#14, RE: Elder Days Story Time
Posted by JeanneHedge on Mar-14-14 at 09:10 PM
In response to message #13
>So I did what any self-respecting whacker would do, wrote it down,
>went home, waited for the library to close (figuring there was
>probably only the one phone line at the other end), and investigated
>further. At the time, the only computer I owned that had a modem was
>an AT&T PC7300 Unix PC, so
>I fired that up and plugged in the number.
>
>I forget the exact details of how the resulting connection worked, but
>whatever was at the other end of the phone line was just a simple
>widget designed to relay the connection to Orono, where it went into
>the system that they were using to aggregate all the remote URSUS POPs
>onto the campus network... which happened to be a Xylogics Annex II
>serial comm server, the same thing WPI used for its dial-up pool when
>I was a student there. I knew how to talk to those (within a
>couple-three years I would in fact be working for Xylogics, but
>that's a different story), so I ignored the MOTD telling me how to
>connect to URSUS and asked it what else it could see. The list that
>came back was a long one and included a lot of stuff I neither knew
>nor cared about,
"Shall we play a game?"
>I didn't have an account on the CS SPARCs at the time (that wouldn't
>happen until school actually started and I was able to go and prove to
>their operators that I wasn't going to wreck anything with my
>humanities-major hamfists), but I was able to spend an idyllic(?)
>summer basking (whenever the local library was closed, which in
>practical terms was most of the time) in the glories of CP/CMS and IRC
>via BITNET on the University's ancient-even-then IBM System/360
>mainframe.
>
>At 1200 baud.
Yeesh, my first dial-up was 14.4K, and that was considered a rocketship at the time. I can't imagine doing anything at 1200. Must have taken *hours*... (BBS at 14.4 seemingly took hours back then) Jeanne
|
