Recently in Computer history Category

The magazine Popular Science and Popsci.com have released their annual list of The Worst Jobs in Science for 2007.

It is worth mentioning that working for Microsoft as a security team member is ranked sixth in the list, just slightly better than Whale-Feces Researcher or Forensic Entomologist.

The bottom-10:

Number 10: Whale-Feces Researcher
They scoop up whale dung, then dig through it for clues

Number 9: Forensic Entomologist
Solving murders by studying maggots

Number 8: Olympic Drug Tester
When your job is drug testing the world’s top athletes, there’s no way to win

Number 7: Gravity Research Subject
They’re strapped down so astronauts can blast off

Number 6: Microsoft Security Grunt
Like wearing a big sign that reads “Hack Me”

Number 5: Coursework Carcass Preparer
They kill, pickle, and bottle the critters that schoolkids cut up

Number 4: Garbologist
Think Indiana Jones— in a Dumpster

Number 3: Elephant Vasectomist
When your patient is Earth’s largest land animal, sterilization is a big job

Number 2: Oceanographer
Nothing but bad news, day in and day out

Number 1: Hazmat Diver
They swim in sewage. Enough said.

The adm3a was first created around 1977. I've never seen an older terminal -- these were the oldest ones when I used vi and nroff to write papers on good ol' Unix B at U.C. Santa Cruz in the mid- to late '80s. If there was a VT100 or better terminal available, that's what I and just about everybody else used. But during crunch time, the adm3a -- in quantity -- was always there. The keyboard was kind of crappy, screen a bit blurry, the response a bit slow, but it was a freakin' workhorse, the VW Beetle of "dumb" terminals in the '80s, and I suspect beyond.

Speaking of U.C. Santa Cruz's Unix B, here's a tidbit from UCSC computer guru Scott Brookie, who wrote the classic manual, "Unix for Luddites," which taught me how to get things done on Unix (note ... this is the first I've heard about the gay-sex angle to Scott's involvement with Unix, so if you aren't OK reading about that, don't click on the link above):

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Brookie: ... Coming back, computers have just been invented, or have just become a somewhat mass tool, at least in academia--and there was a whole community online of gay men. It's interesting to me -- this is a whole other subject -- but I feel like I've been a part of gay men's online communities since the very beginning. The very beginning for me was at UC Santa Cruz, when your community was within the campus. The networks weren't very powerful, they didn't go very far, the internet wasn't invented yet. But all the gay people could get online, whoever could get online at night and flirt with each other and fight with each other.

Letellier: So there was an online even then?

Brookie: Yes. Computers were, how to say...

Letellier: It's way pre-internet, right? You're talking early-1980s.

Brookie: Not way pre-internet, not way . Basically, there was one computer. Has anyone talked about UNIX-B? Back then, every student was eligible to have an account on a UNIX machine where you could send and receive email and write papers. It was one computer about the size of a washing machine, and it sat in the Communications Building, and you connected to it with terminals from all over campus. Somebody wrote a program called Forum; it was basically a chat room, an early, primitive chat room. I remember one guy's name was Stuart something or other. He was "agayboy." Now that was kind of out-there, to take the name "agayboy." People would get online and flirt and so on, and you didn't get off campus, because the internet wasn't really active or the internet wasn't really quite there yet, you could send mail but... Oh, I know why. You could send mail off campus because every couple of hours computers would phone each other, but you couldn't in real time talk to anybody off campus, but you could on campus. So a lot of flirting, a lot of fighting, probably a certain amount of hooking up. I hooked up using that, come to think of it, in the Merrill Steno Pool where I had a little office. [laughter] A three-way. It was fun.

But it happened that I had discovered computers while I was in Boston, and I really liked them, and I got a job tutoring faculty on the early UNIX machines. I discovered I really liked that and I used my writing skills to write computer manuals, one called UNIX For Luddites, which is still used on campus. That got me a job in computing and I liked it, and stayed on campus.

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I'm sure I've still got my copy of "Unix for Luddites" (it was a photocopied thing that cost less than $2 at the campus bookstore), but who knows where it is?

I didn't know about the Forum program, but you could type in "who" at the Unix command line and see who was logged on to Unix B, then type "talk" and their login, and start what -- 15 years later -- became to be known as an IM session. That's one of the reasons that AOL and the Internet weren't quite the revelation to me that they were to many others -- I'd been doing all that stuff with networked computing in the '80s. Getting on BBSes in the late-'80s/early '90s, which pretty much worked like Unix, was a further prelude to the networked world of the Web.

Start your Apple II re-education right here.

One of my first jobs -- early '80s -- was automating a fund-raising operation, with a database of potential contributors, mail merge capability and computer-printed labels ... all done with an Apple II+ and an Epson dot-matrix printer. I can't for the life of me remember whether or not it was running AppleWorks. Must've been.

Just like Woz says, Apple II's don't break down.