Ben, you bring back happy memories. Thank you for that!
I have (had, I didn't actively keep it and I think it is gone now), an email where you routed to it by using "!" rather than "@" sign ;) I built ethernet networks using thick ethernet and vampire screws, and I built them using "thin" ethernet that had to be daisy chained. And of course I built arcnet.
I remember taunting my mom (really joking since I knew the answer well in advance) that there is a great computer on sale - it's a great deal through my university's computer science depart and it is $5,000 off the regular price (the discount was 6 months rent back then). To which my mom promptly replied, "You don't need it!" I said, "But you didn't even let me tell you about this computer." She replied, "Anything that has a $5k discount is not something that you need." That computer was a Sun Workstation.
At one point in time our basement looked like a computer museum as I collected various discarded hardware from work and school. I had a VAX 780. I had hard drives that were encased in glass and you could see the actuator move across the platters. I kept 5MB and 10MB hard drives as momentos - they were the size of a shoebox. There were tape drives (though I never liked them). And I saw line printers.
My own first hard drive was 40MB. This was larger than the OS could address it and you had to partition it. More than that, you had to first do a low level format and then a high level format. My friends gathered around just to see how long it would take to format 40MB. Being a geek, I had profiled my application usage patterns and used that info to optimize where the each application and data block should reside so that by the time the software was done processing the data it had just read, they next block had spun just under the read head and would be ready to be read. I also had more RAM than I needed. I used some 300k of RAM as a virtual disk and upon boot up moved the most frequently accessed parts of the OS to it so that the system would run fast. Think of it as a precursor to Microsoft's optimizer mixed with hybrid drives, decades before either would exist.
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Regarding cryptos - I've been thinking for sometime that the ultimate reserve currency will be a stable coin pegged to a trade adjusted basket of futures contracts. Conceptually this is what Zuckerberg's crypto tried to be - for which the congress chewed his ass and made sure that all the credit cards and banks left him in the cold.
How do you see cryptos shaping up? |
