Everything Else

Slightly remodelled:

The greenery definitely adds something.

It helps a lot and so does a long wheelbase. I rode small 400/500 class bikes for years and I was intimidated to get my dream bike but I finally did. At first it did feel like a Mack (not that I know what one of those feels like, but everything is relative right?) but pretty soon I couldn't stand to ride small bikes anymore. A local Moto Guzzi shop was giving free test rides and even though the bikes were sprightly and turned like a dream I felt very exposed perched out there alone in the breeze. It was like there was no bike, on those you sit way high. I prefer sitting down, in a Harley and using the forwards. Been in lots of bad weather from floods to hurricanes and big is what you want if you happen to be on a bike in unfavorable circumstances on the road.

Never rode a touring bike but they look like they would get plenty of sail effect.

I would like to show pics of my office but I'm pretty sure I have nothing guys on this board would be interested in

Hey now, I thought this was "home" office only

my space is never this clean, normally...
and if we look to the right...

Recently a photo of my "office" setup back in 1990 came to light. For some perverse reason this is the only photo I've found of my IRIS 3130. Must be fairly early in my stewardship, because fairly soon I cut a hole in the floor and put the machine in the basement and just had the keyboard/mouse/monitor there...

Wow, nice one smj. I like the HD spindle too.

Well, terrifying to think how long ago that was - I only bear a vague resemblance to the kid in the chair now.

I still have some of those hard drive platters, but gave at least half away. At lunch one day we both left our office - one of us should have stayed to handle calls, but... - and walked to the Surplus Property Office. A wonderful dark and dusty place with all manner of old stuff piled up. I probably paid $10-20 for an 8-10 platter pack and proceeded to start disassembling the spindle and bearings in the office that afternoon.

There was another day where we invented some reason to head to one of the storage rooms in the basement of Building 10. I forget what we were ostensibly looking for - what I remember is finding literally pallets of printouts I believed came from MULTICS systems, though I couldn't say what all that PL/I was actually part of - the OS, some libraries, or an application/project.

What was the 3130 used for?

It is obvious, by the hair, that this person can't be you!

Sadly, I ended up just goofing around with it. GL2-W (what they called the System III UNIX port) was already fading away by 1990, and I had no docs on the OS or on IRIS GL. I found it difficult to translate much of what I was doing during the day with Ultrix and SunOS, each with plain X straight from the Consortium. So I fiddled with and trivially modified the GL demo programs, tried to get UUCP working, recorded a lot of sorties with "dog" to fly against, and struggled to get emacs to build.

When the monitor died after a few months, I decided the beast wasn't doing me much good since I couldn't really come to grips with the software. So I sold it on, only recovering my $2k, and bought a Sun-3/140, classic Sun-3 storage shoebox, a 300MB CDC Imprimis drive, and a Telebit Trailblazer. Tempting to think I should have kept the 3130, but unless I was going to seriously attack the graphics it was probably the right call for that period.

When you can't rack'em, stack'em.

Lay 'em down or stack 'em rack 'em!

Oh, stewardess, I speak jive.

Looks good, Pentium! What's the Origin up top hooked up to?

I think he's using a NUMA cable rather than the 'router jumper' normally found on desksides.

Hrm -- it looked to me like it might be two different cables. I haven't gotten close to any O2k gear in a long time, but I was wondering if he might have managed to hook the O2000 up to one or two O200s at the top of the stack...