November 17, 1929

Herman Hollerith Dies

Herman Hollerith dies of a heart attack at age 69. Hollerith's experience before he was 30 -- at the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Patent Office and as instructor in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- set the stage for inventing the successful card system for the 1890 census.

After this achievement, Hollerith set up his Tabulating Machine Co. in 1896. In 1911 it became the Computer-Tabulating-Recording Co., which Thomas Watson Sr. joined in 1914. A decade later it became International Business Machines.

Read on for more...

Now this is pretty funny. I found a reference to this video in a post on another retro forum. The new software here allows me to embed the video in this post.

It turns out that if you look around YouTube, there are lots, and I mean lots of interesting videos, including quite a few about retro-computing subjects. Over time I'll try to find some more interesting ones.

In the meantime, enjoy this one!

I spent an hour this evening getting the firewall in order. I was getting  a lot of intrusion attempts on the ssh port (22), so I restricted the port by IP address and now I bet my secure log will be very cle an.

If you run a web server (or mail server or ...), you really  need to insure that all unessential services are turned off, and that your firewall is set to reject or drop everything unwanted.

There are lots of good iptables references out there. Just search for "iptables howto" or "iptables tutorial". One that might get you started if you don't already know what you're doing is at the Fedora project. It is relevant to most Linux distributions, not just Fedora.

I would post mine here verbatim, but it has a lot of trusted IP information that I don't want to expose. If anyone is really interested, I'd be happy to sanitize it and post it.

I mentioned a while back that I was working on cleaning up all the computer junk I have laying around, and I've completed a lot of it. Now for the last part: the network.

Read on for more...

I've been gone for a week, but things are back in motion here at the Community now.

The network is working fine, I've got the firewall set up reasonably well, and VMWare player is installed and operating, although I really don't know how to make it sing yet.

Wyvern is back up, and available via telnet from this server, but you have to be able to ssh in here first. I'll work on a way for others to get in when I have time. I don't think I'll be handing out shell accounts on this host.

Backups of Community are being pulled every night now.

The next big improvement will be the installation of the Management CRM, allowing me to communicate with members much more efficiently. Hopefully that will go in sometime late this week.

All in all, things are moving along well!

Things have been lagging here, and there have been some technical problems. And unfortunately, nothing much will happen for the next week, either.

It's been a bit of a trial, but the site upgrades are complete, at least as far as this application is concerned. A lot has been done, but there is still more to do!

Read on for the rest of the story...

I've always loved playing games on computers, and though I don't have much time for them any more, I still do!

I remember playing Lunar Lander on my TRS-80 Model 1 many, many years ago, and I also remember writing a graphical version for that platform in Z-80 assembly language. Great memories, and made only better by this article.

Did you know that the original Lunar Lander program was written in Basic on a PDP-8 by a high school student? And in under 50 lines of code?

Read the article for a fascinating retrospective.

The site will be undergoing some upgrades in the next few days - hopefully this weekend (25-26 July)

The upgrades will include:

• A new server will be installed after a full backup. The new server has 4 processors, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of RAID 1 mirrored storage. This machine should be fine for this site and several others.
• I will hopefully be upgrading ConcourseConnect to version 2.0, which includes:
  • A variety of new security features and an integrated webinar and web conferencing system using Dimdim
  • Embedded video content from Youtube in wikis and maybe blogs.
  • Lots of bug fixes and usability improvements

I'm looking forward to getting these improvements in place, and then going back to work on my Kaypro 4-84. Hopefully my next blog entry in the Kaypro section will deal with creating Kaypro formatted disks for the editors and compilers I have collected over the last couple of years.

I've upgraded the site to the latest public ConcourseConnect code: Version 1.02

Read on for a description of the upgrades and bug fixes...