I think it would be kind of fun to befriend a big cat. As long as the vet bills, food, and enough real estate for it to get a healthy amount of exercise and mental stimulation were all somebody else's problem. Maybe not as big as a tiger; a leopard or a lion perhaps. Of course, I'm used to dealing with cats that aren't big enough to be able to kill me ...
Last night when I pulled up to a red light on MLK, another car pulled up beside me and I saw a fender with a remarkably clean line -- something about it caught my attention and I took a closer look at the rest of the car ... understated and utterly dignified yet somehow managing to convey sportiness, not plainness. Even a single fender screamed "classic". As I took in the lines of the car, I thought, "That is way too big to be an Alfa Romeo. What is it?" Then I found the Jaguar name on the side -- an unfamiliar model of Jag, and with its near-timeless aesthetics, I've no idea whether it was older or newer than the Jags I'd seen before. The driver noticed me craning my neck and staring, so I gave her a thumbs-up gesture. She looked confused and a little worried and rolled down her window. I rolled down mine and shouted, "Nice car!", and her face lit up as though nobody had ever said that to her before.
Windows NT uses preemptive multitasking, doesn't it? 'Cause my NT box (yes, I'm still using it for a few things, though methinks I should use it for even fewer) is acting like a cooperative-multitasking system running a doesn't-play-nice-with-others program. Last night it was taking 120-150 seconds to respond to a mouseclick; today it's up to seven minutes. All I'm trying to do is save enough of what's open to be able to reboot it without losing anything.
Last night I had a dream that I don't remember most of except that it involved dealing with a terribly annoying bureaucracy, and it seemed like a real waste of dreaming time. But it wasn't as bad as a couple of nights ago when I dreamt I was in prison and the parole board wouldn't let me say anything at a hearing.
A Sun 3/60 is a lot bigger than I'd remembered. I was expecting something closer to the size of a 3/80 or a Sparc 2. The desk I'd planned to put it on isn't big enough. I wonder whether it's okay to stand it on edge. (I can wedge something heavy against it to keep it from falling over.)
Sun 3/60
In other Sun news, I'm considering picking up an Ultra 5 (my favorite used Sun site, RetroBox, has some for $50 ... well, with probably another $50 for shipping). If so, I'll want to get rid of one of my Ultra 1's. Interested in it? I currently have Solaris 7 on it, it's got 256MB RAM and I think only 2GB of HD... oh yeah, and a noisy CPU fan. Then again, you should check out retrobox.com yourself. They have Suns and other things (lots of PCs, an occasional SGI or Alpha, etc.).
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Young'uns these days!
Shortly after I got to college, they replaced the PDP-11/34 running 7th Edition Unix with a Vax-11/750 running BSD4.2 ... And we all logged in with various terminals (mostly VT100 clones, though if we were crowded, you might get stuck using one of the DecWriter paper terminals).
There were a couple actual IBM PC's (not XT's but the plain-old dual-floppy PC, with DOS 1.1) which you could sign up for, in the library.
Re: Young'uns these days!
I do like having a PDA faster than just about anything I had access to in college (though it doesn't have the I/O capacity of the IBM 3090).
Re: Young'uns these days!
All this talk of terminals! We didn't have terminals. We had keypunch machines! And our output was printouts, on wide, green-bar paper. (Or more punched cards.) No pretty displays. Calling dibs on a Sun 3/60? We'd have thought it was the blessed afterlife, or a very positive reincarnation.
And after college, when we did get terminals, they weren't those new-fangled VT-100s. Lear Siegler! ADM-5, ADM-11! Yeah, you remember seeing those strange names in the termcap file. (They're still in there.) Ever wonder about vi's cursor-motion commands (hjkl)? They match the arrow keys on the old terminals.
And d'Glenn's already heard my stories about the computer in High School (and a computer in a high school was a very rare thing in those days) where we marked our punch cards with soft-lead pencils (we didn't even have a keypunch), and everything else was on paper tape....
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The "nice car" comment
Classic Bugs work for me, and I get kinda misty/frothy over them. Oh well.
Big Cat appeal
And the Bain Sidhe is still going.