I wrote the below review of Compuserve in June, 1982. It was emailed on a Burrough's 6900 mainframe to the sys admin I knew there. Read it and understand why this stuff didn't take off at the time. (the first paragraph is about an RCA dumb terminal I bought at the time).

btw, I altered my username because at the time student's usernames were THEIR SSN :-(

Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1982 22:04
From: 999999999 @ UCSC-Site
To: BOB @ UCSC-Site
cc: 999999999 @ UCSC-Site
Subject: Re: Monitor
In-Reply-To: Your message of 24 Jun 1982 09:19
Message-ID: 0322.06.24.1982.22.04.44 @ UCSC-Site

This terminal is quite nice for $399. It's an RCA. It has a modem built in, color graphics, and sound from 14 Hz to 230 KHz. (Why the heck do you need 230 KHz. I probably can't hear past 15KHz.) It even has a white noise generator. (Don't ask why).

The graphics are pretty HI-RES, 240x192, but it takes forever to draw at 300 baud. One could make impressive graphs but one won't ever see Pac-Man here! You can also hook up a cassette recorder to store a heck of a lot of data for off-line viewing.

I got a free hour on CompuServe with it. Ever been on that? They say it's simple, but it took me the whole hour just to look for one thing. The say it's menu driven. GEEEEEEZZ, they must have their menu's nested 50 levels deep!

I was looking for the multi-user Star-Trek game that I read about. Also the CB simulation (Randall probably wrote it).

The story of my quest:

After drifting thru 10 pages of menus, I found the newspapers that were on-line, so I choose New York Times. They wouldn't print the %&$#& thing out unless I subscribed! The subscription was free but they wanted name, add.... I said "SCREW IT". I could imagine how many menu's were on the other side of that subscription.

Now I had to "back up" thru the menus before I could move on. After another 10 mins. I found the home entertainment menu! I was getting closer. I didn't see Star-Trek but I did see "ELIZA - Artificial Intelligence". I decided to try it out, real quick.

This program CompuServe has (called DISPLA) is polite. Instead of saying #SCHED 1234 it says "Please wait. I am processing your request." Sure, I think that the computer down there realizes that it's getting paid by the hour. After 2-3 mins., it starts "Tell me what's on your mind." After 5 mins I was ready to leave, "QUIT, BYE, STOP, " nothing worked. She just kept saying, "Your being short with me.". I was getting desperate, I started punching all the control codes I could. I stoped the program but I hung the terminal. Oh, well. Call back. Back to the first menu page. But I was getting better, I typed "GO HOM" and I went straight to the home entertainment section. After about 200 more menus (estimate) I found "CB simulation"! Quick, read doc. Got it, run CB. "Please wait......". After 5 mins it comes back "Your free hour is up. Would you like to subsribe?".

All that and I never saw the program. For $5.00/hr plus $2 for Telenet, they can forget it.

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME ON THE B6900 !!!!!!!!!

It was called CompuServe, and IIRC was $3 per month.

It was $5 PER HOUR off peak. Peak business hours were like $30/hour. And it was slow. It sometimes took 10 minutes just to start the CB radio chat program.

Got me, but if I had $50k in digital currency I think I'd spread my risk around and stash bits (no pun intended) across many servers at many different hosting sites and companies. The things are like $20/month, for pete's sake.

Thanks for the useful response. I'll look into them.

These things are popping up everywhere where I work and when I asked to get several for my staff, I was told no. Makes it a bit difficult to support, doesn't it? :(

1) Everyone has iPhones and iPads
2) They want to print - they demand to print
3) Find some AirPrint windows driver some guy wrote in his garage and load unknown code into your Windows server
4) Works well until iOS 5 comes out
5) Users update to iOS 5 on their own and they can't print and scream at IT.

That's just one scenario....

1) User gets great idea of hooking up an Apple TV to a presentation display so they can send their iPAD crap output to it
2) Scream bloody murder when someone "unauthorized" sends their screen to the display instead.

Or.....
1) Buy a bunch of iPADs, spend about 15 minutes unboxing them and turning them on.
2) Quickly realize what a hassle it is to manually install apps and settings on all of them and they have better things to do
3) Run to IT to install all the apps instead.

Or....

1) Buy a bunch of iPads for a classroom, set up an Apple ID, associate a credit card with it, buy needed apps for it, save password because it's a hassle to keep re-entering it
2) Scream bloody murder when one of the students decides to go to the app store and buy a few games to play using the instructor's account during class instead of doing classwork.

The way it should have worked was...

1) Identify a need (want tablets in a classroom setting that can do x,y,z)
2) Ask IT to identify a product that meets those needs securely and effectively
3) Wait for IT to figure out how to manage and deploy said devices (and if that takes too long, work with our management to identify appropriate priorities for us -- i.e., what doesn't get done in meantime

Bottom line, I understand IT is a service organization ... but I also understand we are overhead to the bottom line and understandably management wants to minimize the expense spent on IT as well as expect us to keep data secure. So we have to do horrible corporate things like try to control costs, and justify expenses towards the goal of improving productivity. I love my iPad. I think it's cool. But it's a personal, entertainment device. Repurposing it for business or educational use takes effort and time to figure out.

I walked into a similar nightmare two years ago. Before I even took the job I assessed the situation and gave them a proposal for what needed to be done and a price estimate for the software and hardware. I told them I would not take the job unless they committed funds to support the function. I also warned them that there were numerous ticking time bombs and I'll defuse them as fast as possible but there was no magic fix and it would take some time and they could have a disaster still

I then convinced them to only hire me part-time and to also hire a part-time desktop support person for a few reasons including they don't want to pay me to do that and having two IT people at least gives you some continuity. Even if the desktop support guy doesn't know the high-end stuff, if I leave the desktop person can still guide the new person and save them a lot of time I never got.

My line of attack was:

1. Back up data. Wasn't easy. They had old cart tape drive units that were problematic. I ended up getting cheap TB externals to at least make mirrored copies of things. But at least if there was a disaster, I'd have their data safe somewhere -- even if it took me weeks to reconstruct systems to use it.
2. Secure data. Everything was wide open. All domain users WERE DOMAIN ADMINISTRATORS. Locking that down was a pain. An understanding of what would be impacted ahead of time would have taken months, so I didn't tell anyone what access they had, then started removing people from domain admins a few at a time and waited to hear what broke, then fixed access issues. Not user friendly, but getting that under control fast was necessary.
3. Renovated room with servers in it (that were 5+ year old deskside servers) so as to accommodate a rack with proper A/C flow, electrical feed, and physical security.
4. Had them throw ~$50k into a virtual infrastructure and SAN, then virtualized all their old deskside servers until I could migrate apps on them to fresh OS installs. Used Vspehere's DRS product to back up the OS images and data to another system I had them buy for their other site (thankfully not too far away and connected by fiber)
5. Identifying all in-house written programs and finding turnkey solutions to them, preferably cloud-based to reduce their dependency on in-house IT staff in future.
6. Documenting everything as best I can as I go.

Getting back to original point, a one-person IT shop is suicide. Them having a two person part-time crew is better because if one leaves, at least the other can provide some sort of continuity -- and that happened already. The fairly young guy I hired for desktop support two years ago died last month :-(

I dove heavily into HyperCard and quickly got frustrated by its limitations. Plus it violated the user interface guidelines for the Mac in many ways. A neat concept, but it honestly sucked.

A good point, but it did kick in where I live during Hurricane Irene to let us know there was a tornado sighted within a few miles of our home and what track it was taking and advised seeking shelter quickly. Very useful.

I own a domain of (for example) example.org that I have wildcarded to my INBOX. I get A LOT of all sorts of interesting misdirected emails meant for exampleinc.org and example.org.au including invoices, meeting confirmation messages, and frantic "why aren't you answering my email messages"

In Mail.APP on the Mac I used to do a bounce and they'd see that they screwed up and stop. If I send a personal email explaining often people go ape shit and get paranoid wondering why I am reading their email. (Unfortunately Apple removed that functionality as well)

So sometimes a more impersonal response IS better.

ps, yeah, I know, I could fiddle with my MTA and have it refuse the repeat offenders.... and I do now. Not as convenient though.

I post moblog pics to pixelpipe which reposts them to several other sites.I also use it to post status updates to several sites. They have no Google+ integration. They claim Google hasn't published the API to allow that yet. In short, that's a deal killer.

You're doing it wrong. For example where I live they design intersections that fan out to 2 lanes before the traffic light then after it drops off to 1 lane again a few hundred feet after it. The idea is to double the number of vehicles that can fit through during any cycle. But people avoid going into the second lane because they don't want to merge after the intersection so in the end it's still only one lane going through the light, to the detriment over everyone.

Sorry, this isn't on Drudge with a siren graphic, so it must not be true.

True, as I told my boss, satisfaction guaranteed or double our money back.

Microsoft and Google push these "free" services heavily to Universities. Many of them have went for it.

I was "all in" for a bit, was supporting the idea of moving an entire college's email system into one of these systems. We set up a pilot and due to a certain username transition going on with that company, it wiped out about 100 of our user's PERSONAL non-college data from the site because they had associated their college email address with the service in the past.

We begged and pleaded for help. They said they were looking into it. No updates. No promise to make it right. About 2-3 weeks after that, the user's data started to be restored. But I've never felt so helpless during that period. There was nothing I could do. It's a free service, so there wasn't much recourse either.

I have, or my staff have, in the past done some really stupid things that interrupted service or temporarily lost user data. But we were right on top of it, worked around the clock to fix it, and learned from the mistakes. It's a horrible feeling to lose a system but it's nothing compared to the hopeless feeling of losing user data in a system you have absolutely no control over.

Needless to say, the pilot opened our eyes.

Happened to me too. In Safari in a Mac. It immediately started a fake scanning in a browser window. I closed it right away and the Mac installer started and asked me to install Mac Protector, so I quit the installer and all is well. I did some reading and a lot of people apparently go ahead and install a program they know nothing about including entering in their admin credentials to allow it to install with root privs. Sigh... So seems like Nat Geo's ad farm or service is infected....