While my blog has been silent for over a year, I’ve been inspired to start posting again. This was mostly because I’ve been relating various anecdotes to different people and many of them have said “you should really write a book about your experiences.” I also visted the Computer History Museum in California during the fall of 2016, and the combination of seeing their collection and going “I’ve worked with one of those” and seeing how much history has been lost made me decide to create some content of my own*.

Upcoming posts in the Computer History category will (mostly) detail my personal experiences with computer hardware and software for over forty years (yikes!). These posts will combine items from my personal collection as well as information I know about them. I will be researching these posts and will add links to external reference sites where I can.

The Personal Recollections category will (mostly) be narratives about my experiences working with the people who work with computers. These will be from my memory, to the best of my ability. In cases where I have posted the story to Usenet or a forum (BBS, DECUServe, etc.) site and they differ in a non-minor way from the version I post here, I will try to provide links to my prior posts. Not all of those sites still exist, though. When I name people, they will either be first names only or will have consented to being mentioned (when you read some of these posts, you’ll know why).

As always, all photographs will be by me, unless otherwise credited.

* Both categories will often have footnotes (like this one). Often, some of the funniest bits will be in the footnotes. You can either click the blue asterisk(s) when you come across them in the main article, or just read your way down to the footnote(s) at the end.

All of the videos on this site are now encoded using open standards. In addition to not requiring the user to have Flash installed (or click-to-play if installed), this means that users can finally view them on portable devices (tested with both Android and iOS).

The theme I’m using is a heavily-modified version of TypoXP 2 and converting it to be responsive would be a massive undertaking. At some point I will have to migrate to a newer theme, and responsiveness will be one of the selection criteria. Until then, all I can suggest is liberal usage of the pinch-to-zoom feature on your mobile device.

After 20+ years at tmk.com, I’ve sold the domain. The new home for all my stuff is glaver.org. Please update your bookmarks accordingly, as tmk.com is only guaranteed to work until the end of January, 2016.

If you’re wondering what a glaver is, click on the “So what’s a glaver anyway?” link in the “INFO” section on the right-hand panel.

Edited to correct a global search-and-replace that clobbered the tmk.com name.

As my long-time readers know, I don’t make my views on politics, religion, etc. known. That’s because I’ve seen too many message boards (and friendships) torn apart by disagreements between people with different points of view. However, recent events compel me to speak up. As long as the comments remain civil, I’ll leave comments enabled on this post. If things get out of control, I may lock this post temporarily or permanently, or delete the whole thing. With that out of the way…

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin

I’m stunned by the revelation that the NSA is continuing to monitor all phone calls, collecting and storing for an indefinite length of time the phone numbers of both parties, the locations of both parties, and the starting time and length of each phone call. [Reference].

Even more troubling is President Obama’s statement that “In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother or how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, then I think we’ve struck the right balance.” [Reference]

Apparently Congress was informed of this and yet not a single member appears to have raised any objection.

On the heels of that revelation, further information was published showing that a different data collection operation is in progress, sending everything from email to photos to VoIP phone calls, etc. to the NSA. [Reference]

Next, it was revealed that the NSA is also receiving details of credit card transactions. [Reference]

President Obama, I voted for you (twice!) because you campaigned on a platform saying you were different from President Bush and would repeal the “surveillance state” legislation passed as a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11. Not to mention your promise to “Close Guantanamo Bay”. Instead, this is what we get? You make me ashamed to be an American.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” – V, “V for Vendetta”