I mentioned in a previous post the fact that Google has gone through the effort of making available some very early USENET archives. I admit that I was never much of a poster on USENET; rather I would read through newsgroups and search for answers to the burning questions of the day.
A few days ago I did a vanity search in that archive to see what I’d find. (A vanity search is when you search for instances of your name on the web — try it sometime — it’s fun.) I found this posting that dates back to August 1994. It’s the earliest post that I’ve located under my name. You can read the post by clicking through, but the signature block brought back memories:
Jeffrey Kay "Net Surfer"
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Internet: jkay@k2.com UUCP: uunet!kappa!jkay
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"In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity" -- Albert Einstein
Interesting memories surround this. One thing you’ll notice is that I’ve had this e-mail address for at least seven years. You’ll also notice the “net surfer” reference — sort of goofy in retrospect, but surfing the net in 1994 was a new and interesting thing to most people. I also had a UUCP address that I suspect very few of you will recognize.
Around that time, direct Internet connections into workplaces were very rare and no one had connections at home. Being the developer that I was, I had been goofing around with different operating systems and around 1990 purchased a copy of Coherent, produced by the Mark Williams Company. It was a Unix variant, based on Unix v7. I had been doing mostly DOS development at that point, so Coherent was an incredible opportunity to learn. It was cheap and ran on just about any x86 pc. I took a 286 PC and loaded it up and in very little time had a running Unix system in my basement.
Connectivity was the next order of business. Coherent included UUCP, so I opened a low volume UUCP account at UUNET (then an independent company). For $300 a year ($25 per month), I received two hours of UUCP connectivity. I named the Coherent box “kappa” and its UUCP address was uunet!kappa. My user account was jkay and hence the complete e-mail address uunet!kappa!jkay. Twice a day my Coherent box would dial out to a local UUNET number and upload out going e-mail and download any new messages. This was my setup for almost four years. It was a little painful to setup, but I was the only kid on my block who had a real e-mail address of his own, delivered into his own computer.
Coherent was an incredible system and a great way to get familiar with Unix. I built some software using the GNU compilers that were available and learned a great deal about Unix system administration and Unix in general. After a while I moved on to Linux using a Yggdrasil distribution of a 0.x kernel, but Coherent was a great opportunity to learn for a mere $99. Mark Williams shut down in 1995 — a eulogy is posted here.
I’ll post some future comments about the subject of that USENET posting — the Apple Newton — and PDAs in general.