8 ms·

I have a printer story for you young whipper-snappers. Back in the day I worked for Sun. They had a laser printer called the SPARCPrinter that did all the rast

I have a printer story for you young whipper-snappers. Back in the day I worked for Sun. They had a laser printer called the SPARCPrinter that did all the rasterization on the workstation - which made the printer very inexpensive, but it bogged down the workstation when printing. We often played flight simulator after work (ok, sometimes during work) where you could fly an F-15 and go shoot your buddy out of the sky. There was a sys admin (Keith) who was an absolute ace. If Keith got on your tail you were basically dead. Keith would win all the time. But Keith had a weakness. The SPARCprinter was attached to his workstation.... So if Keith got on your tail, we discovered that we could send a nice big print job to his workstation. That was usually enough to shake him from your tail and escape. The virtual equivalent of chaff I suppose

spacemanmatt 6y ago
This reminds me of the BBS equivalent. When call-waiting was introduced, it would usually destroy a 1200 or 2400 baud connection. So we would just call people we wanted to knock offline. It was pretty handy when a "big" chat board had 8 whole simultaneous connections and they were all busy.
- zaphirplane 6y ago
  How would you call them without disconnecting yourself ? Presumably you had one phone line
  - maxden 6y ago
    I think they are saying they couldn't connect as all lines were busy, so they would call someone they assumed was connected, causing the other person to drop off and free up a line, and then try and get that free line.
    - wccrawford 6y ago
      I think call waiting "beep beep" would also cause disconnects a lot of the time, if the person had that.
      - spacemanmatt 6y ago
        It was specifically the call-waiting beeps that interrupted the modem connection. I recall my 300 baud modem tolerating it, but 12/2400 (and higher) could not recover from the interruption.
        Moru 6y ago
        You could set how long the modems would wait for reconnect. We had a service that offered free phone calls with 15 seconds interruption for ads now and then. Worked fine for free bbs time if you knew how to set it :)
  - spacemanmatt 6y ago
    I did have two lines, but if I couldn't get on the chat board, they were both free to call-waste a few likely users. God, we were savages.
- EricE 6y ago
  When running a BBS the first thing you learned was how to add the codes to disable call waiting to your modem INIT string. Ah, the good 'ol days. I picked up a cheap fax switch so I could share my dorm line with my BBS. Very cheesy british lady answered the phone "This is the Fax Boss answering your call. To send a fax remain silent, otherwise press 2 to connect" or something like that. I only really remember up to "...to send a fax...". Wish I still had that thing, it was awesome at the time. Of course instead of faxes I was receiving BBS callers but it worked perfectly. Confused my parents constantly.
tpmx 6y ago
I think I may have found this flight simulator. Looks like it's from 86-87. http://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/sun/games/fltsim.tar.gz http://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/sun/games/fltsim.tar.gz > This flight simulator seems to origin with Ed Falk at Sun Edit: No networking code in this one though, so maybe it's not the one.
- marcodiego 6y ago
  I'd bet it was ACM: https://web.archive.org/web/19981212022158/http://www.websimulations.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981212022158/http://www.websim...
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Yeah, seems likely.
sillysaurusx 6y ago
You had me at whipper-snappers. I think more people should write books filled with stories just like yours. Feynman's was basically that. There's not much knowledge about "what it was like to work for Sun 15 years ago." Stuff like that gets lost with time. It's always seemed like it should be preserved somehow, though I suppose an HN comment is as good a way as any. It's cool that coworkers were doing LAN parties 15 years ago :) I thought it was mostly a teenager phenomenon, but most phenomenons seem that way to teenagers.
- retreatguru 6y ago
  My favourite times were playing Marathon and Quake during lunch at work. This was mid 90s. Marathon was a cutting edge Mac game made by Bungie. It was the first 3D shooter I played where you could look up and down.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    So much great in that game. The rocket noise, the alien chatter and multiplayer game was excellently.
- dgacmu 6y ago
  Longest than that. We were doing lan parties when I was in college - '95 or so. Some Doom, a lot of Marathon in the Mac lab, and Quake a little later. This sometimes involved hauling our PCs and (large CRT) monitors over to one person's house. And sometimes commandeering the computer labs at school.
  - 83457 6y ago
    Oh that's still a thing
  - willmacdonald 6y ago
    I remember doing that with RS-232 connections and Doom 1.
    - 6y ago
Waterluvian 6y ago
I used to chaff my brother with file transfers when playing Marathon.
cgufus 6y ago
That's basically a side-channel attack :-) Thanks for this funny story.
sgtnoodle 6y ago
Lol, that reminds me of the time we were playing "Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator" in the two mission control rooms at SpaceX, and an IT person on the opposing team remotely rebooted our commander's workstation mid battle. Good times!

spacemanmatt 6y ago

This reminds me of the BBS equivalent. When call-waiting was introduced, it would usually destroy a 1200 or 2400 baud connection. So we would just call people we wanted to knock offline. It was pretty handy when a "big" chat board had 8 whole simultaneous connections and they were all busy.

zaphirplane 6y ago
How would you call them without disconnecting yourself ? Presumably you had one phone line
- maxden 6y ago
  I think they are saying they couldn't connect as all lines were busy, so they would call someone they assumed was connected, causing the other person to drop off and free up a line, and then try and get that free line.
  - wccrawford 6y ago
    I think call waiting "beep beep" would also cause disconnects a lot of the time, if the person had that.
    - spacemanmatt 6y ago
      It was specifically the call-waiting beeps that interrupted the modem connection. I recall my 300 baud modem tolerating it, but 12/2400 (and higher) could not recover from the interruption.
      - Moru 6y ago
        You could set how long the modems would wait for reconnect. We had a service that offered free phone calls with 15 seconds interruption for ads now and then. Worked fine for free bbs time if you knew how to set it :)
- spacemanmatt 6y ago
  I did have two lines, but if I couldn't get on the chat board, they were both free to call-waste a few likely users. God, we were savages.
EricE 6y ago
When running a BBS the first thing you learned was how to add the codes to disable call waiting to your modem INIT string. Ah, the good 'ol days. I picked up a cheap fax switch so I could share my dorm line with my BBS. Very cheesy british lady answered the phone "This is the Fax Boss answering your call. To send a fax remain silent, otherwise press 2 to connect" or something like that. I only really remember up to "...to send a fax...". Wish I still had that thing, it was awesome at the time. Of course instead of faxes I was receiving BBS callers but it worked perfectly. Confused my parents constantly.

tpmx 6y ago

I think I may have found this flight simulator. Looks like it's from 86-87. http://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/sun/games/fltsim.tar.gz http://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/sun/games/fltsim.tar.gz > This flight simulator seems to origin with Ed Falk at Sun Edit: No networking code in this one though, so maybe it's not the one.

marcodiego 6y ago
I'd bet it was ACM: https://web.archive.org/web/19981212022158/http://www.websimulations.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981212022158/http://www.websim...
- tpmx 6y ago
  Yeah, seems likely.

sillysaurusx 6y ago

You had me at whipper-snappers. I think more people should write books filled with stories just like yours. Feynman's was basically that. There's not much knowledge about "what it was like to work for Sun 15 years ago." Stuff like that gets lost with time. It's always seemed like it should be preserved somehow, though I suppose an HN comment is as good a way as any. It's cool that coworkers were doing LAN parties 15 years ago :) I thought it was mostly a teenager phenomenon, but most phenomenons seem that way to teenagers.

retreatguru 6y ago
My favourite times were playing Marathon and Quake during lunch at work. This was mid 90s. Marathon was a cutting edge Mac game made by Bungie. It was the first 3D shooter I played where you could look up and down.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  So much great in that game. The rocket noise, the alien chatter and multiplayer game was excellently.
dgacmu 6y ago
Longest than that. We were doing lan parties when I was in college - '95 or so. Some Doom, a lot of Marathon in the Mac lab, and Quake a little later. This sometimes involved hauling our PCs and (large CRT) monitors over to one person's house. And sometimes commandeering the computer labs at school.
- 83457 6y ago
  Oh that's still a thing
- willmacdonald 6y ago
  I remember doing that with RS-232 connections and Doom 1.
  - 6y ago

Waterluvian 6y ago

I used to chaff my brother with file transfers when playing Marathon.

cgufus 6y ago

That's basically a side-channel attack :-) Thanks for this funny story.

sgtnoodle 6y ago

Lol, that reminds me of the time we were playing "Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator" in the two mission control rooms at SpaceX, and an IT person on the opposing team remotely rebooted our commander's workstation mid battle. Good times!