Meme du Jour
May. 7th, 2003 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurOkay, this one's too much fun to pass up. Thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cellio for it.
1. When did you first connect ("go online"), and how?
I did a modest amount of random emailing back in college, so the first baby steps would have been around 1983. But I didn't become a full-fledged Nethead until 1987, when I got my first real job with the shiny Milnet connection. (It was of course strictly illegal to use that connection for personal email, but as far as I can tell, no one paid the slightest attention to that.) That job also had a UUCP connection directly to uunet, which at the time was pretty state of the art.
Actually, to be strictly correct, I was doing some communication via wires prior to college -- I got to college with what was then an amazingly fast (certainly amazingly expensive) 1200 baud Hayes modem, so I could log in to the work I was doing for my father. But I didn't use it heavily for personal stuff at that time.
2. What was your first communications program?
No clue what the mailer at Brandeis was. Used talk a fair amount for realtime chatting. It certainly would have been something Unix-based.
3. When did you first chat over the internet, and how?
Well, no one was calling it "the Internet" yet. But we were doing a bit of chatting with talk by 1985. Talk was a realtime program that showed a split screen, with your keystrokes shown in one half and the person you were chatting with in the other half. It was actually more realtime than most of today's chat programs. But it made people who didn't have bigtime typing skills utterly crazy.
4. What chat type program(s) do you use now?
I'm almost always logged into MSN and AIM while I'm at work; somewhat less frequently I'm on Yahoo and/or Sametime. (Hey, I work at a company that's called "Applied Messaging" for a reason. I do this stuff for a living...)
5. Who was your first service provider?
In the sense of getting onto an actual network, Brandeis University. In the sense of getting onto the Internet per se, my first employer, Intermetrics. (There really was no such thing as an ISP in the modern sense at that point.)
6. Did you ever use AOL?
No, although a friend of ours in the SCA is Steve Case's first cousin. Case is apparently a real SOB to his family...
7. Do you admit using AOL in public?
Ascellio said, "N/A".
8. Who is your current ISP?
Our actual cable/broadband provider is Comcast. Who will hopefully be better than ATT Broadband were. I miss the early days of Mediaone -- the folks who originally set that up had a much better clue than most of the current providers.
Forwarding for our domain is provided by Forevermail, who I was very fond of, but who have been getting a lot less reliable lately, so I'm likely to drop them. And our actual ISP for our websites is Hostcentric, who have actually done quite well by us. (Thanks toeditrx for the referral.)
9. What was the first computer that you used to access the 'net?
Counting "the 'net" as Arpa/Internet, it would have been a terminal hooked up to some early Sun workstation, presumably some flavor of Sun 2.
10. What computer do you use to access the 'net today?
Windows XP boxes both at home and at work. That has proven to be acceptably reliable, unlike most previous versions of Windows. (Although I managed to get a completely new Bluescreen of Death yesterday. Fun.)
And a shiny new Treo 300 in my pocket for when I'm on the road. (It's a geek toy, but there's something terribly empowering, when I get halfway to MIT and realize I don't know what room a meeting is in, to be able to just pull up the web page.)
11. What was your first 'net handle?
Well, if by "handle" email address counts, it would probably have been something like "jhustyn@brandeis.edu". (The same friends who gave me my SCA name convinced me to use a totally idiotic spelling, on the grounds that it was "medieval". I fixed it when I graduated.)
12. Did you use any other handles for any length of time? If so, what were they?
My early email addresses were all variations on "justin", but that's gotten harder to obtain over time. So I've settled in on "jducoeur" on pretty much everything, since it's more or less globally unique.
Assorted other aliases here and there. (For example, I was "dancer" for the relatively short time I hung out on alt.callahans.) But almost always either "Justin" or "jducoeur".
13. What 'net handle do you normally use now?
See above.
14. Are you active on any websites other than LJ? If you're willing to say, what ones?
I run www.waks.org (aka jducoeur.org) and my not-quite-started business, jquote.com. I do a fair amount with www.sca.org. I occasionally do Slashdot, but not so much since finding the timesink that is LJ...
cellio for it.1. When did you first connect ("go online"), and how?
I did a modest amount of random emailing back in college, so the first baby steps would have been around 1983. But I didn't become a full-fledged Nethead until 1987, when I got my first real job with the shiny Milnet connection. (It was of course strictly illegal to use that connection for personal email, but as far as I can tell, no one paid the slightest attention to that.) That job also had a UUCP connection directly to uunet, which at the time was pretty state of the art.
Actually, to be strictly correct, I was doing some communication via wires prior to college -- I got to college with what was then an amazingly fast (certainly amazingly expensive) 1200 baud Hayes modem, so I could log in to the work I was doing for my father. But I didn't use it heavily for personal stuff at that time.
2. What was your first communications program?
No clue what the mailer at Brandeis was. Used talk a fair amount for realtime chatting. It certainly would have been something Unix-based.
3. When did you first chat over the internet, and how?
Well, no one was calling it "the Internet" yet. But we were doing a bit of chatting with talk by 1985. Talk was a realtime program that showed a split screen, with your keystrokes shown in one half and the person you were chatting with in the other half. It was actually more realtime than most of today's chat programs. But it made people who didn't have bigtime typing skills utterly crazy.
4. What chat type program(s) do you use now?
I'm almost always logged into MSN and AIM while I'm at work; somewhat less frequently I'm on Yahoo and/or Sametime. (Hey, I work at a company that's called "Applied Messaging" for a reason. I do this stuff for a living...)
5. Who was your first service provider?
In the sense of getting onto an actual network, Brandeis University. In the sense of getting onto the Internet per se, my first employer, Intermetrics. (There really was no such thing as an ISP in the modern sense at that point.)
6. Did you ever use AOL?
No, although a friend of ours in the SCA is Steve Case's first cousin. Case is apparently a real SOB to his family...
7. Do you admit using AOL in public?
As
cellio said, "N/A". 8. Who is your current ISP?
Our actual cable/broadband provider is Comcast. Who will hopefully be better than ATT Broadband were. I miss the early days of Mediaone -- the folks who originally set that up had a much better clue than most of the current providers.
Forwarding for our domain is provided by Forevermail, who I was very fond of, but who have been getting a lot less reliable lately, so I'm likely to drop them. And our actual ISP for our websites is Hostcentric, who have actually done quite well by us. (Thanks to
editrx for the referral.)9. What was the first computer that you used to access the 'net?
Counting "the 'net" as Arpa/Internet, it would have been a terminal hooked up to some early Sun workstation, presumably some flavor of Sun 2.
10. What computer do you use to access the 'net today?
Windows XP boxes both at home and at work. That has proven to be acceptably reliable, unlike most previous versions of Windows. (Although I managed to get a completely new Bluescreen of Death yesterday. Fun.)
And a shiny new Treo 300 in my pocket for when I'm on the road. (It's a geek toy, but there's something terribly empowering, when I get halfway to MIT and realize I don't know what room a meeting is in, to be able to just pull up the web page.)
11. What was your first 'net handle?
Well, if by "handle" email address counts, it would probably have been something like "jhustyn@brandeis.edu". (The same friends who gave me my SCA name convinced me to use a totally idiotic spelling, on the grounds that it was "medieval". I fixed it when I graduated.)
12. Did you use any other handles for any length of time? If so, what were they?
My early email addresses were all variations on "justin", but that's gotten harder to obtain over time. So I've settled in on "jducoeur" on pretty much everything, since it's more or less globally unique.
Assorted other aliases here and there. (For example, I was "dancer" for the relatively short time I hung out on alt.callahans.) But almost always either "Justin" or "jducoeur".
13. What 'net handle do you normally use now?
See above.
14. Are you active on any websites other than LJ? If you're willing to say, what ones?
I run www.waks.org (aka jducoeur.org) and my not-quite-started business, jquote.com. I do a fair amount with www.sca.org. I occasionally do Slashdot, but not so much since finding the timesink that is LJ...
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Date: 2003-05-08 06:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-05-08 04:23 pm (UTC)