[cpr]

That March 1977 map always brings back a flood of memories to this old-timer.

Happy nights spent hacking in the Harvard graduate computer center next to the PDP-1/PDP-10 (Harv-1, Harv-10), getting calls on the IMP phone in the middle of the night from the BBN network operations asking me to reboot it manually as it had gotten wedged...

And, next to me, Bill Gates writing his first assembler/linker/simulator for the Altair 8080... (I tried talking him out of this microcomputer distraction -- we have the whole world of mainframes at our fingertips! -- without success.)

(Edit:) We also would play the game of telnet-till-you-die, going from machine to machine around the world (no passwords on guest accounts in the early days), until the connection died somewhere along the way.

Plus, once the hackers came along, Geoff Steckel (systems guy on the PDP-10) wrote a little logger to record all incoming guests keystrokes on an old teletype, so we could watch them attempting to hack the system.

[Suzuran]

On the subject of that last item, it is to my amusement that modern internet scanners are completely confused by a 1970s operating system. They record a "hit" when they find an open telnet port, but then get stuck because there is no recognizable prompt after the system banner message prints. They find a running FTP server but get confused that it does not use recognizable filesystem semantics. They get even more confused when it ignores passwords because the system has none. By all rules and tenets of security doctrine this system should be the internet equivalent to a smoking crater, instantly and utterly destroyed by advanced security threats beyond the imaginations of its creators.

PS: It is also amusing that an unmodified 1970s SMTP server can still deliver messages to gmail and receive responses back, given only the provision of a SPF record. Sadly, the coming mandatory requirement for DKIM will finally make this no longer a possibility.

PPS: It is much less amusing to attempt to read the gmail user's responses on a terminal.

[lxgr]

Surprisingly, as I discovered earlier today, Gmail (still? newly?) supports sending plaintext-only messages!

[Suzuran]

Really? How?

[lxgr]

"Plain text mode", hiding in the "kebab menu" (i.e. the three vertically stacked dots) on the bottom of the message composition window. It even seems to stay on as a default once activated!

Very useful for the few times I actually need to send email to mailing lists with strong opinions about newfangled MIME multipart messages :)

[Suzuran]

Yes, that's very useful, thanks for pointing that out.

[ManuelKiessling]

Dear Sir, could you just, you know, continue writing? I just love these stories, would love to hear more!

[cpr]

Nah, it'd come out too much as "almost famous".

I did manage to avoid being Microsoft employee #12 or so (my buddy Bob Greenberg was #8, I think?, and encouraged me to come join them), and Adobe employee #8 (I knew Chuck Geschke from some earlier work done as an undergrad extending his PhD thesis to Harvard's extensible language ECL), due to various life circumstances. I guess God didn't want be to be a spoiled rotten billionaire.

Another near miss was co-consulting with Len Bosack at HP setting up Lisp Machine networking, and wondering how the heck the then-nascent Cisco was ever going to sell more than a few hundred routers (based on the same Sun-1 boards developed by Andy Bechtolstein at Standford that we used at Imagen, the first typeset-quality laser printers, a spinoff from Don Knuth's research at Stanford) to universities and government labs.

As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.

[ManuelKiessling]

> As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.

Well, I wasn't even close to the technology nexus that you describe, neither in time nor in place, but this really resonates with me.

I RELIABLY manage to "not get" stuff in my own bubble, not because I'm too far away from it or because I don't understand it, but the exact opposite.

For example, I clearly remember how in the early 2000s I thought/felt "well, of course Amazon/eBay/Google is a great business, but everyone is already using them anyway, so what's the upside" and similiar other Thoughts Of Great Wisdom And Foresight.

[Suzuran]

You worked at Imagen? I had to write a partial Impress emulator a little while ago so I could make waste paper from my lispm. It only supported the image format since that was the only thing the lispm sent when printing the screen, but it beat the heck out of taking photos of a CRT.

[cpr]

Yes, helped start it (first or second employee back in 1980(?)).

Wild! I had forgotten the LispMs had Impress support; I think that came out of the time when we worked with Janet Walker, head of documentation at Symbolics.

[mromanuk]

Yes, please! I love these comments on HN, this is blog material.

[coffeecantcode]

If this man wrote a book I’d read it.