On 15 July 2016 at 07:37, Ethan Dicks <ethan.di...@gmail.com> wrote: > I think TCP networking on VMS is a bit of a bodge, but back when I > used it every day in the 1980s, we didn't _have_ any Ethernet > interfaces in the entire company - *everything* we did was via sync > and async serial. How well do you think it would go if all you had > was SLIP and PPP? We did a lot. Yes, other people had high-speed > networking and VAX clusters, etc. We did not. Not even our VAXen > running UNIX. All serial, all day. We still got a lot done.
Same for me when I started out on Unix with Xenix in 1988 or so. Multiport serial cards were the rule, and most of my office wasn't connected up with Ethernet yet. When I was on PC Pro magazine in London (1995-1996), there was an editorial office LAN (4th floor) and a Labs LAN (basement), but they weren't connected and neither had an Internet connection. In '96! I was the sysadmin for both. The editorial server was a PC with NT Server 3.51, serving both Macs (production team) and Windows PCs (editorial team). I put in an email server and got us all Internet email, before we had any kind of WWW connection on the desktop -- but whereas now I'd do that with Linux, back then, it seemed way too hard and we got a free eval copy of a commercial MS Mail to Internet mail connection app and ran it on the server. Looking back now, it seems ludicrous, but it wasn't then. A few years later, probably about '97 or '98, as a freelance consultant, I put in my 1st web proxy server for one of my clients, doing dial-on-demand over a 56K POTS modem on the server. That seemed very high-tech at the time! Within the next few years I put in a few of those. Indeed I was peripherally involved in the development of this: http://www.mailgate.com/ ... as tools like WinGate were so clunky. At the end of the '90s, having a DoD modem on a Windows NT4 server, a proxy server for WWW access on the workstations and simple POP3 email was sophisticated and I put in a lot of such systems. MailGate, combining POP3 email distribution and a proxy server in one, was _way_ easier than a separate proxy server and email server. It was also approximately *fifty times* cheaper than Exchange Server and Windows Proxy Server, and easier to configure. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)
