Re: Gary's Recollections of Delta

[Aron Insinga <ainsinga@infomation.com>]

Geat; thanks for writing that up.  I'll try to collect my memories
RealSoonNow.  But you hit on a couple of things...

At 10:37 PM 6/24/98 -0400, Gary Luckenbaugh wrote:

>Dan Grim was the ultimate expert on
>      everything related
>      to RSTS, PDP-11s, PDP-8s, DecSystem 10s, and probably
>      everything else related
>      to computers and computing.

There aren't very many people in the world who've used an LGP-30!

(And yes, I'm still kicking myself for not scrounging enough cash to buy
the Bendix G-15 at Selectronics, which was an electronics junk yard in
south Philly with a dead dog in the parking lot [literally] that mostly
dealt in scrap electronics from the Navy yard.  I still have a few of the
modules from it that I got after they scrapped it, and I gave some of them
to The Computer Museum long ago.)

>       leave, and join Dan at the computing center.
>       Aron and I worked with Dan, and
>       were there when the computing center opened
>       a new building on ??? road.

South Chapel St., next to the Solar House (at least one of the, if not the,
earliest house to generate both heat and electricity from the sun).  It was
off campus, so we could get a Coke machine instead of a Pepsi machine.
Until the Coke machine arrived, people would take turns collecting quarters
and running across the street to the gas station which had an old 'open the
door and grab the top of a bottle and pull it out from between the rollers'
Coke machine.  (Am I repeating myself?)

Anyway, we helped move some of the data comm stuff from Smith Hall to the
new computing center and found most of a TTY under the raised floor -- the
air plenum/cable space doubled as the Burroughs techs' spares cabinet.  We
helped with their 11/70 running RSTS (doing backups and the like) and we
also did stuff with the DECsystem-10 (I wrote a thing to create accounts
based on data from the Burroughs).  I think that the DEC & HP minis and the
-10 were thrown in with data comm because the Burroughs-oriented staff
didn't grok them.  Considering that the Burroughs is history, while Dan
runs the campus network, the small department of data comm was the exact
right place for him to be; I'm sure it was no mistake!

>Ed Boas had told me that Aron and I really left them
>in the lurch when we quit, but Walter Mahla and
>Dave Haislett had filled the void.  I don't believe Aron
>ever went back.

No, I didn't go back.  I think I already said something on the list about
removing the names of the people that had worked on a program from the
comments.

>(For those that don't know, my other passion,
>besides computers, is radio broadcasting.)

I don't recall knowing that.  <begin digression>

One of the neat things about eastern MA is all of the college and other
small radio stations.  There are a lot of colleges in the area.  I heard
that one of Cambridge, MA's problems is there there is so much land that is
tax-exempt, their property tax base isn't very large.

I miss the commercial Bloomberg-network AM station in Boston that did
business news & talk all the time; it was bought out by a religious
network.  My favorite of the shows (see http://www.moneyexperts.com/) is on
another station now but at inconvenient hours.  Their former producer now
works at our spinoff, ThePassword.com.

A few people from the VAX/VMS group ran the folk music show on the NH
public radio station.  (I don't know if the station still does it; they
were trying to switch to an all-classical format.)  One of them, Dan
Murphy, one of the authors of TENEX/TOPS-20, and who worked on soemthing at
OSF, was once (in the '60s) part owner of a folk radio station in Cambridge.

On a slightly more different note, I know a couple of hams at DEC.  I
worked with one in Hudson and you could see her antenna mast from the
plant.  (Well, it isn't really that far away, but it is a very large
structure for a suburban neighborhood.)  Another one I worked with in
Marlborough said something like "My wife thinks we bought a house; I think
we bought a large antenna mast with a small house attached to it."

"Everything is deeply intertwingled."
        -- "Computer Lib/Dream Machines"  <end digression>

- Aron