[sdiy] 20th anniversary :-)

[Phillip Harbison]

Neil Johnson wrote:
> Reminds me a little bit of Gene Spafford's description
> of usenet!

I remember Gene from his days at GaTech. I ran the first
public access Usenet node in The Rocket City and Gene
was kind enough to provide my news feed and he set it up
where his servers called me. I probably don't have to
tell you how much $$$ that saved me in 1984.

I also remember the great renaming, and when we could
get all the netnews we wanted over a 300 baud modem on
a PDP-11/23 (only 68KB total*) during the night.

I don't remember when I joined this illustrious group.
I do recall my first months (years?) were in lurk mode
so I doubt the answer exists in the archives. While it
was synthesizers that lured me into electronics, I took
the digital option (the same courses make up a computer
engineering degree, not electrical) and spent the next
38 years shoveling bits and bytes.

*the 11/23 lacked "split I&D". Other PDPs could address
128KB as long as it was 64K instructions and 64K data.
Modern microcontrollers have more memory than that!

-- 
Phil Harbison