Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - We're all techies here, but who among us are the true, hardcore, old-school geeks?

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We're all techies here, but who among us are the true, hardcore, old-school geeks?

The hour is come, but not the man.

Define "true, hardcore, old-school geeks"

Mr Mephisto

I didn't get into the hardcore hardware nerdfest until about two-three years ago, so I'm definitely not an "old-school" geek. I know a good bit about hardware, though!

-Lasereth

Lasereth seems to know a good bit about lots of things. Especially video cards.

Goddamn you! :)

Mr Mephisto

PS - Wireless neworks are my thing...

Lasereth is good on all gaming issues.

I think we need a definition. I've been in and around computer since the 1970s, my Dad was an exec with Control Data and my bro went to CDI and now is head of IT for a large govt org, I'm running PC ops for a film company. My first "computer" was a terminal to the PLATO network with an acoustic modem.

That being said, I'm no Linux expert or convert. I've messed around with a few distros but I'm much more comfortable around Windows.

Definition, definitely.

I like to think myself a bit of a Linux-nerd.... but way back when...

ran a bbs on a 9600 modem (to start), 386 w/ 4M ram and 8M hard drive doublespaced to 16M (kinda hehe). Good ol' Renegade software.

Quote:

Originally posted by Mr Mephisto
Define "true, hardcore, old-school geeks"

Mr Mephisto

Nobody has addressed the quote from my original post yet, so I'll assume that nobody knows what I was really talking about.

http://www.midnight.demon.co.uk/conspiracies.html

This website has conveniently plagarized a summary of the Usenet Cabal from CONSPIRACY Files

Quote:

With the growth of the Internet over the last few years, the number of people now regularly on-line is growing swiftly. One of the primary tools of communication across the net is the World Wide Web, but in the late 80s and early 90s, before the Web arrived, a discussion board conferencing system known as Usenet stood in its place. Usenet conferences were each themed around a specific topic, and numbered in their hundreds. A user could post a message to a conference - called a 'news group' - which would then be visible to anyone reading that news group. Similarly, people were free to reply. Usenet News is still active, and there are now tens of thousands of groups, but it's importance to the Internet community as a whole has decreased sharply as the web has gained prominence.

At its peak though, Usenet was the primary Internet tool for communicating with people outside of your sphere of acquaintance, and from this the Cabal was born. The Usenet Cabal was a secret society of Internet users, led by an anonymous figure referred to as Aleph Null at Node-1. Each member recruited three others, and no more, but you did not inform the person above you in the chain of the people you recruited. The membership list was entirely secret, even from Aleph Null. The Cabal's own documentation described it as being "... like the Freemasons, or the Shriners", and declared that "We will never know how many members we have. As far as each of us is concerned there are only four members of the Cabal." This meant that the leaders of the Cabal were guaranteed anonymity.

It wasn't totally futile, though. Each member knew the people he or she recruited, and the person who recruited him or her, and so could pass messages down - and up - the chain. Official documentation declared "Once we are part of the network we can send requests up and down the chain, using the organisation to achieve our ends. The Cabal does have a purpose. We are a way of harnessing the forces of chaos without getting our arms torn off in the process."

In practice, Aleph Null sent instructions down through the ranks, instructing members in certain areas to undertake specific actions, for unknown purposes. Because no-one could say how many different branches of the Cabal came off from Node-1, it was easy to send part of an action plan to one branch, another part to a second, and so forth, so that no part of the Cabal actually knew what it was doing. College kids, out for a laugh, cheerfully obeyed their seemingly innocent instructions. The result was a loyal army of dupes, in place to wreak all sorts of havoc if that was what Aleph Null had in mind... but the chances are, Aleph Null was a college kid out for a laugh too.

ODD FACTS
The Cabal seemingly disintegrated in the early 1990s under the weight of pressure from the Web, but it appears to have recently reformed as The Internet Cabal. Membership applications have been sighted, along with bulletins from Aleph Null. This time however, members are encouraged to anonymously email requests and comments to Aleph Null directly, at the email account aleph0@webinbox.com. The Internet Cabal instructs members to keep it completely secret, claims to be the successor of the Usenet Cabal, and declares that its interests are "To save the planet, to promote the advancement and enrichment of all Cabal members in society, and to make the world a cooler place".

THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Kibo
One of Usenet's 'gods', James "Kibo" Parry was omnipresent on Usenet for a while in the late 80s/early 90s. Any time his name was mentioned in any Usenet conference, he would find it and reply to that group, making himself legendary in the process. A cheerful freethinker, he has often been tipped as the benevolent and mischievous founder of the wholly innocent Cabal.

The Freemasons
In sharp contrast, the other top theory is that the Cabal was controlled by a circle of leading Freemasons, manipulating the Internet community. These patriarchs carefully couched the Cabal in anarchic terms so as to appeal to the primarily student-based Usenet community.

THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS
The Democratic Party
One unusual idea is that the Usenet Cabal was set up by a techno-savvy member of the Democrats, who wanted to undermine republican governmental dogma so as to influence the next election. When Clinton came to power in the early 90s, its work was done, and the group was disbanded.

MOST CONVINCING EVIDENCE
Perhaps the best thing to be said for the Cabal as a simple student prank is that it insists that it itself is not to be believed, and that no member should ever heed any apparent call for money to be sent to anyone - a fairly unusual set of instructions for any secret society.

MOST MYSTERIOUS FACT
One of the new dictates to Internet Cabal members asks new members to write the message "The Hour is come, but not The Man." on a piece of cardboard and tack it to any convenient telegraph pole or street lamp. What does this signal mean, and who is it for?

SKEPTICALLY SPEAKING
The chances of getting clear information down a chain of people as scattered as the Cabal is small. Individuals will modify messages, and the overall effect will be like Chinese Whispers - perhaps only the first five or six tiers of the Cabal would ever actually be getting clear instructions from Aleph Null.

Erm...

I don't really know what to say...

Do you wear a tinfoil hat?

Mr Mephisto

Quote:

Originally posted by Lasereth
I didn't get into the hardcore hardware nerdfest until about two-three years ago, so I'm definitely not an "old-school" geek. I know a good bit about hardware, though!

I'm similar in nature. I became addicted to Tom's Hardware about 18 months ago, same for anandtech and bit-tech.net.

I used to desolder/resolder pins old Packard Bell motherboards to change the hardware interrupts...

I used to run a single node 2400bps BBS from my basement!

I used to use Archie.

I remember using Chello to dial into the local university's slip/ppp connection (hacked pw) and use the Beta version of Yahoo on the akebono.stanford.edu server.

.
.
.

-SF

I once used a 9bps modem when everyone had 56k dsl and stuff. To live with that you have to be hardcore.

Quote:

Originally posted by Asuka{eve}
I once used a 9bps modem when everyone had 56k dsl and stuff. To live with that you have to be hardcore.

Were you in the middle of the African jungle or something?

My first modem was a 75 baud accoustic coupler. I remember having to be very quiet when I was online because there was a little hole in the handset cup which let sound in and screwed up the data transmission.

My first useful machine was a Kaypro II running CP/M - which beat all versions of DOS, btw.

Yeah, I'm oldschool ;)

Quote:

Originally posted by Mr Mephisto
Erm...

I don't really know what to say...

Do you wear a tinfoil hat?

Mr Mephisto

No, there's no dubt in my mind that it was a joke set up by Kibo.

The whole point of this thread was to see if anyone else was in the Usenet Cabal back in the day.

Owned a 8088 CPU/MB but never bothered to put it together. First I built was a 380 SX, added 14.4 modem, floppy drives, 4mb of RAM I think. That latest I built from scratch was an Athlon XP 2000+ about 2 years ago. Added DVD+-RW and 128MB video. I kind of miss the old DOS days where you need to manually set up CD ROM drivers. Games need to manually tuned for sound card settings. So, I guess I'm a little old-school but not hard-core, hobby-ist, shall I say?

When I think of "old school" I think of guys walking around with bunch of rubber bands around their wrists (think: punch cards).

I used to run a genealogy bbs with at 9600 modem, I have NO idea how I ever put up with that speed :crazy:

I've been using computers extensively (programming, tearing them apart) for the past 10 years, over half my life, but don't consider myself that "old school". I consider the old school geeks/hackers the ones who operated in the 80s - back when the Internet was first being formed, in the early days of the PC, so on.

My first computer run was with a deck of punch cards, about
a foot long, which went into the card reader on an IBM 370
H mainframe....which produced one hell of a big diagnostic
list for you to go through...if you got a clean compile, you
could then set down and figure out the JCL to make it run...

By the time I retired everyone had a terminal (not a PC) on their
desk, and hooked up to the mainframe.......

I have been working on computer gear of various types for the last 22-23 years or so. I got my start packing classifieds (on 8" floppy disks) and later repairing high output typesetting gear. I learned Basic, Fortran and Cobol on an old Digital DEC mainframe system and I vividly remember the days of actually using paper tape and Hollerith punch cards. I remember being very impressed when they brought the first Mac I have ever seen (an B&W SE) into my shop. My first personal computer was an 8088 with two 5 1/4 floppy drives (no HD) using text-based XyWrite as a word processor (that is, if you don't count the Commodore 64 I have been playing with for over 20 years) and having to drive almost 100 miles to buy 5 1/4 high density floppy disks just to save my output. When I joined the U.S. Navy down the line, I mostly worked on Sperry/Univac shipboard systems as a data systems technician. I have had to use wire wrap guns on many occasions and performed 3M microscopic hand-soldering on motherboards and various circuit cards. I have been shoulders-deep in repairing mission critical tape drives the size of your refrigerator. I have had extensive experience with repairing old style multiple disk packs and ships guidance computer systems, some of which used vacuum tube technology, I shit you not. I remember when having a 10Mb (not Gb, MB) hard drive meant that you were king shit on the block. I had a hand in building many large scale computer networks before I even knew what an MCSE was. I now possess two MCSE's, a CCNA, and a Bachelor's degree in information systems management. In truth, I am a crappy programmer, but I still know a good bit about it, and I admire and value people on my team who are good at it.

I do not consider myself a uber geek/guru of any type, just a great admirer of all things technical and most things mechanical (I'm all thumbs when it comes to working on cars).

I do stand in complete awe of guys like Seymour Cray, Tim Berners Lee, Bob Metcalfe and Vint Cerf. If you don't know who they are, looking them up would be well worth your time.

Quote:

Originally posted by saltfish
I used to desolder/resolder pins old Packard Bell motherboards to change the hardware interrupts...

I used to run a single node 2400bps BBS from my basement!

I used to use Archie.

I remember using Chello to dial into the local university's slip/ppp connection (hacked pw) and use the Beta version of Yahoo on the akebono.stanford.edu server.

.

maybe I am as old as I think

my first modem was 9600bps

my first printer took 16 mins to print one page

I was a tester of Visual Basic

Bill Gates was 29 when we met at the University of Waterloo

I remember using gropher, the original Netscape Navigator,

I remember the excitement of getting on a 80286 machine with a phone line connected to it,

I remember the main server at the school computer lab has a monsterous 400mb HD on it
.
.

-SF

Quote:

I started out with either a Pentium or a 486 (I forget which) running Windows 3.1. I never really learned to use it, as it was already obsolete by the time I got it. My first fairly current computer was a K6-2 @ 475mhz running Windows 98. Right now, I have a homebuilt Athlon 2500+ rig with XP.

Yep, not old school at all.

Not me. I've only been "good" at computers since Windows 98. And I'm still far from 'hard core.' My first computer was an old Amiga. Then I worked my way up with Windows 95, then 98, now of course XP. On a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being clueless and 10 being a hard core geek (my definition of that is somebody who maybe codes their own programs for example), I'd say i'm about a 6.

A lot of my computer knowledge is in Photoshop and 3D Studio Max.

I learned Fortran IV when all we had was a 360, a desk-size keypunch, a card reader, and a tape punch/reader. Does that count?