Greetings. Once upon a time long ago, I was sitting alone in the UCLA ARPANET site #1 computer room late one night when the high Santa Ana winds outside started disrupting power. Hit after hit, very dangerous for the minicomputers, disk drives, and other equipment in that room, since we didn't have uninterruptible power supplies back then.
I made some calls and it was decided I should shut everything in the room down. Everything. I phoned the ARPANET NOC (Network Operations Center) at BBN and explained the situation, since I was about to shut down IMP #1 (essentially, a refrigerator-sized router) on ARPANET which sat in a corner of the room, and doing this could cause disruptions if done in an unplanned manner. The IMP was *always* running -- I had never seen it powered down.
I worked my way around the room, powering down terminals and disks, and printers, and the power supplies on the 11/45 (ARPANET Host #1 - UCLA-ATS) and the 11/70 (Host #129 [1+128 on IMP #1] - UCLA-SECURITY. Back then my email addresses were LAUREN@UCLA-ATS and LAUREN@UCLA-SECURITY -- no domains yet.
The usual roar of the machines gradually got quieter and quieter, until only the IMP was left. I pulled down the power switch. Now there was dead quiet except the hum of the lights, a situation I'd never experienced in that room before. Very odd feeling.
Suddenly I heard a click -- the IMP was powering back up by itself. Damn. I pulled down the switch again. Quiet for a time, then click and it came back up yet again. Before I started thinking about screwing around with its power cables or turning off breakers that could have unexpected effects, I called the NOC again to ask them if they had any ideas.
"Oh yeah. We should have told you! There's a little switch that controls auto-restart. Surprise!"
So I found and flipped that little toggle switch, powered down the IMP again, and this time it stayed down. I had turned off the ARPANET -- at least at UCLA. -L
@lauren You should write a book. You're a good writer, and have lots of unique stories that no one else knows and never will know unless you write it.
One of my background tasks is adding more and more to my autobio as I think of things. Asimov's title for his autobio is always an inspiration for this work, "In Memory Yet Green."
@shuttersparks The kind of book I could write would have such a limited market that the effort just isn't worth it. This has come up a bunch of times over the years, but I've known authors who were published by major and minor publishers and their tales of the results are not inspiring. If I had a plethora of lurid tales of relationships with L.A. starlets to include, that might make it more interesting, but I'm just an ordinary L.A. guy.
@lauren Yes, true, the same for my autobio, but I wouldn't write it in order to sell and make money from it. I would write it, as I'm writing mine, to do history a favor and so my stories aren't completely lost when I'm gone. There are all sorts of insider stories about the development of certain products and technologies. It can be uploaded to the Archive and ancestry.com has a facility for uploading autobios like mine for genealogical purposes. Mine includes as much detail as I know about my parents, other ancestors, wife and her ancestors.
As an amateur genealogist for the past 30-plus years, I can tell you that some genealogist of the future would kill to have the thing I'm writing. It's like a Rosetta Stone.
@shuttersparks @lauren Indeed, here's some of them! http://d.hd.org/anecdotes.html
@shuttersparks @lauren Exactly. Even my rather less exciting anecdotes are getting slowly recorded for posterity...