2 ms·

Didn't we already do all of this 30-ish years ago? And I'm not trying to suggest that we haven't learned a lot since then, but: There was a time when the corp

by ssl-3 3y ago

Didn't we already do all of this 30-ish years ago? And I'm not trying to suggest that we haven't learned a lot since then, but: There was a time when the corpo web server/Internet computer existed as a pizza-box Sun Microsystems machine on someone's desk. And sure, bandwidth was a lot less than 11MB/sec back then, but that's not a stretch at all for today's modern equivalent to that expensive pizza box. But I'm old, and man do I sure as fuck remember the Web being a generally-unreliable turd back then. It was common for a website to not work today, or for an ISP's solitary email server to be down for a week or more. It sure felt more real (and I even built a couple of those email servers), but it was also obviously very broken some of the time in ways that people don't generally accept today -- especially with 400 million visits per month, which was largely unfathomable at the time.

inopinatus 3y ago
Reliability steps were made when we updated the “sparcstation 1s in a university lab” hosting architecture to what marketing called a “hot-swappable blade server with integral UPS” i.e. a bunch of second-hand thinkpads on a rack shelf above the Livingston Portmaster
- ssl-3 3y ago
  Ah. The Livingston Portmaster, and its finger server (or the same on many other dial-up terminal servers): An easy way to not only show the RADIUS username of a person dialed into a port, but also an easy (and scriptable) way to discern their IP address and ping them to death. Or, working oppositely: Knowing the IP of the user (from IRC, say), it was often possible to discern the accounts's username. And since usernames were often factually-descriptive back then -- sometimes for billing purposes (firstnamelastinitial, say): It was easy to give them details about themself or their family that they would not have guessed were possible. The greater Internet was a fun time back then for me as a teenager, and I never did anything particularly damaging with it even though I absolutely fucked around with things from time to time. It is certainly fun to remember, but there are aspects of how things worked back then that I'm not itching to bring back to life here in 2024. (And that includes the solitary pizza-box server on someone's desk, as well as the wooden racks of modems and thinkpads.)
  - inopinatus 3y ago
    in summer we’d nick desk fans off the telco folks to cool down our USR Sportsters, distracting them first with snarky remarks about ATM overhead absolutely do not miss those days
    - ssl-3 3y ago
      You were closer to the fire than I was, and I do not envy this position that you had. I'm over here remembering that /etc/passwd was world-readable (and shadowless) on a given system's [singular] shell box, but you were more like the man behind the curtain.
chefandy 3y ago
Like many others, folks around here are often blind to nostalgia's impact on their perception of 'good ol days' tech. Just because something was simpler to write or administer does't man it was better for users, and there are a lot more users.
graemep 3y ago
A single server in a data centre now is a lot more reliable than a machine sitting on someone's desk back then. The location probably makes the biggest difference - reliable network connections.
- chefandy 3y ago
  There are other advantages directly related to machines themselves, too. Power consumption and heat management alone can make a big difference for when things go wrong. Enclosures that are engineered for a finite life in a data center rather than lighting equipment on tour with a metal band are useful. (Given, if we're talking about Sun, specifically, I really can't fault their hardware.)

by ssl-3 3y ago

inopinatus 3y ago

Reliability steps were made when we updated the “sparcstation 1s in a university lab” hosting architecture to what marketing called a “hot-swappable blade server with integral UPS” i.e. a bunch of second-hand thinkpads on a rack shelf above the Livingston Portmaster

ssl-3 3y ago
Ah. The Livingston Portmaster, and its finger server (or the same on many other dial-up terminal servers): An easy way to not only show the RADIUS username of a person dialed into a port, but also an easy (and scriptable) way to discern their IP address and ping them to death. Or, working oppositely: Knowing the IP of the user (from IRC, say), it was often possible to discern the accounts's username. And since usernames were often factually-descriptive back then -- sometimes for billing purposes (firstnamelastinitial, say): It was easy to give them details about themself or their family that they would not have guessed were possible. The greater Internet was a fun time back then for me as a teenager, and I never did anything particularly damaging with it even though I absolutely fucked around with things from time to time. It is certainly fun to remember, but there are aspects of how things worked back then that I'm not itching to bring back to life here in 2024. (And that includes the solitary pizza-box server on someone's desk, as well as the wooden racks of modems and thinkpads.)
- inopinatus 3y ago
  in summer we’d nick desk fans off the telco folks to cool down our USR Sportsters, distracting them first with snarky remarks about ATM overhead absolutely do not miss those days
  - ssl-3 3y ago
    You were closer to the fire than I was, and I do not envy this position that you had. I'm over here remembering that /etc/passwd was world-readable (and shadowless) on a given system's [singular] shell box, but you were more like the man behind the curtain.

chefandy 3y ago

Like many others, folks around here are often blind to nostalgia's impact on their perception of 'good ol days' tech. Just because something was simpler to write or administer does't man it was better for users, and there are a lot more users.

graemep 3y ago

A single server in a data centre now is a lot more reliable than a machine sitting on someone's desk back then. The location probably makes the biggest difference - reliable network connections.

chefandy 3y ago
There are other advantages directly related to machines themselves, too. Power consumption and heat management alone can make a big difference for when things go wrong. Enclosures that are engineered for a finite life in a data center rather than lighting equipment on tour with a metal band are useful. (Given, if we're talking about Sun, specifically, I really can't fault their hardware.)