Since I came across it in its very early days, for nearly three decades the fourmilab.ch site has been the one constant in my weblife. Treasure trove of projects and ideas and book suggestions. Eclectic is the word which pops up in my head right now and insists on being used.
Had a few email exchanges with the man himself. On randomness, on English grammar, on Swedish adventures in The Thirty Years' War, on certain politics (where we didn't necessarily see eye to eye but where there was plenty of room for civilised discussion). Unfailingly polite, informative, entertaining, and of course with cognitive ressources most of us can only dream of.
John Walker, thanks for all the effort and the inspiration. I shall miss your presence.
So what? This crazy thing runs fine, albeit slowly, on my 12 year old ThinkPad. It's actually digesting an image of an anteater while I write this. Because of course it plays nicely and doesn't hog the hardware.
> A German general decorating with the Iron Cross some soldiers of the Expeditionary Force and two soldiers of the SS, in Denmark, April 1940
Norwegian writing on Norwegian houses in Norwegian town with Norwegian trees in background. So a slight Gell-Mann effect creeps in, although the general outline of Bohr's escape seems well enough aligned with the facts as known.
I stand corrected. You rarely spell out these larger numbers, so the exact spelling can be hard to remember. On similar lines, seeing "tredivte" on the list gave me a start - it somehow doesn't look right, even though it is.
Ha, I remember that news item, although from the other end of the world, and not really sure where I read it. The gist was that the first email had been sent to Australia, and I do distinctly remember that Melbourne was the endpoint.
We certainly had email before 1989. I managed systems at another university and had a working .edu.au email address there, email servers and a usenet feed, and had left that job by late 1986. In fact one of my systems was a beta for 4.2 BSD and I remember the protocol change to TCP from whatever came before it. At the same time Australia’s TLD changed from .oz to .au. Wikipedia says 4.2BSD came out in August 1983, so the 4.1z beta we ran must have come before that.
The University of Melbourne (munnari.oz) had a leased line to DEC’s Western Research Labs (decwrl) over which all of Australia’s traffic flowed. My systems connected to the Computer Science department’s machine, which had a link to munnari. Netnews was an overnight affair, and email slow. It was possible to remotely log in to an MIT system.
My formative memories were on YoYo, a Monash University student group-owned DEC Alpha which was so overloaded with users that it never saw a load average not in the triple digits...
... and had an EFnet server that could only run from 9pm to 5am or so because it'd otherwise cripple connectivity (even before DoS style stuff).
Ours was via the network, although I think we didn’t take the alt tree.
Unix distributions, on the other hand, arrived on 9-track tape via the “distribution tree”. You would get a copy, then make copies and send those on. Bug reports (at least in my experience) went back the same way. I found the TCP URGENT off-by-one bug in the BSD API, and tried to report it to my upstream; it came back “will not fix”, but it was unclear whether that was some gatekeeper between me and BSD.
Had a few email exchanges with the man himself. On randomness, on English grammar, on Swedish adventures in The Thirty Years' War, on certain politics (where we didn't necessarily see eye to eye but where there was plenty of room for civilised discussion). Unfailingly polite, informative, entertaining, and of course with cognitive ressources most of us can only dream of.
John Walker, thanks for all the effort and the inspiration. I shall miss your presence.