Back in September of last year, I stumbled across a NASA website describing the new Mars Lander scheduled for launch July 20 at 6:15 a.m. PDT (9:15 a.m. EDT). NASA offered the chance to send your name aboard the Mars Perseverance Rover etched into a chip placed on the rover.
I thought this was a terrific idea for the family, so I registered the four of us and, lo and behold, we four were among the 1.2 million names that made it.
NASA sent an electronic boarding pass for each of us verifying that our names would be making the 140-million-mile trip to the Red Planet, the average distance from Earth. At its closest, Mars is roughly 38.6 million miles from Earth. Since the path to Mars depends on many variables and is not a direct shot, I am not sure of the actual distance the Perseverance Rover will take to get to Mars. Edit: Turns out that the actual distance is printed on the boarding pass itself in the bottom right-hand corner. The Perseverance Rover will travel 313,586,649 miles on its journey from the Earth to Mars.
I thought the boarding passes looked really cool, and the rest of the family surprisingly agreed. I had intended to post them back then, but it didn’t happen. However, today’s the day! Better late than never, huh?
“The Mars 2020 spacecraft with its Perseverance Rover will launch on an Atlas V-541 rocket from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The Atlas V is one of the largest rockets available for interplanetary flight. This is the same type of rocket that launched the InSight and Curiosity to Mars. The launch vehicle is provided by United Launch Alliance, Centennial Colorado.”
I’ve been doing this ham radio thing for about a year and a half now. I have a couple more observations to add to the blog post I wrote last year.
1. The amount of learning required to get started
is not massive. You can get started with
a relative minimum of technological knowledge and if that’s all you want, you
can do quite a bit. But…
If you want to get really good at it or learn the nitty, gritty
details of how and why things work, it’s a daunting task. I’ve said before that it’s a bottomless pit
of things to learn and from my perspective, it can be pretty overwhelming. Having said that, …
2. … established ham
operators are, for the most part, more than willing to share their knowledge
and experience if you just ask. If you
pop up on the air with a question, chances are pretty good that you can get an
answer or at the very least a clue about how to proceed. The experienced operators are a magnificent
resource if you’re stuck or just need an explanation of something you don’t understand.
3. If you make a
mistake and do something incorrectly, most hams are very forgiving. It’s likely that they’ve made a similar
mistake at one time and they don’t hold your boo-boos against you. I still dread screwing up, but at least there’s
no ridicule from it.
So far as I know. (Maybe
people are laughing and pointing at me on other channels.)
4. There’s a Young
Operators’ Net on Sunday and there’s an eleven-year-old young woman who runs the
net. She’s terrific and does a really
top-notch job of net control. Hearing
those young voices on the air leads me to believe that…
5. …ham radio is not
a dead hobby. Far from it, matter of
fact.
One of the things that surprised me when I finally dove into ham radio was that technology has advanced the amateur radio hobby into the 21st century. With at least three or four digital voice protocols and an untold number of digital data protocols, you can get a message through in any number of ways including the old standards like CW and SSB. There are orbiting digital satellites that ham operators can use. You can bounce a radio signal off the moon and back to Earth if you can figure out how to do that. You can even communicate with the astronauts on the International Space Station. If you’re willing to put in the time to study how to use these modes of communication, you can do it.
6. For we Hollywood types, there’s a working ham radio shack on the set of “Last Man Standing,” the TV show on Fox starring Tim Allen of “Home Improvement” fame. Every once in a while, I’m told that someone on set fires up the on-set radio and communicates with the rest of we mere mortal operators, though I’ve not had that pleasure yet.
Edit: Back on October 22, 2019, I did make contact with KA6LMS on the set of “Last Man Standing.” Here is the QSL Card, a postcard which makes the contact official:
7. You don’t have to be crazy rich to get started. Once you are licensed, a new, entry-level handheld digital radio can be had for Amazon points, if you have enough of ‘em. Even if you don’t, you can get in for less than $100 if you watch the sales. If you’re OK with used equipment, you can get in for about half that. If amateur radio interests you, cost need not be a barrier to entry.
8. Ham radio operators help during natural disasters. Here’s an excerpt of an NPR piece about how amateur radio stepped up to help Puerto Rico in 2017:
MCEVERS: How many messages have you relayed since the hurricane hit?
DOBER: Myself about a hundred.
MCEVERS: Oh, wow. And what’s – what are one or two that, you know, are you know you’re going to remember for a long time?
DOBER: Honestly, there was one woman who – she just broke down in tears when I told her. And she actually called me back five minutes later and she basically asked me, you just called me. And what you told me, I want to hear it again to make sure I heard it right.
MCEVERS: And what had you told her?
DOBER: I told her that, yes, I did call you five minutes ago. And the news I gave you is the news that your loved one is OK.
MCEVERS: And so she just had to hear it one more time?
DOBER: She had to hear it one more time, yes. And like I said, as soon as I told her – and it’s odd because you’re telling people – I mean, I was calling people in California, in Texas. And you’re telling them, hi, I’m from Pittsburgh, Pa., and I have news out of Arecibo for you or out of Puerto Rico. So for them it’s kind of like, what? You know, that’s not the way they’re expecting to get their news.
9. I’ll quote myself
from the original set of observations on this one:
People are people everywhere. I’ve made this observation about every country I’ve physically visited, and the international amateur radio community is no exception. I’ve talked on the radio with people from several different countries. I marvel at the universality of the experience among the operators I hear on the air. Korea, Canada, The Philippines, Australia, the UK, South America. It really shouldn’t surprise me how similar we humans are to our brethren ham operators around the world, but it did. It reinforces my contention that people are people no matter where you go. Governments may suck – and most do – but people are people everywhere. I find that very comforting.
This remains true and still amazes me every time.
10. This isn’t an
observation, but a shout-out to Jeff, aka VE6DV, from Canada who’s just happens
to be moving this week. He is our weekly
net controller and runs the net superbly.
He’s all the things that’s right about amateur radio. He’s helpful, friendly and welcoming. And the net he runs has gained popularity
because of the way he does it. He
deserves public kudos so here they are.
11. One more shout-out, this time to Andrew Taylor, MW0MWZ, in the UK. He authors and maintains a software package which allows amateur radio operators to extend their reach from tens of miles to all the miles. His software makes worldwide communications easy to use. It’s free and he’s WAY more responsive to questions and answers than any professional tech support company. So thanks, Andy, for writing and maintaining Pi-Star. Well done!
Bottom line for me: I am thankful that my son, Jon (left), poked me in the eye about my license awhile back. Jon, don’t make the same mistake I did and wait 50 years to get your license. It’s a great hobby and really tests my technical expertise every time I sit down at the radio. (That’s other son, Andy in the background, circa mid ’90’s.)
If a person’s brain really IS a use-it-or-lose-it proposition as we age, this is a great way to exercise the ol’ noggin. Amateur radio is a great way to exercise your mind and help keep you sharp.
Most of you know that in a previous life, I was an actor. You can see how successful I was by my long-term employment with the government. Back then, I did a lot of stage plays and I admit it, I’m a huge ham. I love stage because you can be broad and loud and all those things that are far tougher to do on film. I was never very good at subtlety.
In the fall, at the urging of #1 son, Jonathon Wolfe, I jumped into the amateur radio field, which in the vernacular is called ham radio:
a : a showy performer; especially : an actor performing in an exaggerated theatrical style
b : a licensed operator of an amateur radio station
Guilty on both counts.
I like figuring technology out. I like the process of tinkering around with it until I either make it work of get so frustrated that I ask for help. Amateur radio fills that particular need for me. Radio transmission theory is a bottomless pit of learning opportunities and over my head much of the time, even though I have a background in technology from my college days, my time running broadcasting stations and networks, and my time in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. (Pro Patria Vigilans, bitches!)
In the few months since I got my license and ventured out into the radio frequency ether, I’ve made some observations. Let me be clear: these are observations – not criticisms. Here we go.
1. There are two schools of thought when it comes to ham radio license exams: Learn the material and take the test, or just memorize the test questions and answers (there are hundreds of ’em) and learn as you go. I’m kind of OK with either because learning by doing is a time-honored tradition.
I assumed that everyone in this hobby was as equally delighted as I was to figure stuff out on their own. I assumed that this was one of the reasons we all get into the hobby in the first place.
There is a subsection of folks like me who are perfectly fine, for example, taking eight weeks to learn how to program a DMR radio. No exaggeration, it took me eight weeks before I made my first call on purpose. Perhaps it’s because of my advancing age that I’m more patient now than I used to be. And get off my lawn!
There’s also a subsection of operators who want the easy solutions yesterday. (I suspect that these are the kinds of people that want the answer from their computer BEFORE they hit the ENTER key.)
2. People are people everywhere. I’ve made this observation about every country I’ve physically visited and the international amateur radio community is no exception. I’ve talked on the radio with people from several different countries. I marvel at the universality of the experience among the operators I hear on the air. Korea, Canada, The Philippines, Australia, the UK, South America. It really shouldn’t surprise me how similar we humans are to our brethren ham operators around the world, but it did. It reinforces my contention that people are people no matter where you go. Governments may suck – and most do – but people are people everywhere. I find that very comforting.
3. There are assholes on the air just like in real life. About a month or so ago, after having become somewhat comfortable talking to people on the air, I stumbled into a talk group on DMR, one of the many digital standards. It was one of my very first times on DMR. A talk group is just like it sounds – a chat room where people actually talk with one another instead of typing back and forth. There was a verbal knock-down-drag-out war of words going on between a few individuals and it was loud, rude and the primary instigator would not shut up. I was horrified because in the months since I had gotten my license, I’d only experienced hugely warm welcomes and willingness to help from everyone particularly to the new guys like me.
I should have expected that it wouldn’t all be sunshine and blue skies, but that first experience on DMR was shocking in its contrast to my other limited experiences. I almost didn’t go back. I did, of course, go back to that talk group as well as other ones and have had some wonderful conversations with folks on DMR. But yikes! If I’d have heard that first, I would have a very different perspective on the amateur radio community.
A KWM-2. I used to see these in Army MARS stations quite regularly.
4. My introduction to ham radio was in the 1960’s. My childhood friend’s dad, Nathan Vance, was K8TMX. (How I’ve remembered his name and call sign all these years still surprises me.) Mr. Vance was in the middle of a conversation on his ham radio and must have seen me standing there with wide eyed amazement at the buttons and dials of an old-school Collins KWM-2. He took pity on me and let me talk on his radio to some South American country, as I recall. This being the 1960’s, he conducted his conversation with his fellow operator without the benefit of the internet to get him there. His radio was connected to a HUGE antenna in the backyard, and he communicated directly with the other operator.
Today, computers, digital radios and the Internet have really changed the landscape. Today’s digital standards like DMR, D-STAR and others rely on the Internet to get you out of the county. Some claim that using Internet back haul for amateur radio is cheating – not “pure” amateur radio. Then again, the nice thing about this digital world is that it’s instant gratification. With digital standards, you can start talking world-wide today. Right now.
I get the guys who say it’s cheating. They contend the purest form of amateur radio is totally self-reliant. Speaking candidly, I kinda fall into that camp myself. But with limited resources and real estate, I can’t set up a big antenna for talking around the world directly – my back yard isn’t big enough and my homeowners association probably wouldn’t let me if it were. Using these digital standards, which require far less power and shorter antennas, allows me to overcome the space and HOA obstacles that otherwise would limit the people I could reach. (One more thing about the digital standards – transmissions made in digital mode are clearer and are MUCH easier to hear for a guy like me who should be wearing hearing aids, but isn’t. This turned out to be a bigger deal for me than I thought it would be.)
5. For a guy like me who loves tinkering with tech, it’s addicting. As I already mentioned, amateur radio is a bottomless pit of learning opportunities in everything from rules and regulations to antenna physics and Earth-Moon-Earth communication. I’ll never run out of things to study and learn, if I’m so motivated. The downside to this is that you want to buy every damned radio or device you can lay your hands on not because you need it, but because it’s fun. That can get pricey and a little restraint goes a long way. (Ok, a LOT of restraint for me. I admit it.)
6. Unlike the Citizen’s Band radios, hams don’t use handles. We have names. Mine’s Dan, thank you very much. I like the lack of anonymity that hams insist upon. Yes, there’s potential for subterfuge and deceit, but particularly with the digital standards, it’s virtually impossible to hide your identity. It makes you responsible for how one conducts oneself on the air. Comparing that to Facebook or Twitter, I find this strikingly refreshing.
7. You can always find someone to talk to. (See #2 above.) If you’re willing to look around, and you’re not mic shy, (yes, that’s a thing) you can always find someone to talk with. There are a zillion frequencies out there and someone’s talking on at least one or two. There are a zillion standards both digital and analog that operators are using on these zillion frequencies. And there’s a zillion talkgroups, reflectors or repeaters on which someone is talking about something right now. Maybe not in your language, but they’re talking. Bottom line: there’s no excuse for saying “there’s no one on the air!” If you want to talk, there are a zillion ways to find someone just like you who wants to talk, too.
As I mentioned at the top, my son, Jonathon, got me started on this whole ham radio thing with a casual text message:
JW: “Hey, sir, do you have a HAM license?”
DW: “I do not. I used to carry a commercial radio operators license, but that was long before your arrival on my planet. …”
That’s what started it all. I have Jonathon to thank for planting the idea in my head. Since then, I’ve taken two tests, got my General Class license, and talked to lots of fellow operators around the country and around the world. I’m grateful for his offhand comment that motivated me to do something that I had always wanted to do but didn’t.
I wrote this back in 2014 and it generated a bunch of comments on Facebook. It’s posted here again because of recent FCC announcements about the potential revocation of net neutrality regulations that were instituted in the previous administration.
The bottom line for me and for others is that Internet Service Providers should not prioritize the delivery of information based on content. The technical nature of the Internet Protocol does not discriminate between differing points of view as could paid prioritization.
The Internet was indeed founded on the idea that information should be shared and the suite of Internet protocols were designed to deliver information in a fashion unbiased by location or content. If you can digitize it, the Internet was designed to deliver it. It’s my belief that this should continue.
I stand by my initial belief that the Internet has become a utility to the Nation and unless additional competition is added to those areas in which there is none, regulation is necessary to maintain the unbiased flow of news and information to the consumer. — DW 24 Nov 2017
Stay with me here, this is liable to get complicated.
My first instinct when it came to this subject was to pooh-pooh government regulation of what amounts to a private pipeline. The Internet, after all, is an electronic pipe that delivers information on demand and unbiased by location. In other words, you have access to the same information regardless of where you are on the network. (That’s the beauty of TCP/IP.)
Since an Internet service provider owns the broadband network infrastructure, they should be allowed to manage it and charge what the market will bear. Consumers will regulate the value and price of delivery through the usual dynamics of supply and demand.
Makes sense, right? Let’s look a little more closely.
Enter Comcast, for example. (And there are other examples. I’m picking on Comcast because I’m a former Comcast employee, sorta.)
Comcast and others have decided that they will prioritize the delivery of Internet traffic based on the information provider’s ability to pay. This means that an information provider can pay Comcast to move its information faster than a competitor. Plus, if I’m a high-volume information provider, I’m using up a whole lot more of Comcast’s bandwidth to deliver my information. Therefore, if I’m using more of Comcast’s resources to move my information, it should cost me more, right?
While this sorta makes sense in the context of a Netflix streaming service, or iTunes Movie delivery, when you consider the second and third order effects, this concerns me.
Comcast owns the National Broadcasting Company, or NBC and all of its entertainment and news operations. Let’s suppose hypothetically that Comcast decides that it will give top priority to Internet delivery of its NBC News products and relegate other news organizations to a lower priority. Comcast understandably wants to you to see their advertisements in their news products instead of those of their competition. That means that if you’re a Comcast subscriber, online access to NBC News products would be easier to find, more readily available, faster to download, featured in ads and otherwise presented to the consumer IN LIEU OF products from other news outlets.
Taken to the extreme, since Comcast owns NBC, they may make an economic decision to offer ONLY NBC News products on their network by routing all Internet searches for news and current events to NBC resources. This would have the effect of censoring all news and information from any other source but Comcast’s NBC News.
And Comcast isn’t the only one who would likely engage in such a scenario.
Time Warner, Cox, Verizon all would likely strike similar deals with information providers who would collectively decide what information gets priority on their networks and what gets relegated to the basement of Internet transfer speeds, ultimately limiting what your eyeballs can see.
Do you want your access to information limited in any way just because of the company you’ve chosen to deliver your Internet service? Do you want your Internet provider deciding what news source you’re likely to see?
I don’t.
I have no objections to the CONSUMER paying higher prices for using greater capacity. I have a problem with Internet service providers deciding for me whose information is more valuable. The value of any given piece of information is a decision that individuals should make for themselves.
If there were multiple broadband Internet service providers available nationwide, I’d not be too awfully worried about the issue as the marketplace would have multiple choices from which to choose information they want. But in most cases, there exists a duopoly or, as it is in my hometown, only a monopoly on broadband Internet service. In these communities, market forces can’t apply and if the ISP limits the delivery of certain kinds of information, what’s a consumer to do?
Since broadband Internet service in a given community is more often than not limited to one or two companies, it becomes more like a utility than not and should be regulated appropriately. No single company should have the power to limit news and information provided through their networks given the public’s reliance on it.
Internet service is no longer a luxury. It’s a must-have. Schools rely on it. We voters rely on it for the delivery of facts and opinion. In fact, broadband Internet service has become so important that it serves the public, and therefore the public interest.
Keep the information flowing to the public without bias, without limiting choices and ideas and without commercial interest censoring it.
With apologies to Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias
I’m a nerd.
This is common knowledge among those who have been in the same zip code as me. You don’t actually have to meet me in person. It’s kind of like radiation. No, it’s not contagious.
No, this is my grandma Effie, not my slightly older sister.
Anyway, I was thinking about something my (slightly older) sister and I were discussing a while back regarding our grandmother, Effie Wolfe, and the degree in which technology exploded in her lifetime. Think about the degree that technology emerged from her birth in 1897 until her passing in 1987. It’s hard to imagine what it was like for her and others of her generation to have been born into a world in which technology was just in its infancy to seeing people landing on the moon.
For example, the first electric power transmission line in North America went online on June 3, 1889, with the lines between the generating station at Willamette Falls in Oregon City, Oregon, and Chapman Square in downtown Portland, Oregon — about 13 miles. That’s only 8 years before Effie was born and I doubt tiny Deshler, Ohio was a place where cutting-edge home electricity distribution landed first.
When I was a really small human, I remember she had a phone with no dial. You picked it up and the local Deshler operator answered and placed your call. My sister mentioned remembering a phone with a hand crank on it, but I don’t remember that.
But I DO remember computers. Lots of ‘em starting with this baby:
This is the computer from the Seaview, the fictional submarine featured in both the movie and the absolutely awful TV show “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” and I vividly recall watching this show at Effie’s house. In black and white, ‘natch.
The TV show ran from 1964–1968, and as an impressionable youngster, I was nuts for this show and its vision of advanced technology. Mom said that it gave me bad dreams and I would wake up in the middle of the night turning imaginary knobs and pushing imaginary buttons on the wall, presumably dreaming I was operating the Seaview computer. (Out of curiosity a few months back, I looked it up on Netflix to see what I was so obsessed with back then. Trust me when I say the show does NOT hold up. At. All.)
Another Irwin Allen show that prominently featured a computer was “The Time Tunnel.” Here’s the way it looked on the show:
From the pilot episode “Rendezvous with Yesterday” September 9, 1966.
Something I didn’t know until recently, this was a real computing system, the AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central. (Click the link or the photo below to learn about it.)
This computer would show up in a whole lot of movies and TV shows including a couple more from “Tunnel” producer Irwin Allen:
“Q7 components were used in numerous films TV series and TV series needing futuristic looking computers, despite the fact they were built in the 1950s. Q7 components were used in The Time Tunnel, The Towering Inferno [Featuring O.J. Simpson], Logan’s Run, WarGames and Independence Day amongst many others.”
“The Juice” on the loose in “The Towering Inferno.”
After all that good stuff, I found myself taking a different track into music. I got a music scholarship to Valley Forge Military Academy in 1971. In 1974, I believe, they offered a one-semester course in Computer Programming with FORTRAN IV. I and my fellow students had to take our deck of punch cards on the commuter train over to Villanova University’s computer center to have our programs run through their IBM 370/168.
I have only vague recollections of running my cards through the reader, waiting for 15-20 minutes for the program to run and then retrieving my printouts from the computer technician through the glass window. Very old school. The computer center looked something like this 370/168 installation:
There was a watered-down version of either BASIC or FORTRAN on the Academy’s very own minicomputer, the Interdata Model 4.
It had a single Teletype as its primary interactive device and a single punch card reader which, as I recall, wasn’t good for much since we could never get the Interdata version of FORTRAN IV to run even though it was supposed to. It was plenty good to teach programming techniques that we could implement in our programs we took to Villanova.
Many years passed before I did any programming of any kind. I had access to the Commodore VIC-20 when I was in SHAPE, Belgium and I wrote a BASIC program to do TV scheduling for the American Forces Network TV station there.
When I got back to the US in 1985, I promptly bought a Commodore 64…
… and just as promptly outgrew it, replacing it with a pre-owned original IBM-PC for which I needed a bank loan for something like $3,000. (Yes, computers were painfully expensive.)
Later on, I upgraded the memory from 384k to a whopping 640k, which at the time was as much as you could stuff into one of these babies. Down the road, I upgraded it again with an extraordinarily large, thought-I’d-never-be-able-to-fill-it-all-up-in-a-zillion-years 10 MB hard drive. That’s megabyte. To me, it was a huge amount of storage space.
In 1985 about 6 months after returning from Belgium, I was assigned to Fort Sill, OK as a student in the Communications/Electronics Staff Officer Course (CESOC). Since I had just become addicted to the newly discovered online world, I could not bear to go without being on CompuServe for the nine weeks of the course. To pass the time, I got this little guy, the Radio Shack TRS-80, Model 100, one of the very first “laptop” computers. It had 8 lines and 40 characters on it’s LCD screen and, most importantly, had it’s very own acoustically coupled modem.
Three years later, for a nine-week school at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, I bought myself the very first Zenith laptop computer. This one came with 640k of memory, I think, and two of the newest type 3 1/2″ floppy disks, which were really no longer floppy at all.
This lasted me for quite awhile until… well, the divorce and the former spousal unit got the IBM and I kept the laptop. Fair enough.
Jon and Andy hung on to that laptop for quite a few years, most of which were spent gathering dust.
In 1987, I started working for the newly-formed Information Center at Fort Richardson, Alaska. ‘Twas there that I met and worked for the brilliant and talented Raymond Brady, a long-time mainframe programmer and Department of the Army Civilian. Raymond trained me on the IBM 4361 mainframe computer that was the central hub of the Command Wide Area Network encompassing Forts Richardson, Wainwright and Greely.
Publicity still of an IBM 4361.
I recall that Fort Richardson received a cutting-edge Direct Access Storage Device (DASD). Think of it as a mainframe hard drive. Raymond was crazy impressed that it was a half gigabyte system. Let’s face it — we were ALL impressed with this thought-we’d-never-be-able-to-fill-it-all-up-in-a-zillion-years DASD.
Raymond taught me about the 3270 terminal, SNA network protocol, and the IBM Operating System, VM/SP. And I got to be a pretty good beginner REXX programmer.
About the time Raymond and I started working together in the Information Center, the Army negotiated a huge contract to buy desktop PC’s from Zenith. These Z-248’s flooded very quickly onto desks around Alaska and throughout the Army, armed with an integrated software suite called Enable. Since I was one of the few people around who actually had personal computers at home, I became the designated PC guy.
I spent a lot of time teaching basic and advanced courses in MS-DOS to the new PC users at all three posts in Alaska. My close friend, Chief Warrant Officer Don Foley, loved Enable so much, he wound up teaching Enable classes even though he was assigned elsewhere.
I can’t tell you how many of these machines I installed and repaired in the roughly two years I was in the Information Center, but it must have been well over a hundred if not more. I got to know the Z-248 quite well.
I would be remiss were I to fail to acknowledge fellow VFMA alumnus Ben Sherburne. Long after graduation, Ben and I unexpectedly ran into each other in the headquarters building barber shop at Fort Richardson. We wound up working together with Raymond in the Information center until 1990.
Me, Raymond Brady and Ben Sherburne in Alaska during our time together in the Information Center.
During my time serving in the Fort Richardson Information Center, I also administered a few of what were then called minicomputers. The first was an Intel 386 minicomputer. At it’s heart was an Intel 80386 processor that ran SCO Xenix, which like Unix before it, was a multiuser operating system. Each of the two boxes supported 12 users. Both boxes were connected to the aforementioned IBM 4361 mainframe through an IBM Systems Network Architecture (SNA) network, a terminal-based protocol.
One other computer dinosaur was Digital Equipment Company‘s MicroVAX Unix computer. It was installed for the purpose of helping the Fort Richardson Director of Logistics manage some sorts of transportation-related missions. I wasn’t aware of the application side of things, but I did do some system administration on that machine.
In 1990, I got out of the Army for the first time. The Zenith laptop continued to serve me well. Then I started collecting computer parts. People would just give me their old computers that they replaced. I sustained my computer habit over the years by rescuing the parts and pieces from these hand-me-downs and building systems that did what I needed ’em to do. They weren’t cutting edge, but they got the job done.
Not too long after that, PC’s pretty much became a commodity. The brand you bought really didn’t matter all that much as it had in the early days of PC deployment. In 2008, I bought my first Mac Laptop and it’s still working just fine even as I sit at the kitchen table and type this:
Samsung Galaxy S8.
Of course, even the tiny cell phone with which I snapped the photo of my nine-year-old MacBook Pro has enormous power when compared with the Interdata Model 4, the first real computer I got to use. From 64 kilobytes of ferrite core memory, to 64 gigabytes of solid state storage on my Samsung Galaxy S8 smart phone, it’s easy to see how drastically things have changed.
Just since I started in the computer business in 1974-ish with punch cards and core memory, to having access to nearly the entirety of human knowledge in my pocket is genuinely astounding when I stop to think about it.
I doubt Effie ever laid hands on a computer keyboard before her passing in 1987. With new devices and new technology popping up almost daily, I wonder just how far beyond the S8 and Alexa-powered smart homes we’ll be in 20 years.
I wrote this back in 2014 and it generated a bunch of comments on Facebook. It’s posted here again because of recent FCC announcements about the potential revocation of net neutrality regulations that were instituted in the previous administration.
One other computer dinosaur was 
