Things we have lost

[HRM Resident]

I discussed with a friend yesterday what our generation has
"lost." I realize some of these things are still around, but many
are gone completely, or their use is dwindling.

Cable TV

Over-the-air TV

AM radio completely

Postcards

Anything analog

Newspapers

Books (replaced mainly by eReaders)

TV and radio news/weather (replaced primarily by websites)

Typewriters

Cursive writing

Horses, other than for sport

Most small grocery stores

Landline telephones

Film cameras (and even digital ones)

That's the quick list. Anything else?
--
HRM Resident

[James Warren]

You can buy a rotary black phone on Amazon for $62. I don't know
why you would though.

[lucr...@florence.it]

On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 10:08:17 -0400, HRM Resident <hrm...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Can't go with radio, listen to hours of it, fm mainly but still old
fashioned on a transistor radio.

Haven't had cable or newspapers for years.

[HRM Resident]

lucr...@florence.it writes:

>
> Can't go with radio, listen to hours of it, fm mainly but still old
> fashioned on a transistor radio.
>
> Haven't had cable or newspapers for years.

FM still thrives, but AM is gone in 99% of the places. Try AM 880
from about 3 PM until well after dark and you usually can get WCBS from New
York because of some weird propagation. I don't think there are many
(any?) AM stations left in the Maritimes.

As regards to rotary dial phones, I have two that are going to the
recycle bin next week. If anyone wants them, speak now!

--
HRM Resident

[James Warren]

I had one in 1985 that came with a 300 BAUD dial-up modem
that I used with a VT-100 terminal. Bleeding edge stuff!

[HRM Resident]

James Warren <jwwar...@gmail.com> writes:

>
> I had one in 1985 that came with a 300 BAUD dial-up modem
> that I used with a VT-100 terminal. Bleeding edge stuff!
>

It was at the time. The squeal of the modem connecting, etc. were
music to a person's ears. I had almost the same setup. I think Mike
said recently he had a modem 'behind the stove' or thereabouts and amazed
a visitor by connecting to a mainframe in Massachusetts with it. Not sure
if he was using a dumb terminal or a CP/M computer.

300 BAUD was all you needed at the time. It was really something
when they went to 1200 and then 2400 BAUD. I used mine to dial into
computers at work and the old BBS systems that I suppose were the
precursors to Usenet.

--
HRM Resident

[James Warren]

When I upgraded to a 2400 BAUD modem it was too fast for my VT-100
so I has to upgrade the terminal too - a VT--200. I ended up with a 5600
BAUD and then junked it all. It was all good fun.

[Mike Spencer]

HRM Resident <hrm...@gmail.com> writes:

> I think Mike said recently he had a modem 'behind the stove' or
> thereabouts and amazed a visitor by connecting to a mainframe in
> Massachusetts with it. Not sure if he was using a dumb terminal or
> a CP/M computer.

Circa 1990, I had been doing blacksmithing seminars at MIT for several
years. In 1989, a friend who was part of the Visual Computing Group [1]
at Project Athena had arranged for me to have a Unix user account
on the Athena system. That's how I came to Unix, Emacs and thus,
later, Linux.

I was only in Cambridge for a few weeks a year but could do email from
home by dialup, calling Dal, logging into an account there and then
telnet to MIT.

It was when the friend from Athena (who has since immigrated to
Canada, married a NS girl) came to visit and asked if there was some
way he could check his email that the "amazement" occurred. Dial into
Dal, telnet to MIT but log in there as davis, not mspencer.

Osborne I, CP/M, 14" green external monitor (the Osborne had a 4"
built-in but 80 columns on 4" was a killer), US Robotics modem, 2400
bps. There was a comms program for the Osborne that not-quite
emulated a VT 100 and I had written a termcap entry for it so the
Athena end was able to send the right bits. He could run Emacs and
mhmail on the Athena host and have it rendered correctly on the
Osborne screen.

> 300 BAUD was all you needed at the time. It was really something
> when they went to 1200 and then 2400 BAUD.

I once had a DecWriter II hardcopy terminal that someone gave me. It
came with a 300 baud acoustic coupler. Only used to to fool around.
I wanted to set it up in the corner of the kitchen, connected to a
computer so it would type out obscure, bogus spook/military messages
[2] every few minutes but we didn't have room for that.

The Osborne I was very advanced for its time with on-board 2400 bits
hardware. Most micros then were 1200.

[1] http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/user/b/h/bhdavis/www/VCG.html

[2] HRM, if you're using emacs now, do you know about "M-x spook"?

--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

[lucr...@florence.it]

On Wed, 01 Mar 2023 10:19:30 -0400, HRM Resident <hrm...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Wouldn't be much use, haven't had a land line for years now!

[HRM Resident]

Mike Spencer <m...@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> writes:

>
> [2] HRM, if you're using emacs now, do you know about "M-x spook"?

I'm not sure what it does now, but originally it generateed a
random selection of spooky words and phrases, such as "bats", "ghosts",
"skeletons", "witches", "goblins", and so on. However, I haven't
tried it because an Internet search (that hit Reddit, the most
unreliable source of info except for FOX News) suggests it has been
upgraded to generate terrorist related words about bombs, explosives
and city names to tie up the CIA and FBI.

For this reason, I was afraid was try it. I just did and indeed it
generates words in this post that I don't want associated with my name.
I deleted them before sending this.

--
HRM Resident

[HRM Resident]

lucr...@florence.it writes:
>
> Wouldn't be much use, haven't had a land line for years now!
>

We ditched ours about 5 years ago. We'd only kept it because,
historically, landlines worked when the power was off. During a
prolonged outage, the cell phones worked and the landlines did not. So
there was no point in paying to keep an "emergency backup" that didn't
work.

I had one of the rotary dial ones in service for nostalgia
purposes. But they are sort of useless when you hit the menus that want
you to press numbers to select options.

--
HRM Resident

[Mike Spencer]

HRM Resident <hrm...@gmail.com> writes:

> Mike Spencer <m...@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> writes:
>
>> [2] HRM, if you're using emacs now, do you know about "M-x spook"?
>
> I'm not sure what it does now, but originally it generateed a
> random selection of spooky words and phrases, such as "bats", "ghosts",
> "skeletons", "witches", "goblins", and so on. However, I haven't
> tried it because an Internet search (that hit Reddit, the most
> unreliable source of info except for FOX News) suggests it has been
> upgraded to generate terrorist related words about bombs, explosives
> and city names to tie up the CIA and FBI.

That's not quite right. Richard Stallman has always been a species pf
libertarian so his hostility to spooks (in the TLA,
three-letter-agency sense) was early and natural. Remember that when
Stallman was just getting rolling in the late 70s, the Church
Committee was turning up dirt on COINTELPRO, and the TLAs were objects
of derision and ridicule. In that era, the TLAs were doing all sorts
of bumbling but calculatedly devious stuff to identify potential
threats to the 'Mer'can way of life.

So "spook" was a jape that would insert random words thought to be
trigger words of the TLA spooks into email and usenet.

> For this reason, I was afraid was try it. I just did and indeed it
> generates words in this post that I don't want associated with my name.
> I deleted them before sending this.

If you're really paranoid, you should search your system for the
spook.lines file where M-x spook gets it's lines. Probably in

/usr/share/emacs/[VERSION]/etc/spook.lines

if you did a conventional install. Delete the file or update it to
contemporary trigger words.

Because the spook lines come from a file, not from an intelligent
scanning of the net, they're likely to be out of date [1] as far as
TLA spook interest in concerned. You know, "Azov" instead of "Kabul"
or "PLO". They're not funny if they don't have the potential to cause
a clean-shaven, closely cropped agent in shiny black FBI shoes to
break out in a sweat, spring out of his $1200 chair and dash into his
boss's office in a manic swivet, brandishing a print-out and shouting,
"I got one! I got one!"


[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2348061/remember-echelon-.html

[Mike Spencer]

HRM Resident <hrm...@gmail.com> writes:

> I had one of the rotary dial ones in service for nostalgia
> purposes. But they are sort of useless when you hit the menus that want
> you to press numbers to select options.

After that crap became common but long before we dumped the dial
phones for Nortel 2500 sets, I wrote a script that would put the modem
on-line ignoring the absence of dial tone, send the tones for a keyed
number sequence and go off line. Clunky but it did work.

[axemen99]

On Wednesday, March 1, 2023 at 2:30:18 PM UTC-5, Mike Spencer wrote:

Many of the startup companies in Boston were initiated by MIT grads, contagious good people creating jobs.

In 1997, I was offered job from DEC and BBN (with Athena), I decided to take DEC job.

[Mike Spencer]

axemen99 <axem...@gmail.com> writes:

> Many of the startup companies in Boston were initiated by MIT grads,
> contagious good people creating jobs.

Yeah. Exciting place, Boston & Cambridge, if you're of a tech bent.
For a decade, I spent 3 to 4 weeks there (once 6 weeks) each year.
But I always became antsy to get away from the city.

> In 1997, I was offered job from DEC and BBN (with Athena), I decided
> to take DEC job.

Huh. So you went aboard only a year before it sank. Athena wrapped
up as a project around 1991 (5-year grant funding, then a year or two
extension) but BBN is still going strong albeit as a susidiary of
Raytheon.

[HRM Resident]

Mike Spencer <m...@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> writes:

>
> So "spook" was a jape that would insert random words thought to be
> trigger words of the TLA spooks into email and usenet.
>

I never heard of TLAs before, but now that you mention it: CIA,
FBI, NSA, DOJ, IRS. All trouble! Did I miss any?
>
> /usr/share/emacs/[VERSION]/etc/spook.lines
>
I never typed "M-x spook" B4 but looking at that file, I see it
contains words that would get attention. My version seems to have ones
from the 2012-2016 era. They are quite similar to those in the
last sentence or two of the article you posted the URL to.

I tried "M-x spook" just now with this message and it put in a
dandy "spook trap!" I deleted it before sending this.

--
HRM Resident

[HRM Resident]

axemen99 <axem...@gmail.com> writes:

>
> Many of the startup companies in Boston were initiated by MIT grads, contagious good people creating jobs.
>
> In 1997, I was offered job from DEC and BBN (with Athena), I decided to take DEC job.
>

I used a number of DEC VAX systems for about 10 years
. . . everything from big mainframe to mini-VAXs. VMS was one of the
best operating systems written. I think James did a lot of programming
in the VMS environment as well.

--
HRM Resident

[James Warren]

I did! And I agree it was the best OS I have ever used. I think it would
have been a good idea to port it to the PC as an alternative to cmd.exe.

[Mike Spencer]

HRM Resident <hrm...@gmail.com> writes:

> I never heard of TLAs before, but now that you mention it: CIA,
> FBI, NSA, DOJ, IRS. All trouble! Did I miss any?

DIA, DHS, ICE, BATFE. (for values of 3 close enough for government work)

[James Warren]

"TLA" is a TLA itself; the term was almost certainly coined with a certain degree of self-referential humor in mind. Likewise, a four-letter abbreviation is sometimes known as a FLAB (Four Letter ABbreviation), an ETLA or XTLA (Extended TLA), an LFLA (Longer Four Letter Abbreviation) or a TLA/E (TLA/Extended) - although all these are far less common than TLA. In the same vein, VLFLA is a Very Long Five Letter Abbreviation and DETLA is a Doubly-Extended Three Letter Abbreviation.

TLAs became common in the United States during the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (who is frequently referred to as FDR). Terms from this period included NRA for National Recovery Administration, CCC for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and TVA for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Detractors of President Roosevelt's policies called the new agencies "alphabet soup."

http://academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php/Three-letter_acronym

[axemen99]

On Thursday, March 2, 2023 at 11:40:14 PM UTC-5, Mike Spencer wrote:

good riddance!
Bolt had pulled in his MIT colleague Beranek...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytheon_BBN

Almost all companies that I worked for were acquired by another.

"spent 3 to 4 weeks there" - I believe that you enjoyed working with those people with the same brain power, especially your younger days I interviewed for a job at MIT, but I was given a lecture on networking for remote teaching worldwide from MIT.

[Mike Spencer]

axemen99 <axem...@gmail.com> writes:

> "spent 3 to 4 weeks there" [at MIT] - I believe that you enjoyed

> working with those people with the same brain power, especially your
> younger days I interviewed for a job at MIT, but I was given a
> lecture on networking for remote teaching worldwide from MIT.

I applied to attend MIT in 1959. They were professional enough to
give me an interview where they told me I was good enough to be
admitted but not good enough to get a scholarship. I was leery of
excessive debt when state uni tuition was ca. $1,000 and MIT's was
ca. $5,000 (ca. $30,000 in today's money but less than today's MIT
tuition in today's money) so I went elsewere.

It's pure speculation whether or not I would have flourished as an MIT
undergrad or failed miserably. In retrospect, I don't think I'm smart
enough or have the right personality traits to be a good scientist so
maybe the latter or at best a mediocre scientist tied to a large debt.

So it was amusing to be invited, 25 years later, to *teach* at MIT
albeit in a humble status ranking below "support staff". And yes, I
enjoyed hanging out with those people. But there is this: Some of
"those people" were brilliant and generally great people varying from
utterly conventional to notably eccentric. But it was revealing to
see that some of "those people", while more than bright enough, were
devious overachievers dedicated to their careers at a prestigious
school but not dedicated to pursuit of "How does it work?", "What,
exactly is going on here?" or "What theoretical mechanism explains
that?"

Something that did impress me was the personalized support that
faculty offered to the undergrads. It somewhat mitigates the daunting
"firehose" metaphor for how subjecxt material is delivered at MIT.

[James Warren]

In today's Quantum Physics the same divide exists between the
"Shut Up And Compute" crowd and the "What Exactly Is Going On Here" crowd.

I imagine that distinction exists in all the sciences.

[axemen99]

Experience counts at MIT, why you can teach at MIT.
Along the same thought, I studied at Acadia instead.
Once arrived on campus, they can always find jobs for students.

MIT admits a student from my high school in Hong Kong this academic year. Many of kids from my HK high school prefer Ivy League schools around NYC. Their parents can afford the tuitions, and after graduation, their earning abilities increase. Parental investment.