• Gus (unregistered)

    I'm pretty sure it would be more fun to give out 1-900-INTRNET :)

    And at least they didn't wait a little longer... they could have wound up with 90mHz pentiums that had the floating point problems... like I did!

  • dolor (unregistered) in reply to Murray
    Murray:
    LORD is not gone though, you can play it on facebook.
    First you say one thing, then the opposite. I don't get it.
  • Ex-Supernetter (unregistered) in reply to random internet wanker
    random internet wanker:
    and now that I've read the whole article, typical, I know... I've got to agree with one of the previous posters.

    complete bullshit fabricated just because it sounds cool and funny like a typical WTF. Someone just happened to find the Tandem name somewhere and decided to throw it in with all the other made-up stupidity to help sell how fucked up the situation was. no way any of this is real.

    wankers.

    Actually, since I wrote quite a bit of Fortran code on the old "SuperNet" as well as some of the mail gateway after the SCO transition, some of it is real.

    The old system did run on a Tandem under Guardian. It was written in Fortran although with our own libs which had changed the language quite a bit. It could indeed speak to pretty much anything under the sun.

    When we moved to offer Internet connectivity, it was when routing was opened to commercial entities. We were actually the first (well, second by a couple days because of a premature announcement) to open an Internet access locally.

    The problem was that Mgt had decided to buy a packaged server system from a company that knew nothing of the Internet (the local techs knew it very well, thank you very much, we had some good people there including a proper wizard). However it let users run a cute graphical front end on their machines à la AOL. Their package ran on top of SCO. We had a few SCO boxes of our own at the time (I even already ran Linux back then).

    The makers of that thing were clueless, the sendmail story is true. I was writing sendmail rules by hand to get their monster to talk to the rest of the world and talked to them on the phone. But they'd never head of sendmail. "It's the standard mail transfer agent on the internet, it's standard, that's what everybody uses" "oh, do you have the phone number of the internet ? We should order a sendmail to check it out". Kept us entertained for weeks.

    In the end we got that monstrosity to work. It was a horrible hack. We all sorely regretted the elegance of the Tandem system (even with the annoying Guardian tools).

    In the end of course, there was no real point in a BBS + Internet so the whole thing went the way of the dinosaur when proper ISPs popped up all over the place.

    The whole idea was presumably to run on cheaper "commodity" hardware (using Tandem hardware is a horribly expensive way to run a BBS). Didn't really work out though.

  • fdizzle (unregistered)

    I call shenanigans. TRWTF was that you published this bullshit.

  • Lazarus Marat (unregistered) in reply to Peter
    Peter:
    I remember my first experiences with e-mail on a local network in ND called SENDIT, an educational system setup to give students access to 'the internet'. Good old days of login limits, local access numbers, and messing with modem protocols.

    Whoa, someone here knows SENDIT, the group I work for. Though we are called EduTech now. I didn't work for SENDIT then though I knew all the folks who did. When I first came to work for SENDIT the state was rolling out the state wide K12 network and I was tasked with getting those old dialup terminal servers to work with the new network which I did. I also have one of those old terminal servers in a box in my office still.

    Most schools had to ditch them a few years later due to changes in the network and the fact that I couldn't find anyone who knew enough about them to get them working with some changes made to the network later. I knew enough to get the ip ranges working correctly but not enough to get special routing commands necessary to work through the changes.

  • samuri (unregistered) in reply to Kris

    Are you sure you don't want another free month? at the end of which your credit card will be billed automatically. I think there was actually a 2 minute window of opportunity to cancel before the next billing dropped but since you were on hold for at least 5 minutes before you spoke to a real live human being the moment passed and $$$

  • Yak (unregistered) in reply to Fast Eddie

    160KB was enough at one time too

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