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Yes, I have, and I still miss them. Your problem was that you (apparently) tried to use Unix on them, rather than VMS, and the common language interface (which allowed you to do system calls and fancy string handling in fortran 77). Once you grokked the Orange Wall (and later Grey Wall), VMS was easy to manage, and rock solid. It used funky networking of course (CMUTEK tcp/ip still gives me shudders), but if you had all VAXes, then DECNET was no big deal. Truly a loss, and superior to many of its successors.

I miss my VAXstation and the 11/785.

turbo pascal 2 was also great, but they never cleanly made the transition to the Windows world. I'm sorry to lose the simplicity of TP2 (which would be great now because you'd just link it to other libraries, rather than rely upon Borland's oddball implementations), and there was always the attempt to be different, such as Turbo Prolog.

Hrm. 1999? 2000? I think you're a decade or so off. All the old h/p/a/v/c BBSs not to mention Compuserve and GEnie have used "netspeak" since at least the late 80's and I imagine earlier.

It is a little hard to find old text documents, but here is one from circa 1985 entitled The History of Real K-K00L DOODS.

Of course that is when it was cool to type in all caps with only a splattering of 0's and 1's in words, BeFoRe ThE MuLtI-CAsE ThING WaS K-RaD eLiTe.

There are some great old textfiles. Including the smiley dictionary (1989/1990), The Jargon File (1990), and a post about Compuserves Online Magazine in 1989 that includes such wonderful ones as ROFL, OIC, OTOH, etc.

Not PCI-X, but Matrox has offered quad-headed machines for years.

For those who don't want it for gaming (ie, don't want to blow a few hundred for the latest and greatest multi-headed AGP card), throw in a few extra el-cheapo PCI cards. Win2K supported up to ten heads - Only one AGP, obviously, but although it can't run as the boot display, both Windows and Linux (X, anyway) can make it the primary after startup so your games will run on it. XP supports even more than that (up to 255, I believe?).

On my Windows development machine, I use a 5+ year old Trident PCI card for the second head, and an older Geforce (3? low-end 4? Don't really care, it works) as the primary. I keep WinAmp, Task Manager, Calculator (a nice graphing one, not the 'doze default), and SI's TCPMon (a network connection monitor that looks much like TaskMan) on the second head, with my actual dev IDE open on the primary. On the rare occasions when I want to play a graphics-intensive game (I far prefer RTS to FPS), it works perfectly. Good frame rates, no glitches (that wouldn't have happened anyway). I do run a single-monitor screen saver I wrote (I've made it publically available on my homepage), that uses a moving-windows style saver so I can see its contents without worying about showing a static screen for too long. I also use a mouse corral (don't recall the name, do a Google search), to keep the mouse from leaving the primary display while playing a fullscreen game (that will cause glitches, just don't go there). Overall, it works great, and that PC doesn't even have a PCI-X bus.


So, not really news, I'd have to say. Someone managed to do with a new tech what we've had the ability to do with the previous gen of hardware. Whoop-de-do. "In other news, the sun has continued to burn hydrogen for the 4.6 billionth year, making a new record for our solar system!".

Okay... Hopefully this won't Slashdot the poor server on which I keep my homepage (please, unless you really want to see an example of what Mozilla's "Personal toolbar" can do, don't click this link! And don't mod this up, I already have "excellent" karma, you'd only do me a disservice):

A screenshot of my Mozilla 1.6 Personal Toolbar

Note that the first, second, and eighth icon I made myself (the first two for sites I run, and the eighth I derived from a submission to Pricewatch's current "design a T-Shirt" contest, since they have no favicon), and the fourth and last two I managed to "trick" into using the 32x32 icon (rather than the default 16x16 icon) by saving the 32x32 icon locally, specifying the icon manually in my bookmarks, and using a nonstandard URL to prevent the icon from reloading when I visit the site).

I also just cleaned my toolbar out a few days ago, so it would have had a half dozen more last week. Additionally, I use a 32 pixel high toolbar (I know, a waste of space, but icons look so much better compared to 16x16).

In case anyone cares, in order from left to right, these load: (private), (private), Babelfish (should that icon look like a fish?), dictionary.com, Logical Fallacy Files at Nizkor (I have no idea what that icon represents... A human stomach?), Google (advanced search), Internet Movie Database, Pricewatch (my own icon), Amazon, Fark, MemePool, MetaFilter, Rotten.com, Slashdot, iFilm, Newgrounds, and Zophar's Domain.

You'll also notice I have a "Home" button on my main toolbar... You can get that from here, just click on "Install Home Button" (he has his links appear non-underlined, so you'll have to pay attention to find it).

This never seemed to be a problem in the days of letterboxing. I guess geocaching has become a victim of its own success

As a letterboxer and non-geocacher, the connection between the two somewhat disturbs me.

Although superficially similar (stick a plastic box in the woods and post some sort of clue to find it), Letterboxing clues generally follow existing trails, and we choose the exact planting spots to minimize environmental impact (for example, in New England, we have countless decaying stone-walls, which make a great spot to plant boxes as they have zero environmental impact).

Geocaching, on the otherhand, while sometimes giving clues to minimize bushwhacking, at their heart actually encourage bushwhacking. "Park here at point A, find the box at --N--'--.- by --W--'--.-, point B" illustrates a typical clue. To most people, that means "walk in a straight line from point A to point B", regardless of a possibly better (ie, already blazed and no bushwhacking) but less direct route.


Incidentally, I maintain the web-page for a NE Letterboxing group, the Rhode Island Bored Nocturnal Adventurer's Guild, for those interested in finding a somewhat more environmentally friendly alternative to geocaching. And of course, the ultimate Letterboxing site lives at Letterboxing North America, with well-organized maps to help you find clues to boxes in your area.


On the bright side, actually stopping people from Letterboxing and/or Geocaching would take a miracle... I know of a number of places that not only officially ban boxes, but aggressively hunt them down and destroy them (as the worst, both the NPS and the Audibon society have ordered their caretakers to kill boxes, though at most parks the phrase "plausible deniability" has worked greatly in our favor). This hasn't stopped people from boxing in those parks/preserves, it just means the clues have gone "underground", shared by word of mouth between trusted fellow 'boxers. Having a few boxes like that spices up the hobby, but I would consider it a real loss if the majority of clues end up requiring personal, private distribution.

I usually use TAC as my AIM client when using a Linux system. It's great because it's small, console based, and is pretty flexible. If you want to mess around with it you'll have to know a bit of TCL, but I don't think it's still being developed so you're not likely to get much help. By default it supports logging to a file as well as reading from a file to send messages, so it wouldn't require much hacking to get a quick and dirty version working of what you want. Possibly try logging messages with the content you want executed to a script file, then something else to specify when to execute the script. It wouldn't be pretty or secure but it might do what you want.

i dont care so much about interoperability as much as i do about just opening the protocol and stop blocking 3rd party IM clients (like Trillian or TAC - altho tac hasnt been blocked). As long as i have a choice of AIM clients then i'll be happy. If every messaging protocol was open, then programs such as trillian would function more perfectly. plus if the protocol was opened, other servers might popup, and that'd take some of the load off the AOL IM servers. that's my $.02...

Here in Ireland we have no consumer broadband. If I want to connect to the Internet I can:

1. Dialup at up to 56k for $0.6 - $2 per hour + $15 per month line rental
2. ISDN 64k for $0.6 - $2 per hour + $35 per month line rental
3. ISDN 128K for $1.2 - $4 per hour + $35 per month line rental + $25 per month IP connection
4. Leased Line (about $10k per annum for 128k)

So now we have Ireland Offline trying to act as the voice of reason our politically appointed department of Telecommunications Regulations should be, but neither have any real teeth. Just to top it all off, after NTL bought Cablelink (cableTV) the next government sale came up, Telecom Eireann which was floated to the public with guaranteed share availability to each member of the public, and everyone encouraged (banks throwing money at them) to buy at the government set price. So Eircom was launched (of course they had to rebrand it) and proceeded to lose most of the country some of their hard earned cash (but not the country's "vice prime minister" who was/is on the board who claimed at the first agm/lynching after the floatation that "he had no money to buy with" HAHAHA (insider trading cough cough) HAHA). So after a failed floatition that lost most of their customers potential loyalty (most people even had to deal with a share split as the mobile division was sold off, so they ended up with some vodafone shares) the company went through an incredilby public bidding war resulting in the purchase of the fixed line division by a private group which now has a £2billion+ loan to cover .... so they are going to launch a cheaper service for anything .... I think not ... they will unbundle the local loop now (only 1 year after the EU deadline) and risk losing some analogue call revenue ... NO

To anyone in this thread who has complained in any way about price, quality of service or availability of service I suggest you thank your lucky stars you aren't stuck with 56k (I'm actually extremely lucky that I availed of an offer a few years ago to get unlimited free off-peak net access for $25 per month from one of their competitors who no longer allow people to sign up AND who kicked of many users for over using the unlimited service!) and go search google for errorcom to see just how popular eircom are! I think GPRS will be my first "broadband" connection .... Go 2002!!!

So, if he had said, corny H-anime, it would probably have been less confusing... or not.