Ghosts of Web Pages Past
I just found one of my old web pages mirrored on someone’s Tripod site. Old, as in a page I put up twelve years ago.
It’s just a long article on the state-of-the-art in x86 processors. State of the art circa 1994. I posted this on my personal web site, one of a series of handouts I was using for CS 132, Computer Organization and Architecture.
To quote the last line of the page:
"The information in this
file was researched in mid-1994 to early 1995, and some or all of the data
presented may be out of date."
Creepy, because I’d taken that page down ten years ago, and to my knowledge only one other person asked for permission to mirror it (and this guy wasn’t him). I’d written that web page way back when we were using Lynx and Mosaic. Don’t know where else it went before this guy put it on his page.
A quick look around Google (ego-surfing: punching your name into Google to find out how many pages register hits) shows me one of my Java programs (actually, the very first Java program I’d written) being used to teach EVSC 430L at virginia.edu.
The timestamp on TreeTest.java reads 96/02/12. I’m cringing at the sight of my decade-old code (which I actually translated directly from Pascal to Java, with all the attendant non-OO structures) embarrassingly posted on someone else’s website.
I guess it’s true that anything you do online is forever saved in the dark corners of the Internet.
They did bring back nice memories of that time - I’d just enrolled in Graduate School, and everything was so new. Nobody knew what this Internet was (except for us geeks in the Computer Science Division) and for us, the Internet consisted of email, USENET and FTP sites.
Back then, to get on the Internet you had to share time on a couple of VT100 terminals (amber text) hooked up via serial ribbon cable to mudspring.uplb.edu.ph - our Sparc IPX. There were only two machines visible on uplb.edu.ph - makiling, a 386 running BSD/386 which was our main DNS and mail server, and mudspring, where the grad student accounts were kept.
I remember spending too much time on USENET. I remember the glory days of SimTel.
I remember writing a dining philosophers simulator using LWP on SunOS 4.x. That was stupid. But fun.
I remember stringing several meters of ribbon cable outside the window from the server room to our office, and wrestling with Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I remember the first time I was able to get Mosaic running over a SLIP connection (and how we were happy if we were able to run it for more than two hours without crashing).
I have been on the Internet for over twelve years now. Damn but that makes me feel old.
May 5th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Dining philosophers… in my first run, my philosophers won’t dine… so we all went out to eat. Haha!
I remember CSDiv had more people during weekends than weekdays… Saturday morning ’til Sunday night was Internet time! And, hey, you forgot to include Talk and Y-talk! Hehehe! And when you find someone in the Net, he/she is either a computer science/engineering student/faculty or some geek.
And the CS125 lab days when we would hear students go “Sir/Ma’am, we got no connection..” … in sequence.