OTD 1980: Publication of the Digital/Intel/Xerox specification for "The Ethernet", Version 1.0. 10Mbps then, 800Gbps now. I'm running 2.5Gbps (with P.O.E.) throughout my house.

Happy 70th birthday, Andy Bechtolsheim! Also, OTD 1993: #sunmicrosystems ships its 1,000,000th system!

Seems to have been a lot of "improvements" at 4 corners since my last visit.

@aka_pugs 🧵100🎂Seymour Cray ‘Cray-1 Introduction’ Seymour Cray, LANL (1976) video #seymourcray #video #cray1 https://youtu.be/vtOA1vuoDgQ

Happy 100th, Seymour Cray! I never met Mr. Cray, though I did visit Cray Research in Chippewa Falls once.

StorageNewsletter: Recap of MSST conference. https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2025/09/26/recap-of-msst-conference-2025/

Scalps and platters in the man cave. (Neatness not typical)

50 years ago today: Kick-off of the #princeton #unix/370 effort. Career-defining moment for me.

NFS at 40. Phenomenal collection of seminal documents, related work, source code, ephemera, etc... https://nfs40.online/ #sunmicrosystems

There was cake!

NFS: Genesis My talk from today's IEEE MSST Conference. https://speakerdeck.com/pugs/2025-ieee-msst-nfs-genesis

Another Seymour Cray 100th birthday event. TNMOC in UK: https://www.tnmoc.org/events/2025/9/28/seymour-cray-at-100-the-man-the-machines-the-supercomputing-legacy

Seymour Cray 100th birthday event coming up: https://www.cfmit.org/event-details/seymour-cray-100th-birthday

TIL: Norwegian Computing Center, established 1952: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Computing_Center

OTD 1985: #sunmicrosystems announces the Sun-3 workstation family & architecture. TBH, the Sun-3 was always my favorite.

Born this day 1941: Dennis Ritchie. I was lucky to work directly with Dennis during my summer at Bell Labs.

OTD 1999: #sunmicrosystems announces the Sun Ray thin client. Great blog about its development: https://marcschneider.weebly.com/sun-ray.html

Got my home network upgraded to handle Comcast's 2.x Gbit service. Pretty neat result from Fast.com considering I'm using 2.5Gbe switches.

OTD 1991: #sunmicrosystems announces #solaris name and strategy.

Just spent 30 minutes on the phone (after hours!) with a very pleasant lady from #xfinity - because the *&^#$ Android App doesn't work!

OTD 1982: Sun is on the Net! https://www.krsaborio.net/bsd/research/1982/0908.htm #suntember

OTD 1963: IBM's "Janitor Memo" regarding the development of the CDC 6600. https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/supercomputers/10/33/62

OTD 1996: Ipsilon Networks' "IP Switch-a-Thon" featuring 22 vendors: https://web.archive.org/web/19970102233600/http://www.ipsilon.com/news/switchathon.html

OTD 1963: Control Data Corp. announces the CDC 6600 - the first broadly deployed supercomputer. But check out this site about the CDC Sunnyvale site - located exactly where the Google Cloud buildings are today! http://www.couperus.org/Albums/Bayview/index.html

Born this day, 1934: C. Gordon Bell, computer pioneer & architect; founder of the Computer History Museum. Pictured (left) with PDP-6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Bell

Feeding my scanner a 3 course Tukey dinner. 3 fat volumes of Limited Preliminary Edition (1970) of his seminal book Exploratory Data Analysis (1977) - hand drawn graphs. Sorry, John, no microfiche. Tukey biography for the curious.

#shitpost #meme #phone #Camera

The HP Garage is famous for the claim that it's the birthplace of Silicon Valley. But the Federal Telegraph labs, 1100 feet away but 29 years earlier gets my vote. Birthplace of the electronic tube.

Happy 75th, Steve Wozniak! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak

Radio Shack TRS-80 Coding Form with Video Worksheet on back. OK, the video worksheet might make sense, but who would think that a coding form (almost always associated with punched cards) would be useful with a TRS-80? Especially for BASIC, a column insensitive language?

New score: AFIPS 1964 "Very High-Speed Computer Systems" Includes papers on the IBM 360 model 92 which was hurriedly announced in response to the CDC 6600 and never shipped. The 360 model 91, which first shipped in 1967, was still an amazing machine. But the 6600 ruled.

Xerox Daybreak system at #vcfwest. Brother Bob worked on the software; brother Dick invented the optical mouse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Daybreak (That's a black & white monitor; curious color artifacts)

CDC-160A. Oldest thing running at #vcfwest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_160_series

TIL: Gomphocarpus physocarpus aka "Hairy Balls" #bloomscrolling

Finished "IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future" by Lepore, 2020. A dark counterpoint to "The Dream Machine" tracing the invention of predictive behavorial analytics and it uses and abuses leading to things like Facebook today. Good, but not fun […]

My Dad's radio controlled airplane from the 1930s is now on display at the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamagordo.

Made one of my world famous fruit salads for a picnic today. 1 simple rule - Don't put anything in that you don't want to eat! No seeds, no rinds, no under or over ripe stuff. And I usually have pineapple to offset the sweetness of other stuff, and to help slow down decay. 1/2

Excellent book: "The Dream Machine - J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal" by Waldrop (2001) Both an excellent biography of Licklider and a history of the key people and technologies, especially the Arpanet, that got us to today. #bookstodon #licklider #arpanet

OTD 1992: Insanely over-the-top water war at #sunmicrosystems between SunSoft and Sun Labs. Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q851fnC4io&ab_channel=TomLyon

Just finished "Why Computers are Computers -- The SWAC and the PC". Fast, easy, read for the layman but enough facts and figures about early computing to keep me satisfied. And I discovered a direct connection between SWAC and Sun Microsystems - Bill Gunning! 1/5

IBM 1401 Feuille de Programme Symbolique. (early 1960s) Send that to the "filles de frappe au clavier"

You may be cool, but you're not Bell Labs Coding Form cool. (1971) (Don't forget to specify your character set!) Or maybe Cray is your kink. (1976?)

OTD 1983: Toronto USENIX conference. Schedule of talks: https://www.krsaborio.net/unix/research/1983/0713.htm

ping -q

Ready to party! #usenix 50th!

Just finished "Making Silicon Valley" This is a great book! Connects the dots starting with amateur radio nuts in the 1910s, and carries through into the 1970s. Highly recommended. Thanks to whoever pointed me to this, I can't seem to find that now […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

TIme-traveled via bike today. Palo Alto to Niles.

I scanned a handful of old commercial UNIX newsletters from 1983: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1su6vVa5vXe5FpI-4WB5AQyex_jS_t2XI?usp=sharing "commUNIXations" Number 12 is particularly interesting - an issue dedicated to the commercial databases available on UNIX at the time.

OTD 1945: distribution of "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC". We are all living with the repercussions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC

OTD 1913: Birthday of Maurice Wilkes, computing pioneer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkes Among his many firsts: authorship of the first book about software.