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Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/24
Triggered by [Wayback/Archive] Hillel on Twitter: “Gen-Z programmers are always chasing the new shiny thing like Tailwind and Svelte instead of learning CS fundamentals, like React”, below some links on HEARN, EARN and BITNET Relay: conference system before IRC.
I might amend it later with more information, but for now the list is so that I do not have to re-do the search queries.
Posted in About, BITNET Relay, Chat, History, Personal, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/12/15
I forgot where I originally downloaded bitnet-links-Bitnet-Network-Definition-verison-89.xlsx from, but for posterity, here it is:
[Wayback] bitnet-links-Bitnet-Network-Definition-verison-89.xlsx
Related blog posts:
–jeroen
Posted in BITNET Relay, Chat, History, Internet, InternetArchive, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2018/08/27
I’m from the BITNET RELAY era, so every now and then I need to get used to how things are done on IRC:
[WayBack] IRC Private Messages – /msg, /invite, /query, Internet Relay Chat
Summarised in my own words:
/msg nick single private message/query nick private channel–jeroen
Some of my BITNET history: xyzzy, Relay Conferencing before IRC even existed « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff
Posted in BITNET Relay, Chat, IRC, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/10/20
A while ago, Joe C. Hecht mentioned for the second time about his family joke along the lines that he had bad grades at school despite being good at the topics. He got tested which resulted in “You would make for a great computer programmer”.
I wonder how this happened with other people in the IT. Did you get yourself a degree in that direction, or teach yourself programming and such?
The reason is that I recognise what Joe wrote: I’m still a bad learner from books or theory as I learn by doing. I specifically didn’t try to get a Computer Science degree as in the late 1980s in The Netherlands it basically was a heavy math degree plus Computer Science topics. So it was basically doing two studies at once and I was only interested in the Computer Science parts.
So I chose studying Chemistry (one of the science topics I really liked at high school) at the closest university to my home so I kept living with my parents.
In 20-20 hindsight this was not the right choice. But at that time I didn’t know about the right choice.
In about 4 years, I finished like 2.5 years of studying, was a geek-prototype (good at computers, bad at people skills) and still did a lot of Computer Science topics (even though the exams would be worthless as back then individual exams didn’t count unless they were part of the main direction of your study). The last year was prepping for practice and advanced topics. I slowly attended less and less sessions and did more and more programming gigs as somehow that was way more fun before slowly bailing out. I also sold network equipment to the university department helping them to connect to the internet and helped a lot of co-students with their computing issues and assignments, learned my way in DOS/3com/Novell/EARN/BITNET/DECNet/SunOS and VAX/VMS based technologies.
I only found out why I bailed out more than a decade later: I was a pragmatic guy learning by doing, not suited for a university that tried educating theorists. Besides that the department I wanted to finish my studies has two four camps: a very theoretic camp (with nice guys: they were the ones wanting internet access very early on), two less theoretic camps fighting each other and a lazy camp filling their days basically with doing as little as possible. A very unproductive and depressing situation. I had worked at the research labs of the paint factory doing research close to my studies, but there was no way the university would allow me to do my research phase there. Even more depressing.
Now (as always, hindsight is 20/20 vision) I know I should have bailed out early on and go for a more pragmatic study maybe not even a university but a polytechnic. On the other hand it helped doing a truckload of Turbo Pascal work (which I started at High School with Turbo Pascal 1 on CP/M with Apple ][+ and //e machines), programming in assembler/prolog/FORTRAN/C, getting connected to the internet (BITNET RELAY chat, mailing lists, early newsgroups, uucp, TCP/IP basics, thick/thin ethernet converters, serial and modem communication with Kermit and FidoNET, gopher, FTP and truckloads more stuff).
It got me into the Delphi, .NET and open source worlds, doing a lot of travel and conference speaking and being an early adopter of many technologies and concepts (some even so early that they only got way popular decades later – like the 1980s “the network is the computer” mantra – or making sense – like the lock semantics topics really became useful when around the century turn single processor machines got multi-processor siblings and a lustrum later multi-core and multi-threading processors became available and ubiquitous around 2010) and taught me that being able to search and find things is way more important than knowing things.
So I wonder about all my followers:
How did your education go and how did you end up in computing?
–jeroen
References via Joe C. Hecht:
Posted in About, BBS, BITNET Relay, Chat, FidoNet, History, Opinions, Personal, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/28
A while ago, I remembered xyzzy by David Bolen: a VAX/VMS program for the BITNET Relay conference system on BITNET/EARN. Yes, relay chat before IRC. Even ELIZA did operate as a chatbot on BITNET Relay.
I was part of it from the late 80s until the early 90s and vividly remember the chat rooms where at one time you could have smart people from all around the world participating: Asia, Middle East, Europe, North America and other regions.
All people had one thing in common: an enthusiastic vibe as they had immediately recognised what the benefits of near instant feedback were. World Wide before you had the WWW. It was addictive too (:
The most important Dutch relay node was HEARN which was named unlike the HNYKUN patterns at the University in Nijmegen (now Radboud Universiteit, but previously known as Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen hence the KUN in the HNYKUN pattern).
I had an account at HLERUL52 (chemistry department) at first, then later at HLERUL5 as well (computer technology department). Only later I got an SMTP email address [Wayback/Archive] jeroenp@rulfc1.leidenuniv.nl.
Anyway: based on the list of Bitnet/Earn links and connections below, you’d think you could plot a route. The example is between me and a cyber friends who – in 1992 – I finally met in real life:
But that table is not the only one, the actual routing tables were generated from [Wayback/Archive/Google] LINKSWT files (see below), which means that HEARN and DEARN had a direct connection collapsing the (expensive) transatlantic steps 3..5 into one.
Posted in BITNET Relay, Chat, History, IRC, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 