3 ms·

I used to experiment with a Hercules MVS (my first real computer job was sysop at an institutional datacenter with an MVS) on my eeepc on my second tour in Iraq

I used to experiment with a Hercules MVS (my first real computer job was sysop at an institutional datacenter with an MVS) on my eeepc on my second tour in Iraq. Doing convoy security, of course we never had any network connection of any kind (it being the middle of the desert and also having active RF-jammers on our guntrucks), and there was always a long wait for the MWR computers at whatever base we'd stopped at for the night, so we were left with only whatever data we could pack before each mission. I spent hours and hours hacking on that thing. It was a pretty absurd situation, but I had a lot of fun.

zentiggr 6y ago
On my last two sub deployments I bought a midrange laptop and Mandrake Linux 8.0, had a grand time installing, reinstalling, tweaking the hell out of it, learning to handle a running *nix. Came in handy when an onboard system based on HP-UX cut out while underway and out of contact with fleet technical support.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  I was on a surface (aka "target" to you) cruise, and spent all my downtime in the medical department hacking away on an unused little laptop. This was when MARSGRAMs were the height of fast communications, and the procedure for sending them was to handwrite your message on a slip of paper and pass it to the radio guys, who would then type a bunch of them into a computer hooked up to a packet modem. That was pretty low priority for them, understandably, so things would wait in queue for quite a while before they could get around to doing some data entry. I knocked up a little QBasic app that let you type in your MARSGRAM message and then write it out to a floppy, batched alongside everyone else's messages. Once every couple of days, we'd run that floppy to the radio guys who'd pop it in their computer, blast out the messages, and write any replies they'd received to it back out so you could take them back to the department and everyone could read notes from their loved ones. I'd have a hard time exaggerating how well this went over with everyone involved (except maybe the MARSGRAM operators who were suddenly carrying a lot more messages than they were before because it was so easy to send them). "Hey Captain, I heard you say you were missing your wife. Want to send her a message and hear a response in a couple of days instead of months?" It worked out pretty well for me personally, too. I had a great boss at the time who told me flat-out that I was an idiot for pretending to want to work in medicine, when my heart was clearly elsewhere. It'd never occurred to me to make a career out of computer stuff before then, and a short time later I was out of the Navy and enrolled in a compsci program. Thanks for the kick in the right direction, Ken!
  - jeffrallen 6y ago
    In 2006 on my first mission with MSF, we had a BGAN satellite terminal. Luxury! Because in my downtime, I'd read the tech library on CDROM, which explained how to organise a mail service with floppy disks and Landcruisers, with a relay to Paris over HF radio via Portishead, UK..
    - kstrauser 6y ago
      That's beautiful.

zentiggr 6y ago

On my last two sub deployments I bought a midrange laptop and Mandrake Linux 8.0, had a grand time installing, reinstalling, tweaking the hell out of it, learning to handle a running *nix. Came in handy when an onboard system based on HP-UX cut out while underway and out of contact with fleet technical support.

kstrauser 6y ago
I was on a surface (aka "target" to you) cruise, and spent all my downtime in the medical department hacking away on an unused little laptop. This was when MARSGRAMs were the height of fast communications, and the procedure for sending them was to handwrite your message on a slip of paper and pass it to the radio guys, who would then type a bunch of them into a computer hooked up to a packet modem. That was pretty low priority for them, understandably, so things would wait in queue for quite a while before they could get around to doing some data entry. I knocked up a little QBasic app that let you type in your MARSGRAM message and then write it out to a floppy, batched alongside everyone else's messages. Once every couple of days, we'd run that floppy to the radio guys who'd pop it in their computer, blast out the messages, and write any replies they'd received to it back out so you could take them back to the department and everyone could read notes from their loved ones. I'd have a hard time exaggerating how well this went over with everyone involved (except maybe the MARSGRAM operators who were suddenly carrying a lot more messages than they were before because it was so easy to send them). "Hey Captain, I heard you say you were missing your wife. Want to send her a message and hear a response in a couple of days instead of months?" It worked out pretty well for me personally, too. I had a great boss at the time who told me flat-out that I was an idiot for pretending to want to work in medicine, when my heart was clearly elsewhere. It'd never occurred to me to make a career out of computer stuff before then, and a short time later I was out of the Navy and enrolled in a compsci program. Thanks for the kick in the right direction, Ken!
- jeffrallen 6y ago
  In 2006 on my first mission with MSF, we had a BGAN satellite terminal. Luxury! Because in my downtime, I'd read the tech library on CDROM, which explained how to organise a mail service with floppy disks and Landcruisers, with a relay to Paris over HF radio via Portishead, UK..
  - kstrauser 6y ago
    That's beautiful.