Happy Sysadmins Day 23 things only 90s Sysadmins will remember | Hacker News Reader

Happy Sysadmins Day 23 things only 90s Sysadmins will remember

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I wasn't a 90s sysadmin, but I remember most of these. Also...

> EISA vs. MCA (vs. NuBus)

> SCSI termination and ID-conflict issues

> Apple stuff: System 7, AppleTalk, ADB

> DECnet and OSI (yes, still, in the early 90s)

> NFSv2, RFS

> Reconfiguring your kernel to add new devices

> BSD and SysV "universes" in some flavors of UNIX

> Usenet and all of the crappy software that went with it

> sendmail rewriting rules for a bazillion kinds of addresses

> KVM cables/switches with VGA and PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors

> X Terminals and Motif

> i860, i960, 88K, MIPS, SPARC, POWER, PRISM

> Gopher, archie, veronica

> Kermit and xmodem

> Pagers

Stupid software that couldn't display indented text properly without having to add newlines. Oh wait, we still have that.

> i860, i960, 88K, MIPS, SPARC, POWER, PRISM

I was a teen in the 1990s, and what I remember was thinking that the world of interesting hardware had come and gone and I'd never get to use anything other than x86 chips. VAX? PDP-10? Alpha? Stuff I'd read about, even seen some assembly listings for, but nothing I'd get to program. Some systems, like Multics or Lisp Machines, were freakin' Atlantis sunk beneath the waves for all the access I'd ever get.

Now, I have emulators for them. I have Multics, I have PDP-10 OSes, I have both BSD and Linux on VAX, and that's without trying too hard. I also have real, physical ARM CPUs, something else I'd never imagined I'd have.

> Usenet and all of the crappy software that went with it

Xnews on Windows is pretty good, and Usenet isn't even dead. More like "determinedly ignored even as federation and decentralization become hot ideas".

And, never, ever forget OS/2

Ever since using OS/2 I have always put my toolbar vertically on the left side of my screen. Just seemed like better use of screen real-estate.

And with Ubuntu - what's old is new again!

I remember spending way too much time reading threads on usenet (fr.comp.sys.mac, mostly) on the beloved MacSOUP. In this dial-up area it was great to be able to download a forum content and read it offline, writing the answers offline, and then synchronizing everything when going online.

On the other hand my communication skills were atrocious, and it took me way too long to understand that sarcasms have no place on forums...

In many ways I feel like reddit is sort of the new usenet (without warez, as far as I know), but it's not quite the same.

https://www.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/

Backing up 20 DEC RA81 disk drives with 120MB capacity 9-track tapes. The RA81s were 454MB each.

A 20-node VAXcluster using workstations and 10base5 (coax) Ethernet.

StorageTek anything.

Real laser printers that could set the paper on fire. (DEC LN01s that were rebranded Xerox units)

PL/I

Bliss-32

Microfiche of the VAX/VMS source

Some of those were more 80s, weren't they? I remember RA81s and VMS microfiches from '89, and even then at a company that was deliberately providing legacy support.

Then, there's stupid software (mail clients?) like this:

>> Stupid software that couldn't display indented text

> properly

>> without having to add newlines. Oh wait, we still have

> that.

This makes my prostate swell. I remember all of these then there are the comments and I remember them as well. Now the internet is a phone and a server is just a slice of cloud. Ethernet is old.. Wireless is fragmented There was not any security at my job when I started my computer had its own class B address. It was part of the internet on the internet no firewall now.. my pc is behind 4 firewalls and a carrier pigeon. The other day I got an email from a guy who wanted me to pay for a video of me jerking off - I was like hey I can make my own videos plus who would want to see that anyway I bet he didnt even watch it.

Not in front of the pigeon :(

> Lotus Notes possessed integrated email, directory services, Internet email, and applications (known as databases…much to the chagrin of legit DBAs). If it wasn’t for wide proliferation of HTML applications and rapidly adopted internet standards, you’d probably still be logging into a Lotus Notes client today.

I am still logging into a Lotus Notes client EVERY SINGLE DAY :(.

We still use it where I work. The long time employees love it, the newer ones are in awe that something so old/creaky still runs. We've been "investigating" a migration to Outlook/Exchange for 10 years.

My only experience working for a company that ran Lotus Notes was in the mid-90s. The company ran on Lotus Notes. All the back office processes done today mostly through internal or SaaS apps was done then using Lotus Notes apps. Expense reports, benefit selection, procurement requests, travel requests, etc were all done using Lotus Notes apps. This is a time when 90%+ of companies still did all this using paper, fax machines and interoffice mail. As a field employee this made my life much easier than my peers at other companies.

Knowledge bases, installation files, patches, etc for all the products we supported were also maintained in Notes databases. Once a day I would sync the latest updates down to my laptop. I then had a searchable knowledge base and all the files I needed for my work without having to be connected. Back then being connected when mobile was the exception and not the rule.

Lotus Notes was a god send for me in that job.

I .. am pleased I no longer have to do that.

Little anecdote.

At my dad's old company, where he'd been for almost 25 years, they still used Lotus Notes. About a year ago, he moved to a new company that uses Office, and he hates it (old dog, new tricks, etc.). His old company is still the only company I've ever personally had experience with that still uses Lotus Notes.

Is it that bad?

Notes is itself pretty remarkable, but suffers from a peculiar UI + dysfunctional efforts from two sides in development (people who wish it was a RDBMS not a document database, and people who don't really have any business writing application code). The complaints about it being kind of an ugly email client are not really of the essence. In addition, IBM has pretty much left it to rot on the vine since the early 2000s. I think "R5" was the last release of any real significance, and even that was not revolutionary.

Here's how bad it is: In the mail editor you are lucky if you can undo one change. Multiple undo is out of the question.

Way too young to be a sysadmin back then but still remember all those things.

Still got a bad habit from Win95, whenever the system seems sluggish I have to move the mouse around, because when the mouse didn't respond under Win95 it was time to press the hardware RESET button.

Maybe that's the reason Windows 2000 is still the best Windows ever in my mind.

Aaaahf. I used all of that stuff. All of it.

Worse yet, last year I did a break-fix on a wlan installation at a Sears store... They had an operational token ring network still running their automotive department, along with a tan tower rocking a pentuim pro. (remember those?)

Good times.

Fun read.

For all its headaches, today's were still trying to replace the mobile offline-first capability of Lotus Notes in the 90's. It's too bad IBM got their hands on Lotus.

I was a sys admin from Around 2006 to around 2014 and I used many of these things.

Our office still had (multiple) T1s, and ran on IBM as/400. When I joined in 2006, it was a startup.

Also: PCMCIA cards were definitely still around for much more than the 90s. I still have several coveted PCMCIA wifi cards that were supported by kismet.

I never could remember what PCMCIA stood for (something about a memory card association, even though there ended up being lots of types of those cards beyond just memory).

If someone asked me, I used the tongue-in-cheek alternative someone came up with of PCMCIA=People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acroynms.

I finally threw away my Proxim Wireless Networks Orinoco Gold 802.11b/g PCMCIA card I'd picked up in the mid-2000s just last week.

It had an Atheros chipset and was useful for wireless sniffing, WEP cracking, and about everything else.

I did, however, realize I haven't owned anything with a PCMCIA slot to put it into for more than a decade.

If you don't remember ordering GNU software on 9-track tapes, vampire taps for coax ethernet cables, and the dimple on the Sun 3/50 then get off my lawn...

To be fair, my read of this article suggests that what it calls "Sysadmin" was, at the time, called "Network admin" and tended to include a significant helpdesk component.

What I remember being called "sysadmin" that might have included thicknet ethernet or servers with reel-to-reel tape drives is now "devops" almost everywhere I look.

Ah, simpler times, when most things could be fixed by taking them apart and putting them back together again, because that was still a thing you could do.

I'd like to reference this gem as well:

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/know.your.sysadmin.html

Decades later, it gives me a good laugh.

You could add multi-protocol networks to the list. Almost all sysadmins today only have to worry about TCP/IP versus back in the 90s your network usually supported at least two and possibly all of the following protocols: TCP/IP, IPX, VIP, DECnet, LAT, SNA, and NetBEUI. There are plenty I'm leaving off the list.

Token ring was mentioned but other LAN technologies around in the 90's that are dead or mostly dead include 100VG-AnyLAN, ATM LANE (emulates an ethernet network over ATM), FDDI, TCNS (basically 100Mbs ARCNET), proprietary pre-802.11 wireless technologies, proprietary layer 3 ethernet switching technologies (looking at you Cabletron and 3COM). I worked with all of these at some point during the 90s. Some were a pleasure to use and some were not, but ATM LANE deserves a special place in hell.

I started out the 90s connecting systems to 9600bps x.25 networks and ended them deploying millions of dollars of Juniper M40 routers and Fore ASX-4000s ATM switches per day. Both of those vendors would have probably appreciated my employer actually paying for them. It was a crazy decade.

> ...and ended them deploying millions of dollars of Juniper M40 routers and Fore ASX-4000s ATM switches per day. Both of those vendors would have probably appreciated my employer actually paying for them.

Ok, I'll bite... Can you share the story how that could have happened?

I retired about a decade ago and have been actively avoiding staying "up to date" but I suppose I can't resist asking now...

What replaced Ghost?

It probably depends on what you were doing with Ghost, but for me, Clonezilla is the replacement: https://clonezilla.org/

I still use Ghost, its been maintained and updated over the years and supports at least Windows 7. I haven't deployed any Windows 10 machines yet, so I don't know if it supports that.

Its nice because with NTFS it saves files and all of their attributes and not empty space.

Company I worked for moved from Ghost over to ImageX (aka WAIK: Windows Automated Installation Kit) which worked well since we needed it for MDT or Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. They built a GUI for ImageX and it was more compressed than Ghost for the same hard drives.

I either use dd or Aomei Partition Assistant

We ended up using Acronis.

Don't forget IRQ and DMA!

I was a 90's teaching-self-to-program-while-in-middle-schooler, and I remember many of these. "The Internet was new" is definitely one I can relate to - I initially learned how to program by reading through the VB4 help files, since my family didn't have internet yet. Also, Zip Disks, because it was really easy to leave behind in the computer at school.

I was a Mac sysadmin in the 1990s. We had different stuff.

Gatorbox AppleTalk routers. RJ11 terminators. RIP print servers. Hell film printers for color slides.

Banyan VINES for global auth management. Like LDAP and ACLs before it was cool.

No mention of Banyan Vines. Am I the only one here that had the unique pleasure of supporting Vines, StreetTalk, and Intelligent Messaging III.

Can we retitle with something less clickbaity? Perhaps "For Sysadmins Day, here's a nostalgic look back at the 90s"

I get where you’re coming from, but I think that title was part of the joke. It was such almost like an inside-joke reference to clickbaity Buzzfeed articles.

But the HN rules clearly state that the title must match the one on the article.

But it's clickbait, and that's against HN guidelines.

I wasn't a sysadmin in the 90s, and I remember this stuff. Are we _really_ supposed to believe that _only_ 90s sysadmins remember the items on this listicle? That makes it an inaccurate headline, and clickbait. Titles are frequently changed here by the admins, and I don't see why this one wouldn't be changed.

It doesn't matter if this is intended to emulate a Buzzfeed-style headline; that's not clever, and makes the submission inaccurate.

> that's not clever, and makes the submission inaccurate.

I found it to be clever and funny.

Which one of us is right?

Walnut Creek for your operating system needs.

Yeah, that's the one that is missing the most from that list!

3270/5250 emulation still lives on to this very day and can be commonly seen in banks around the world.

"Wow, awk!? You're old school" ...

90s users, not just 90s sysadmins.

Shareware.

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