My first girlfriend, Kate, bought an old VW Bug for $200 from someone on Page Mill Road up the hill from Palo Alto.
I drove her up there in my Toyota Corolla that I later rolled over on Summit Road. I didn't realize I was upside down until I heard a scraping sound from the roof and saw the top of the windshield crinkling.
Apparently that was a thing with the 1970s era Corollas. Several years later a buddy's girlfriend who I had a secret crush on rolled her Toyota too.
With the car upside down, someone drove up, we gave it a mighty push and rolled it back on its feet! Then someone else stopped by and held a joint out his car window and said, "You look like you could use a toke."
Back to the Bug. I followed Kate down the hill into town and noticed she wasn't slowing down much around the turns. Then we got to Junipero Serra Blvd and she didn't stop at the red light. A pickup trick sideswiped the Bug and that got it to stop.
The only real damage to the Bug was a front fender, so we bought a new one at a junkyard and bolted it on.
Besides the brakes, the engine wasn't running so great either. We bought a carburetor rebuild kit and got it running much smoother.
Emboldened by those successes, I decided to rebuild the engine too. I was a member of the Briarpatch auto repair collective, where you could rent a spot in the shop and use their tools to do your own work, or pay their mechanic to do it.
I got the engine torn apart, with nuts and bolts and parts strewn across the shop floor.
Then I realized I was in way over my head and had no idea where everything was supposed to go. I asked the mechanic if he could take over. He looked at the mess, shook his head, and said "I'll do it, but this is the worst way to get a job."
We named our cars in those days. The Bug was named Gus, and later I got an MGB-GT that I named Maggie. And after that, a Fiat 124 Spyder which already had a cool name.
Spyder developed a different brake problem. I think there were air bubbles in the brake lines that expanded as they warmed up. Then the brakes would slowly and gradually clamp down. You'd be driving on level ground and find yourself having to press down more on the gas, as if you were driving uphill. And then the the car would come to a complete stop.
Instead of getting the brake lines flushed and fixed, I did the sensible thing: Each wheel had a brake bleeder valve, and I started carrying a combination wrench that fit those valves. When the car stopped, I loosened one of the bleeder valves and brake fluid spurt out onto the ground. This relieved the pressure in the brake lines and I continued on my way.
Kate and I also had a thing for the Porsche 914. We knew it was a joint venture between Volkswagen and Porsche, so we scrambled up those two names. When we saw one on the highway, we'd call out "There's a Vorp!"
I worked for Peter Kirstein for many years - he always had wonderful stories to tell.
In the article Peter talks about the temporary import license for the original ARPAnet equipment. The delayed VAT and duty bill for this gear prevented anyone else taking over the UK internet in the early days because the bill would have then become due. But he didn't mention that eventually if the original ARPAnet equipment was ever scrapped, the bill would also become due.
When I was first at UCL in the mid 1980s until well into the 90s, all that equipment was stored disused in the mens toilets in the basement. Eventually Peter decided someone had to do something about it, but he couldn't afford the budget to ship all this gear back to the US. Peter always seemed to delight in finding loopholes, so he pulled some strings. Peter was always very well connected - UCL even ran the .int and nato.int domains for a long time. So, at some point someone from UCL drove a truck full of obsolete ARPAnet gear to some American Air Force base in East Anglia that was technically US territory. Someone from the US air force gave them a receipt, and the gear was officially exported. And there it was left, in the US Air Force garbage. Shame it didn't end up in a museum, but that would have required paying the VAT bill.
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.
I bought my 1040st, and a dot matrix printer, with most of my first year's student loan. (Almost all of it.)
I was so embarrassed I told no one, even my girlfriend at first. It was a big expensive secret. My car was a Chevette, with a bad tranny. Anyone in their right mind would have bought a better car.
Not one teacher could differentiate type written papers, from dot matrix. Besides the fear of public speaking, I always worried a teacher would find out I didn't write my paper on a twpewritter.
I tried to get my girlfriend to like it, but it was a big No. I remember drawing, in Paint, a penis. I even got it to vibrate. (It was not easy back then.)
She thought it was cute, and we had sexy time, but she didn't like the machine. I could just tell she didn't like my computer.
In retrospect--maybe she thought I should spend that kind of money on her?. I remember thinking, I'm a glad about equal rights. After all she was from a wealthy family, and I was poor. (sorry about reminiscing.)
Now most of you think it was my dick pic, but it wasen't. I think she thought the computer was nerdy?
She wasn't happy with my Bullmastiff either, but I loved my dog. She didn't like it when my dog had her period. She once said to me, "It's the dog, or me?". I didn't say anything, but my Elsa was my family. It was no decision to be made. I would have died for that dog.
I don't think we ever liked each other, but boy was she attractive.
She's now some big wig at a computer company, and consultes on computing.
I only bought it for word processing.
I wasen't a computer guy. I just knew at the time college was a joke, and if I was going to write all those useless papers; I wasen't going to do it on a IBM, with Whitout.
I felt like I was cheating.
Got my degrees. Had a nervous breakdown. The world seemed grey, and depressing.
I got tired of looking at that horrid beige idle computer on my desk one day, and tossed it all. (I'm color blind, but thought that beige was horrid.)
I wish I kept it now though.
(I miss my dog, and computer. My girlfriend not so much, but she was stunning. Way out of my league.)
Satire is not a tool for change. In fact the opposite as laughter sublimates the emotions that would otherwise lead to action (cf Orwell’s 1984).
However people are not always in a position to change things and satire can be a useful outlet for venting, but culturally can also be good for providing talking points.
Southpark and the Onion strike a chord with me the others less so, I think because they believe that they are agents for change.
I love John Oliver though. He follows up his rants with some sensible ideas sometimes. Not everyone’s cup of tea though for sure.
> but business processes that rely on spreadsheets certainly do not
I wonder if this migration from spreadsheets to databases is what helps ossify business culture in older companies. With spreadsheets, change and iteration are easy with fast cycles. With a database, change is a pain and iteration cycles are very long since everything has to though multiple stages of review, approval, and implementation.
A lot of programmers would rather write tools for other programmers than for non-programmer end users. It's the target market that they know best, and it's most prestigious.
I wish more of those bright engineers would try to solve problems for other users rather than re-re-re-re-re-optimizing the life of their colleagues. But writing code for users involves, among other things, knowing something about users, which is more bogged down and less fun.
I drove her up there in my Toyota Corolla that I later rolled over on Summit Road. I didn't realize I was upside down until I heard a scraping sound from the roof and saw the top of the windshield crinkling.
Apparently that was a thing with the 1970s era Corollas. Several years later a buddy's girlfriend who I had a secret crush on rolled her Toyota too.
With the car upside down, someone drove up, we gave it a mighty push and rolled it back on its feet! Then someone else stopped by and held a joint out his car window and said, "You look like you could use a toke."
Back to the Bug. I followed Kate down the hill into town and noticed she wasn't slowing down much around the turns. Then we got to Junipero Serra Blvd and she didn't stop at the red light. A pickup trick sideswiped the Bug and that got it to stop.
The only real damage to the Bug was a front fender, so we bought a new one at a junkyard and bolted it on.
Besides the brakes, the engine wasn't running so great either. We bought a carburetor rebuild kit and got it running much smoother.
Emboldened by those successes, I decided to rebuild the engine too. I was a member of the Briarpatch auto repair collective, where you could rent a spot in the shop and use their tools to do your own work, or pay their mechanic to do it.
I got the engine torn apart, with nuts and bolts and parts strewn across the shop floor.
Then I realized I was in way over my head and had no idea where everything was supposed to go. I asked the mechanic if he could take over. He looked at the mess, shook his head, and said "I'll do it, but this is the worst way to get a job."
We named our cars in those days. The Bug was named Gus, and later I got an MGB-GT that I named Maggie. And after that, a Fiat 124 Spyder which already had a cool name.
Spyder developed a different brake problem. I think there were air bubbles in the brake lines that expanded as they warmed up. Then the brakes would slowly and gradually clamp down. You'd be driving on level ground and find yourself having to press down more on the gas, as if you were driving uphill. And then the the car would come to a complete stop.
Instead of getting the brake lines flushed and fixed, I did the sensible thing: Each wheel had a brake bleeder valve, and I started carrying a combination wrench that fit those valves. When the car stopped, I loosened one of the bleeder valves and brake fluid spurt out onto the ground. This relieved the pressure in the brake lines and I continued on my way.
Kate and I also had a thing for the Porsche 914. We knew it was a joint venture between Volkswagen and Porsche, so we scrambled up those two names. When we saw one on the highway, we'd call out "There's a Vorp!"