
23 Things Only 90s Sysadmins Will Remember - discoposse
https://discoposse.com/2018/03/20/23-things-only-90s-sysadmins-will-remember/
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smarks
PCMCIA = "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms"

Oddly, that's one I had memorized. It actually stands for PC Memory Card
International Association. (That one I didn't memorize; I had to look it up.)

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sparrish
Ghost... such fond memories. I was like black magic to be able to pull a drive
running out of space, ghost it to a new larger drive, while resizing the
partition, and stick it back in the server and just boot it up.

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newnewpdro
Few if any of these would be limited to 90s sysadmins. If you were an office
worker in the 90s this stuff is almost all familiar.

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discoposse
Very true! Hard to imagine how commonplace this stuff all was and now it's
like a museum

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sebazzz
We still use Lotus Notes at work, except that it is called IBM Notes nowadays.
Some legacy applications are still in process of being ported to Sharepoint
(which is itself in process of being migrated from 2013 to 2016). Happy to say
we do use Outlook for a few years instead of Lotus.

Regarding ZIP drivers, I had such drive in my personal computer. There were
several variants of hardware, both in allowed ZIP disk size and formatting.
Some ZIP disks were Mac-formatted and no way to get those working on Windows.
I wonder if that was a technical or artificial limitation.

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wglb
I had both types and was able to reformat them to windows.

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virtuexru
The nostalgia is super high in this one. I still have all my AOL & Netscape
CD's laying around somewhere. As well as some old zip drives, floppies and my
original Gateway desktop along with an old IBM machine.

I should dust them off and see if they still run.

I didn't even realize at the time T1 meant 1.54mbps; we definitely take for
granted the speed today (currently at 250mbps for roughly ~$60USD/mo).

Great article :).

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bcrescimanno
Score one for the 3270 emulation. I worked for a small company in the mid 90s
whose software was used to connect to the mainframes that airlines used for
scheduling. We provided software that allowed for dial-up access to those
systems from home (among other things). The core software was built in Delphi
and was basically a dialer married to a 3270 emulator.

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hellofunk
After reading this, I was surprised to learn that in the 90s I was a sysadmin.

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HelloNurse
Apart from EBCDIC and 3270 emulators, which are uncommon but in daily use in
IBM-addicted environment such as banks, disk imaging software is still
relevant.

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woliveirajr
Is it a competition? I made 20/23 in this quiz.

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swalsh
I think it's a trick for Cambridge Analytica to gather data on your political
segmentation preferences.

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discoposse
Shhhh ;)

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tptacek
ESF, B8ZS.

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discoposse
Nice! Classic memories :)

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RickJWag
Great article. Hacker News paydirt!

