From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!menlo70!sytek!zehntel!tektronix!tekecs!randals
Newsgroups: net.singles
Title: Re: Sex and the single netter
Article-I.D.: tekecs.936
Posted: Tue Apr 26 08:43:04 1983
Received: Fri Apr 29 04:49:46 1983
References: cornell.4335

~~~ quote ~~~
	From ...!cornell!ddw Sat Apr 23 13:03:34 1983
	Subject: Sex and the single netter
	Newsgroups: net.singles

	...
	Specifically, I am referring to a situation that developed on the 
	Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) back around 1976-77.  A multi-
	terminal conference program called Xtalk (which was originally written
	with an eye towards letting people ask questions of the assistant on
	duty) became a popular medium of communication for those with time to
	kill.  Some fairly lively conversations and correspondences began to
	appear, not all of them among Dartmouth students, as Dartmouth wasn't
	(and isn't) the only school using DTSS.
	...
	
	...
								By the way,
	does anyone know of situations like this developing anywhere else?
	...
~~~ end quote ~~~

Shades of my much younger days!  Egads.  When I was but a tyke, playing
for hours-on-end with our Time-Shared HP2100 system running only ugly
BASIC, I got moved from my place of growing up (at age 13) to a
far-away location.  Far enough away to be long-distance phone calls,
anyway.  My parents had this "thing" about long-distance.  It was
called "NO".  However, the new school that I moved to had an
extended-service phone-line back to the same old computer that I had
been playing with since I was 10!

So, to stay in touch with old friends, I wrote the "Interterminal Data
Exchange System" (IDES for short, so I could say "Beware the IDES of
Schwartz" [boo!]).  The system had an interactive facility (sometimes
known as the "CB" mode), and a reasonable mail interface.  By the way,
for a complex, interactive, real-time processing, 1500-line BASIC
program, it ran the first time with only one typographical error ever
to be found.  Who needs debuggers!

Anyway, my friends at my former school started telling other people
about it, and eventually, about thirty schools in the Portland Metro
area were using my IDES system.  Teachers (for some reason) didn't like
this... it seemed that kids were spending mucho-hours talking to kids
from other schools on the CB mode.  In fact, one day, the system
crashed.  A half hour later, my teacher got a call.  It seems that one
of the files used by IDES had been accessed so frequently that the
magnetic media was damaged and caused a head-crash!  IDES was pulled
from the system (boo-hoo!), and forbidden by the sys-ops.

But, I had a paper-tape copy!  (Tune in next week for the exciting
conclusion of Randal vs. the establishment, or "How I broke into the
system to find a host account for an underground version of IDES".)

Ahh, the memories.  It was through IDES that I got a job as a software
consultant even before I graduated from high school (or turned 16!),
and eventually led to the job here at Tek, and all sorts of other
connections.

We had a few females too.  I even got to meet a couple of them.  People
also went by "handles", so we had some wierdly cute handles.  On the
underground IDES, everybody's handle was a Star Wars character.  I was Luke.

Enough reminicsing (excuse the spelling)... and back to work (ha!).

Randal L. ("net hacker at 13") Schwartz
Tektronix Engineering Computing Systems (the UNIX folks)
Wilsonville, Oregon, USA

[Until April 29, 1983...]
UUCP:	...!XXX!teklabs!tekecs!randals (ignore return address)
	(where XXX is one of: aat cbosg chico decvax harpo ihnss
	lbl-unix ogcvax pur-ee reed ssc-vax ucbvax zehntel)
CSNET:	tekecs!randals @ tektronix
ARPA:	tekecs!randals.tektronix @ rand-relay
[After then...]
Analog: 503-227-3777
U.S. Snail:	Randal L. Schwartz
		Servio Logic Development Corporation
		2700 Georgia Pacific Building
		Portland, OR  97204
UUCP,CSNET,ARPA: None! (boo hoo)