I had the honor of knowing Pres as a casual acquantaince. I went to high school with one of his children, and he lived right down the street from my parents.
At the time (back in 1989 or so) I was a rabid deadhead and was very much into recording live music. I liked all kinds of music, including classical.
Round Christmas time they were performing Messiah at my church. So I decided to pack up my recording gear and record the performance. Little did I know at the time but my friend's dad (Pres) was also going to be there to record the show, because the musical director was a family friend of theirs. So that night I met Pres Eckert. I was an aspiring computer hacker at the time, so it was quite a treat.
So I whip out my little Marantz 430 dbx (a nice portable battery powered tape deck), my mike stand, my shotgun mikes and omnidirectional (JVC's and a Nakamichi omnipoint CM 100). I thought I was pretty hot s**t.
Meanwhile Pres and some of his family members start to set up THEIR equipment. I couldn't believe the stuff they had! Digitial to Analog PCM converter so they could record digital direct to a portable 4-head VCR they had, awesome super long mike cables, and these top of the line $800 a piece German mikes I forget the name of (NOT including the power supply needed for each one).
So my eyes are bugging out my head. Seeing that I was a fellow audiophile, Pres whips out this little graph of the frequency response of the mikes and other technical stuff and starts babbling on to me about all sorts of technical details related to the mikes and his setup. We sat and talked recording for quite a while. He was definitely a major "gadget freak" as most of us here are. His mikes, by the way, were the reference standard that were used to gauge most other mikes at the time! Wow...
So I am blown away. Over the next year I "sat in" to make some recordings of other performances they could not make it to. After these I would go their house to mix them down.
I don't want to share too many personal details, but I think its ok for me to say that he had some awesome hi-fi systems, and lots of gadgets everywhere. One time when I was there he and one of his sons were busy hooking up an oscilloscope to a VCR to measure something like the "white saturation" of the deck. I think they were callibrating it for something, maybe digital recording.
I remember shaking my head as I watched these guys throwing oscilloscopes around the house and hooking them up to things like they were just another usual household appliance. They totally had the "mad scientist" thing going.
Over my 13 years of working computers in the Philly area I have met up with many of the "older guard" who warked with Eckert and Maukly too. I worked for a guy back in 1993 who actually worked with Seymour Cray. If you ever want a real treat and meet one of these folks, make sure you take some time to go out to lunch and have them tell you about the crazy old computer days they grew up in. It will really make you appreciate where we are today and the feeling that we are trully standing on the shoulders of giants.
I was deeply saddened to hear of Pres's death a few years ago. He definitely was a somewhat under appreciated piece of all of us hackers' history.
Over the last couple years there were some in depth threads on the server-linux email list discussing how ISP's were using linux to serve up POP3 and other email services to tens of thousands of users. To boil down what I remember one problem was the way the vanilla pop servers look things up - it takes to long to iterate through one directory with ten thousand mail spools. So better solution was to custom build and break the mail up into sub folders, or use a pop server that already had this more efficient mechanism built in. Other folks even had seperate servers partioned by user name.
On another note I did some work a couple years ago for a place with probably about 10,000 Exchange users running off of the largest Alpha NT box from Digital at the time. Performance was 100% MISERY. It was almost useless. The NT Domain it was in had close to 30,000 users and they had massive problems finally settling on a few giant Alpha PDC/BDC's as opposed to many small servers.
You forgot to mention a few other, uh, benefits of CE:
* crappy battery life (as in recharge DAILY) * horribly bloated and slow OS (an hour glass cursor while waiting to look up a phone number? no thanks) * a platform that has been one of Microsoft's most notable failures this last year (such a dismal failure they just announced a "complete rewrite" of the OS to make it more like the Palm OS * Another case of Microsoft having difficulty seeing outside of the little windows-box they live in (its like the saying "if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail" - if you're Microsoft, everything looks like it should run Windows) * pathetic synchronization capabilities (my company syncs pilots over IP to java running on a server - try that with CE) * clumsy form factor versus Palm's perfect "fit in your pocket" size * high prices versus almost commodity prices (I just heard that Palm III's were available online for NINTEY NINE dollars!!!)
Sorry but the consumers have spoken, and for once the superior and more innovative technology has won. Palm was revolutionary and a risk, but the determination of its designers to not compromise anything to bloat and the perfect form factor made that risk more than worth it as they now completely own the Palm/PDA market. It has been humorous watching Microsoft try and adjust to this new market. Reminds me of their confused response to open-source.
That doesn't work anymore either. That stinks! I think I miss that the most for super quick name lookups on machines that don't have whois installed. The searching in that service was nice too.
Slashdot Mirror
I had the honor of knowing Pres as a casual acquantaince. I went to high school with one of his children, and he lived right down the street from my parents.
At the time (back in 1989 or so) I was a rabid deadhead and was very much into recording live music. I liked all kinds of music, including classical.
Round Christmas time they were performing Messiah at my church. So I decided to pack up my recording gear and record the performance. Little did I know at the time but my friend's dad (Pres) was also going to be there to record the show, because the musical director was a family friend of theirs. So that night I met Pres Eckert. I was an aspiring computer hacker at the time, so it was quite a treat.
So I whip out my little Marantz 430 dbx (a nice portable battery powered tape deck), my mike stand, my shotgun mikes and omnidirectional (JVC's and a Nakamichi omnipoint CM 100). I thought I was pretty hot s**t.
Meanwhile Pres and some of his family members start to set up THEIR equipment. I couldn't believe the stuff they had! Digitial to Analog PCM converter so they could record digital direct to a portable 4-head VCR they had, awesome super long mike cables, and these top of the line $800 a piece German mikes I forget the name of (NOT including the power supply needed for each one).
So my eyes are bugging out my head. Seeing that I was a fellow audiophile, Pres whips out this little graph of the frequency response of the mikes and other technical stuff and starts babbling on to me about all sorts of technical details related to the mikes and his setup. We sat and talked recording for quite a while. He was definitely a major "gadget freak" as most of us here are. His mikes, by the way, were the reference standard that were used to gauge most other mikes at the time! Wow...
So I am blown away. Over the next year I "sat in" to make some recordings of other performances they could not make it to. After these I would go their house to mix them down.
I don't want to share too many personal details, but I think its ok for me to say that he had some awesome hi-fi systems, and lots of gadgets everywhere. One time when I was there he and one of his sons were busy hooking up an oscilloscope to a VCR to measure something like the "white saturation" of the deck. I think they were callibrating it for something, maybe digital recording.
I remember shaking my head as I watched these guys throwing oscilloscopes around the house and hooking them up to things like they were just another usual household appliance. They totally had the "mad scientist" thing going.
Over my 13 years of working computers in the Philly area I have met up with many of the "older guard" who warked with Eckert and Maukly too. I worked for a guy back in 1993 who actually worked with Seymour Cray. If you ever want a real treat and meet one of these folks, make sure you take some time to go out to lunch and have them tell you about the crazy old computer days they grew up in. It will really make you appreciate where we are today and the feeling that we are trully standing on the shoulders of giants.
I was deeply saddened to hear of Pres's death a few years ago. He definitely was a somewhat under appreciated piece of all of us hackers' history.
Over the last couple years there were some in depth threads on the server-linux email list discussing how ISP's were using linux to serve up POP3 and other email services to tens of thousands of users. To boil down what I remember one problem was the way the vanilla pop servers look things up - it takes to long to iterate through one directory with ten thousand mail spools. So better solution was to custom build and break the mail up into sub folders, or use a pop server that already had this more efficient mechanism built in. Other folks even had seperate servers partioned by user name.
On another note I did some work a couple years ago for a place with probably about 10,000 Exchange users running off of the largest Alpha NT box from Digital at the time. Performance was 100% MISERY. It was almost useless. The NT Domain it was in had close to 30,000 users and they had massive problems finally settling on a few giant Alpha PDC/BDC's as opposed to many small servers.
-Scott
You forgot to mention a few other, uh, benefits of CE:
* crappy battery life (as in recharge DAILY)
* horribly bloated and slow OS (an hour glass cursor while waiting to look up a phone number? no thanks)
* a platform that has been one of Microsoft's most notable failures this last year (such a dismal failure they just announced a "complete rewrite" of the OS to make it more like the Palm OS
* Another case of Microsoft having difficulty seeing outside of the little windows-box they live in (its like the saying "if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail" - if you're Microsoft, everything looks like it should run Windows)
* pathetic synchronization capabilities (my company syncs pilots over IP to java running on a server - try that with CE)
* clumsy form factor versus Palm's perfect "fit in your pocket" size
* high prices versus almost commodity prices (I just heard that Palm III's were available online for NINTEY NINE dollars!!!)
Sorry but the consumers have spoken, and for once the superior and more innovative technology has won. Palm was revolutionary and a risk, but the determination of its designers to not compromise anything to bloat and the perfect form factor made that risk more than worth it as they now completely own the Palm/PDA market. It has been humorous watching Microsoft try and adjust to this new market. Reminds me of their confused response to open-source.
That doesn't work anymore either. That stinks! I think I miss that the most for super quick name lookups on machines that don't have whois installed. The searching in that service was nice too.