11 Jan
2017
11 Jan
'17
5:25 p.m.
I give up on prediction. I never thought UNIX would have lasted this long. Personal
computing bounces back and forth between local devices and remote services every decade or
so.
I will offer a few interesting observations. Back when I was still at BRL (somewhere
around 1983 probably), one of my coworkers walked in and said that in a few years
they'd be able to give me a computer as powerful as a VAX, and it will sit on my
desk, and I’ll have exclusive use of it and be happy. I pointed out that this was
unlikely (the being happy part), as my expectations would increase as time goes on.
Ron’s Rule Of Computing: “I need a computer ‘this’ big” (which is accompanied by holding
my arms out about the width of a VAX 780 CPU cabinet.
Hanging up on the wall in one of the machine rooms I administered was a sign comparing the
computer that had sat there (the ENIAC) to a then HP 65 calculator. The HP 65 would
have been an incredible tool to the ENIAC guys, but now It seems way dated.
A lot of computer discussion mentioned what would happen if a hacker had access to a CRAY
computer. Could he perhaps brute force the crypt in the UNIX password file? Oddly,
when BRL got their first Cray (an X/MP preempted from Apple’s delivery slot), I was given
pretty much as much time as I wanted to try to vectorize the crypt routine. It wasn’t
particularly easy, and we had other parallel processors that were easier to program that
were doing a better job at the hack for less money. I actually signed for the BRL Cray
2 but it didn’t get installed until after I left.
Ron’s Rule of Software Deployment: “Stop making cutovers on major holidays.”
The dang government kept doing things like the long leader conversion on the Arpanet and
the TCP/IP changeover on Jan 1. It drove me nuts that our entire group ended up working
over the holidays to bring the new systems up. At one point when they were rejiggering
the USENET groups, the proposal was to do it on Labor Day weekend. I pointed out (this
was the Atlanta UUG) that it violated the above rule AND was particularly bad because many
of the USENET system admins were going to be back in Atlanta for the World Science Fiction
Convention that weekend.
And finally, Ron’s Rule of Electrical Engineering: “If two things can be plugged into
each other, some fool will do so. You better make it work, or at least benignly fail
when it happens.”
Somewhere I have a cord that one of my employees made me which has a 110V plug on one side
and an RJ-11 on the other (fortunately it is non functional).