3 ms·

Just curious - which one? I started out teaching "Welcome to the Internet" classes once a week, and then was the first tech support guy at ioNet / Internet Okl

by mrbill 11y ago

Just curious - which one? I started out teaching "Welcome to the Internet" classes once a week, and then was the first tech support guy at ioNet / Internet Oklahoma. Worked my way up to assistant sysadmin before I moved to Austin to be a sysadmin for Texas.net. April 95 to September 96.

mrbill 11y ago
And my first day on the job was April 19, 1995. Talk about a hell of a first day... We pretty much switched into full "get news about the bombing online in some form or fashion, however possible" mode for about 48 hours. This was before CNN had a huge online presence, so we had stuff going like a RealVideo stream of a webcam pointed at local TV news, a couple of people went down to take pictures, etc, etc...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
kordless 11y ago
The Internet Shop: https://web.archive.org/web/19990423075248/http://www.theshop.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/19990423075248/http://www.thesho... Started it in mid to late '96.
- mrbill 11y ago
  Those early ISP days both sucked and were fun in their own special way. Trumpet Winsock for Win3.x users! Getting OS/2 online and older Macs! Trash-talking in the local Usenet groups!
freebasedgirl 11y ago
Where you kept a copy of the Solaris Operating system for all of your coworkers to peruse. We use to track you back then as you were one of the larger pirates of our software. :P
- mrbill 11y ago
  What? That's a bit libelous, I'd appreciate an explanation. If it happened at ioNET after September '96, I wasn't involved. All of Texas.Net's systems ran legit copies of Solaris; a large amount of them were brand new and came with OS entitlements. I remember going to the post office one day to pick up our brand new copies of Solaris 2.6. Are you talking about me running SUNHELP.ORG, which started in '97? That was (and is) a third-party user community and resources, along with mailing lists. It did not provide Solaris downloads. I happen to have a (personal) archive of Solaris releases, but it's not public access. The closest thing to "piracy" I could ever be accused of was reposting design documents for an unreleased system that I found on Sun's own publicly-accessible website in 2000. That whole scenario is explained in detail here: http://www.sunhelp.org/letters/ http://www.sunhelp.org/letters/ If anyone at Sun held me in bad regard, it was never mentioned to me by anyone, and I had a lot of contacts at the company. - I was one of 250 people to be picked as an external pre-release beta tester / community liason for the release of OpenSolaris. - In 2005, Sun donated a fully loaded T1000 server (8 cores, 8G RAM) for use by me in running the site. I'd think that if I was a huge software pirate the company wouldn't encourage it by giving me expensive hardware for free. Pictures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/sets/72057594124431136/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/sets/72057594124431136/ Thanks.
  - freebasedgirl 11y ago
    Texas.net is what we're talking about. And by software, I mean Solaris source code.
    - mrbill 11y ago
      This is the first time I've ever been accused of being a pirate! There's a first time for everything I guess. To be perfectly honest: I vaguely recall source of an older Solaris version being passed around the user/hobbyist community, but I wasn't the originator. I'm sure I downloaded it at one point, but don't remember ever doing anything with it OR putting it up for coworkers to browse. Like the (released and quickly discontinued) version of Solaris 2.6 for PPC that ran on certain RS/6000s, it was "out there" and easily obtainable by anyone in the hobbyist community if you asked enough people. No idea what was done at TN after I left; I had issues with how management treated the technical staff and resigned in late '98. It's been 18 years, my memory is a bit fuzzy.

by mrbill 11y ago

mrbill 11y ago

And my first day on the job was April 19, 1995. Talk about a hell of a first day... We pretty much switched into full "get news about the bombing online in some form or fashion, however possible" mode for about 48 hours. This was before CNN had a huge online presence, so we had stuff going like a RealVideo stream of a webcam pointed at local TV news, a couple of people went down to take pictures, etc, etc...

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

kordless 11y ago

The Internet Shop: https://web.archive.org/web/19990423075248/http://www.theshop.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/19990423075248/http://www.thesho... Started it in mid to late '96.

mrbill 11y ago
Those early ISP days both sucked and were fun in their own special way. Trumpet Winsock for Win3.x users! Getting OS/2 online and older Macs! Trash-talking in the local Usenet groups!

freebasedgirl 11y ago

Where you kept a copy of the Solaris Operating system for all of your coworkers to peruse. We use to track you back then as you were one of the larger pirates of our software. :P

mrbill 11y ago
What? That's a bit libelous, I'd appreciate an explanation. If it happened at ioNET after September '96, I wasn't involved. All of Texas.Net's systems ran legit copies of Solaris; a large amount of them were brand new and came with OS entitlements. I remember going to the post office one day to pick up our brand new copies of Solaris 2.6. Are you talking about me running SUNHELP.ORG, which started in '97? That was (and is) a third-party user community and resources, along with mailing lists. It did not provide Solaris downloads. I happen to have a (personal) archive of Solaris releases, but it's not public access. The closest thing to "piracy" I could ever be accused of was reposting design documents for an unreleased system that I found on Sun's own publicly-accessible website in 2000. That whole scenario is explained in detail here: http://www.sunhelp.org/letters/ http://www.sunhelp.org/letters/ If anyone at Sun held me in bad regard, it was never mentioned to me by anyone, and I had a lot of contacts at the company. - I was one of 250 people to be picked as an external pre-release beta tester / community liason for the release of OpenSolaris. - In 2005, Sun donated a fully loaded T1000 server (8 cores, 8G RAM) for use by me in running the site. I'd think that if I was a huge software pirate the company wouldn't encourage it by giving me expensive hardware for free. Pictures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/sets/72057594124431136/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/sets/72057594124431136/ Thanks.
- freebasedgirl 11y ago
  Texas.net is what we're talking about. And by software, I mean Solaris source code.
  - mrbill 11y ago
    This is the first time I've ever been accused of being a pirate! There's a first time for everything I guess. To be perfectly honest: I vaguely recall source of an older Solaris version being passed around the user/hobbyist community, but I wasn't the originator. I'm sure I downloaded it at one point, but don't remember ever doing anything with it OR putting it up for coworkers to browse. Like the (released and quickly discontinued) version of Solaris 2.6 for PPC that ran on certain RS/6000s, it was "out there" and easily obtainable by anyone in the hobbyist community if you asked enough people. No idea what was done at TN after I left; I had issues with how management treated the technical staff and resigned in late '98. It's been 18 years, my memory is a bit fuzzy.