Same at my University in the mid-90s. I was the CS department network admin and we had an entire /24 to use as we liked.
At least it taught me how to detect attempted hacks early because every machine had to be monitored for attacks.
I just looked and they still have a /16 (65k public addresses). This is for a school that has maybe 15k students, not all of them living on the campus. And I’m sure most of the computing takes place in the cloud now anyway.
I know there are a lot of places who were on the Net early besides the military that have excess address capacity.
Same here. Trying to type anything on that thing (especially copying the code out of magazines) was just horrible.
Edit: just remembered something that made it even worse than just the awful keys - all reserved words for BASIC were tokenized in some way where you had to use a control-key sequence to tell it PRINT, for instance, instead of being able to type P,R,I,N,T <enter>.
Back in the day I upped the RAM
and put a set of virtual machines on our VP of Marketing’s laptop with copies of our staging server, db, data… the works. He just started it up and browsed away.
He loved doing demos without a network connection etc. Back then WiFi was always restricted and hot spots too slow.
This actually can become a problem in the future. Here in Montgomery County, Maryland there was an old rail line converted to a bike path but always with the intention of adding light rail to a portion of it.
20 years later, they started the project and the local cycling groups are upset because their path has to be split and rerouted in places to support the new line. Delayed the thing many years as a result.
I often point out an anecdote from my early e-commerce days in the late 90s where a customer wanted in-store pickup like everyone else they saw on the web doing. But they just had purchased an already outdated (but IBM so nobody got fired) Point Of Sale system for 40 stores which did inventory management as a batch at the close of business each day over Frame Relay lines or even dialup. The concept of a VPN was alien to them.
Since they were selling some limited edition high priced items that were allocated to each store, there were often only 1 or 2 at a given location of what would be a popular item.
So you can imagine when I explained that the huge investment in the legacy system just a few years before was a big blocker for ‘pick up in store’.
I think we had to hardcode something that would remove an item for sale online if there were less than 2 left or some awful hack like that to reduce customer complaints.
Yeah I was starting to use PCs during the Apple II era so we didn’t have 8 inch disks anymore by then in my house. But I do remember seeing them in labs with VAX systems.
But those specialized music workstations all were custom designed so the parts etc. used were based on older standards I’m sure. Pre-ISA bus too I would guess.
Nowadays, even a lot of embedded devices like IOT things are running effectively a Linux OS on them so the economies of scale are enormous compared to the early 80s music gear.
I imagine Roland and other similar companies had their own OS or base platform they used on those earlier workstations that eventually had screens you could attach.
Oh please tell this old Genesis fan some more. Gabriel was a very forward thinking musician from a technology perspective. See this clip for his demonstration of an early sampler [0]
I was in the BBS scene in Baltimore in the mid-to-late 80s and totally relate. I think about some of the things I used to pull off on an Apple //e and then a 286 PC along with school and a job and wonder how I had time to do it.
Youthful energy? Or maybe the limitations of the tech made us work cleverly and thus made us prouder of the result.
Our computer lab in college had these NEC/AT&T 386 desktops that had RJ-11 keyboard ports that didn’t work anywhere else.