Let her rot

[Valkie]

I specifically asked about pictures because the company I worked for was one of the first to send pictures to Germany.
We had the boffins from Sydney uni and even some technology professors very interested.
But we successfully sent pictures to our mother company
I was the Lucy sod that got to go to Berlin to set it up there.
This was only a couple of years before the wall went down, and from our factory office windows we could see into the "other" side.

Now, my delightful little troll
How did we do it?
Let's see if you are as smart as you want us to believe.
Just a note
Dr Google can't help you here.

[brian ross]

Poor, poor, Neferti. I am an "old fart". I have been online, contributing to "forums" since 1987, when I first logged onto a university mainframe and discovered USENet forums, well before there was an "internet". Since then, I have been using them and webforums. I have seen more "old farts" more than likely than you have had hot dinners. People like you, come and go. You discover the "internet" and then forums and start contributing until your new toy appears.

You know fuck all, you Old Fart!

When I joined the Commonwealth Public Service in February, 1986, we, too, had a Mainframe ... which was huge .... so I know all about USENet Forums.

I had my first PC at home in 1983 ... I got the Real Internet (WWW) in August 1995 when Microsoft introduced Windows 95 .... it was costing me $5 an HOUR back then because even the Commonwealth Public Service did NOT have the internet at that time!

I recall that one month in 1995, I got charged $300 for internet usage .... mainly because I was contributing to "forums" in the evening to people all around the World ... I still communicate with most of them!

You, of course, did all this internet activity "at work" when you were supposed to be working and the Aussie TAXPAYER paid for your activities. I paid my own way for my Internet activities.

Don't you start telling me who I am and what I know.

I never got into Fidonet (or "doggy net" as it was known). I knew one or two doggy net administrators but it never appealed to me. It relied on dialup modems.

I topped the entire (limited at the time) USENet heirachy with the greatest number of posts in a month in 1988 (the topic which I was particularly concerned with was the American ignorance of the limits of the US Constitution WRT Australia and the Australian gun controversy). I first encountered the WWW in 1991. I first encountered a WWW forum in ~1994.

I don't doubt you had access to USEnet, Neferti. However, I cannot remember encountering a single post from a single poster from a public service site in the USENet newsgroups I posted in (almost exclusively aus.flame, aus.politics, sci.military, alt.computers.folklore). Public servants who used USENet newsgroups were as rare as hen's teeth I suspect. All my interlocutors were from initially Australian universities and then later, after the Voyager Space Probes, US universities and then UK universities. I can remember when turn 'round times for USENet were 24+ hours and was amazed when they become 5-15 minutes.

Oh, I recall most of those USEnet sites. The IT Tech in charge of the Mainframe, used to get bored and all we had was CCMail ... so he and I started chatting, on the computer. Interesting times. I doubt he let anybody else into it. It would have been against the rules. The position I was in allowed me to do whatever, as I was bored too. I can't remember even meeting that IT guy ... he was just somebody I "typed at" on the computer screen, up on the 3rd Floor or wherever.

Never used CCMail. I used DECMail and Pine. I knew the SysAdmin in the school I was working at, in the ANU. Indeed, I knew the entire IT Department (all four of them). Indeed, they were interesting times. I remember once getting into an argument with a pro-Israeli poster from Melbourne Uni. Imagine my surprise 20 years later when I saw him on the TV News, having made some breakthrough or other in IT science. As in your case, he was just someone I typed messages to. Then there was Mark V. Shaney, a primitive AI which would digest a week's worth of newsgroup messages, mix the text up and spit it out in a long post. The newbies would be sucked in and start arguing with it and it would reply, again sucking in their posts and mixing them up and spewing them back. Problem was, when you first started reading them, they made a weird kind of sense, which is why you got sucked in. All the Older posters would laugh as the newbies became more and more frantic. Best times were the long summer holidays when all the students would bugger off and leave the professionals to argue. Loads of fun then.

Then AARNet was created, NASA came onboard and paid for a satellite downlink between Melbourne Uni (Munnari) and Hawaii because Canberra was where their space probe link was. Then Challenger and Hubble happened and suddenly a lot of the new Newsgroups disappeared. NASA didn't want to be seen as being a purveyor of porn and so all the porn newsgroups were cut. No great loss and I only found out about it by chatting to the AARNet administrator on the other side of the campus. He advised me not to advertise it, to save NASA and AARNet embarrassment.

[brian ross]

I specifically asked about pictures because the company I worked for was one of the first to send pictures to Germany.
We had the boffins from Sydney uni and even some technology professors very interested.
But we successfully sent pictures to our mother company
I was the Lucy sod that got to go to Berlin to set it up there.
This was only a couple of years before the wall went down, and from our factory office windows we could see into the "other" side.

Now, my delightful little troll
How did we do it?
Let's see if you are as smart as you want us to believe.
Just a note
Dr Google can't help you here.

Long, long, time ago and I suspect the methods I used would not equate to the methods you used. I rarely bothered downloading images - they invariably took too long and I had no means to print them out. I used to use various interpreter programs IIRC. Sometimes the images were split into multiple posts, being basically ASCII text. The interpreters would read in the ASCII text and turn out an image on the computer screen. The more advanced interpreters would actually join the ASCII text files back togeher, otherwise it would need to be done by hand in a text editor.

[Valkie]

Not even close.
We simply video stilled the images, in colour, using a video encoder
We then streamed the videos to Germany where we set up a video viewer
The images were then printed using some rather overly complex software.

The cost was ridiculous
With specialised hides gear and sending data through the phone lines to Germany.
But we needed to get the photos to them to diagnose some very complex engineering issues that could only be described using photos.

Prior to using this system
We photographed the component, had the film developed, posted the photos to Germany
And any questions would take ages to come back for us to take more photos.

With the method we used, apart from having to stay up late to discuss the issue with them, we could solve problems in hours instead of weeks.

And just a few years later
Digital cameras
Internet and the ability to send images by email.
I could just scream

[brian ross]

Video streaming post-dates what I was talking about, Valkie, by a long shot. In those days, all you had was an ASCII text file and you used an interpreter program to change the ASCII text into video commands. Video wasn't involved, there were no moving pictures.

[Valkie]

Again
you have no idea.

But then again, you know it all dont you ............not