use in a lab I couldn't access
but could see through the door, and at Prudential in Roseland there
must be several hundred IBM PS2 Model 80's that they haven't
figured out how to throw away.
--
Ward Griffiths
They say that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Of course, the main reason they cuddle up is to screw somebody else.
Michael Flynn, _Rogue Star_