chose Zaphod
as my B account name because It was male and I would not get hassles from
geek guys. Hey I like geek guys but I dont want to be funluv or sexgrl
online... sheesh! It was my second choice the first choice that at this
late date I forget was already used.
I was Zaphod for 5 years- yeh it took me 5 years to get out of there with
my BS- 1985-1990 including summers where you had to walk in to the CC
in person and keep it open for the summer. I still have my account tar-ed
on a big spool of tape- probably a meg or two of data really. I loved
the Cowell College Nature and language of Unix class taught by Geoffrey
Pullum. I thought it was fantastically fun. TANJ was my TA. He even had
TANJ as his license plate.
my
first year at Cowell and got a used ADM31 and a 1200 baud modem the next
year when I lived in condo land. I later donated that terminal to Falcon-
though I don't know if it was any use. I remember a distinct turning point
where I was at the CC early in my UCSC career a short haired Falcon and
some other geek asked me if I wanted to go on a fud run with them- I declined
as they were going all the way to Capitola-- in retrospect I would have
been initiated into the geek world sooner if I had gone. (insert what
if dream sequence here)
I had many many many class machine accounts my favorite was Anal008@ucsci.ucsc.edu
it was for my analytical chemistry class. I was statlab- mom for NSII
and Kerr Hall, I did Cowell too sometimes. I got a Key to the room, and
carried printer ribbons. I don't remember the print sequence that would
have the printer print out all the characters on the ribbon. I would check
for bad print (time to clean or replace the print type). I cleaned up
and reloaded paper. For this I got a free account on some less used machine
so I could actually write my papers etc... Finals made machines deathly
slow and hard to use for editing in vi.
I spent many an hour in the CC pounding out lab reports, formatting them
with -MS macros troff-ing them- printing them, waiting for the printer
to be done with landscape and print my report to find I had messed up
some font and I had to find the error and re-format it. Oh the days before
WYSIWYG.
Lets just say ADM3a's are not ergonomic.
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