Memories of the Dawn of Internet

Somebody my daughter met had known me during one of my famous episodes, and this brought things up out of the brain sludge.

This was more than twenty years ago at the old company.  The NDP had just been elected and we were ordered to destroy all the geophysics for the new sites.  I never did, but it go into the black hole of the Atlantic geophysics centre, and various other federal places.  That's why I know all about the megathrusts, and nobody else does.  I have wonderful images of the bottom of Lake Ontario, and the full geology of the North Channel.  Also some nice stuff off Bruce, which made me oppose the Wasted Black Hole so much.

That was our 'Golden Era'.  Little did we know it was all going to Hell in a wastebasket real soon.  With the geophysics I got a brand new Sun Microsystems machine, the famous 'pizza box'.  My friend and I jumped into Unix with a passion.  I really didn't have anything to do, so I was interested in using it for analysis.

We had a bunch of brilliant people then, soon to be all dispersed to the winds, except little old me.  One guy was doing the firewall, and we had an email domain.  That was all I needed to set up Usenet, which was the communication network of the day.  We had so many enemies -- the mainframe people, the mini-computer people, and the Apollo workstation people.

Usenet was great at the time.  Only a very few people knew how to get it.  I set it up and decided to give everybody in the division access and an internet email address.  For our work it was essential, and everybody was enthusiastic.  I eventually had hundreds of people up.

It was not to last.  Our enthusiastic general manager was kicked out when a tube busted at Pickering.  Our president brought in a bunch of insidious Americans who published a report that we were all garbage, and then proceeded to make themselves in charge.  They were scummy party people, and put up a Stalinist management, and started firing as many people as they could.  Every one of my brilliant buddies left.

My memories have been wiped out of all the horrible things that happened to me, but I stayed under union protection.  All my internet efforts were wiped out and the internet was banned for some time, until people started to get it again, citing the usual emergency things.  I slowly emerged, and used the internet to get hundreds of classical novels, which I printed out in a report format and read.  There was a major seismic issue and I emerged triumphant.