Long posts was: breastle screen for HLA Adventure 866

You are welcome.

BAH has a unique experience from a coordination viewpoint in one of the most important organizations in IT history. Not that this was just roses, pretty far from that. She got to see the "Rise and fall of the Digital Empire" up close and personal; including the sieges by the barbarians.

The effects of this, and other; very similar, empires is an important background for the current parts of IT; and why Open Source has become so important to so many people who otherwise are no flower-power peacmongereres.

Some of us try to understand what happened in these empires that made them crash so completely; with an order of magnitude greater implosion speed than International Harvester, 1930s radio stations, or small car manufactureres in the 1960s.

This whole newsgroup is plagued by vocabulary problems when we want to discuss the old iron up close and technical. One mans disk is another's dasdee. It follows academic fields, geography, but first and foremost it follows organizations in a huge NIH pattern.

If IBM promotes Virtual memory DEC cannot advertise the same, even if they had it longer. They have to call it something else. This permeates our former employers like water permeates a swamp.

BAH writes in firm DEC (old) style, with a technical tilt that appears similar to what was popular in MIT-Hardwrd at the time. This vocabulary has been all but lost now.

'Modern' vocabulary is very california-centric, and the "generic' terms radiate out from Stanford and Caltech, as well as from Intel and all labs in the bay aera.

But be aware when she starts with politics. She makes Ghengis Khan sound like a leftwinger.

-- mrr