In the amateur radio community, hams who pass away are known as "Silent Keys," a reference to a telegraph (Morse Code) key that is no longer being used. The phrase is poignant to me.
At 61 years of age passing away is for me a thought that appears more and more often in consciousness. Yet it's not scary or something I dread.
Thank you for introducing me to 'Silent Keys'. It's a great way to remember my dad.
I'll introduce a story about him: My father was unable to get ahold of my mother (with me inside) who had made an emergency visit due to me putting up such a fuss being trapped and wanting out. She was not home when he got home from work. He tried calling the hospital but either no one picked up or could help him. It was at that point that he reached out to some friends he had on the ham radio who managed to contact another radio enthusiast who lived nearby the hospital who was able to walk over and confirm that she was indeed there. At which point he got in his Dodge Omni and drove into town.
I remember thinking it remarkable when he described this to me years later as perfectly reasonable and that he had to reach out from the Adirondacks to someone in Mississippi who then reached out to someone back in the Adirondacks due to practicalities I still don't really understand. Something about how it was more reliable to communicate past a certain distance than someone very close to you.
I think I ended up all right, birthed 10 days late. Poor mom.
That’s a wonderful story. Thank you for sharing it.
In general, I think amateur radio operators are still mostly like that. Most of the hams I know respect the hobby and its rules, and will gladly relay emergency traffic without delay. Many do even more, including being members of groups like ARES and RACES.
I think it's been that I had the sense that I had to accomplish great things before I passed away. Strong sense of ego, I think.
Over the last five years or so, my perspective has changed such that I don't feel any need to accomplish big things or act in ways that are self-aggrandizing. One of the things I work on from time to time is trying to dissolve a sense of ego.
I think all of life comes down to luck, at a very high level or in a very abstract sense. I don't believe in free will, and I don't think anyone knows why they are doing what they are doing in any meaningful way. I do think the brain confabulates great stories for ourselves and others to explain our actions in the world.
I have mentioned this before, but I like the "Chill Step" recordings of Alan Watts on YouTube. Maybe his philosophy is just a comforting story, but honestly, would anyone want a story that prevented them from being at ease in the world?
I'm increasingly subscribing to the philosophy "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity".
Like, people who work for Google and Facebook. It's all a big deal for them. For me, it's "meh", whatever. I'm not saying those people aren't bright, of course, but being intelligent doesn't mean you know everything. I've thought that the coolest place to work for would probably be NASA, actually.
I also believe that nobody can know many things for sure, especially when it comes to the political arena and the future. Ideas which are so sure in other people's minds seem more like facets of a larger picture to me. Some things I know will be disastrous, other things I think "meh, give it a shot, sounds wacky, but it might just work".
I chose this account name because if how fondly I remember getting shareware and freeware from simtel20.wsmr.army.mil.gov (iirc) in my first years on the internet. I once ran into someone in a game who said "hey, I used to put backup tapes in that when I was in the service" or something to that effect. It's wild.
Whoah! I had no idea this started locally. That might explain why it was later hosted by Oakland.edu, as well. The excursion to White Sands being temporary... ;)
Back before the Raspberry Pi made hobby-class computers a norm, I had a habit of collecting old PCs and "doing things" with them. The Simtel collection was a favorite for finding things I didn't know I needed in my life.
In the mid 2000s, a radio station near me (WFNX) broadcasted a great morning show while I was in school. I ponied up for a PATA-to-CompactFlash adapter and a 2GB CompactFlash card (probably $50 at that point), downloaded Digital SoundSystem from Simtel, hooked up an FM radio to the sound card of a Packard Bell 386, and used Digital SoundSystem (I believe from the "sound" collection) to record the radio on boot. When I got home from school, I'd unplug the card (which was hanging out the front by the ribbon cable), plug it into my computer, and listen.
For most of the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was running PClock (from the "clocks" collection) on an old Dell Latitude as my alarm clock. As my then-girlfriend was unhappy with sleeping three feet from a laptop screen, I later relegated it to my mantle clock in the living room. It no longer runs PClock, but actually is still my mantle clock.
At some point I was browsing through and stumbled on the APM utilities, not knowing that MS-DOS would run the CPU at full steam. Several changes to autoexec.bat's later, I probably saved a good deal off my electric bill.
I uploaded a program to this collection in 1995, when I was about 15. It was a terminal front-end program called MTerm. It relied on a FOSSIL driver (a serial port driver for DOS) and ANSI.SYS (or compatible) to do the real work of communication and display, respectively. And the Ui was pretty minimal. As such, it was quite worthless, really just a vanity project (good thing it was freeware). Still, as far as I can recall, it was the first program that I ever actually released to the public.
It took a while, but I finally found my favorite DOS program that I used for _everything_ (even in Windows) until I switched to Linux in the mid-90s: Stereo Shell, a fast and easy-to-use Norton Commander clone: http://www.lanet.lv/ftp/simtelnet/msdos/fileutil/sts_410.zip
I got my first Internet connected account in '93 Sep and I uploaded Volkov Commander to SIMTEL pretty soon after. Their answer was that I am pirating Norton Commander (which I obviously wasn't) and they didn't contact me -- they contacted the highest level of university sysadmins and apparently at the time it was a realistic threat the whole university will be disconnected from the Internet because of this. So I was summarily booted from the university VAX and all I was left with were some small Unix accounts at the CS department. And because said department started experimenting on Linux at the time as Unix licenses were expensive, I got an extremely early start on Linux, too...
Of course. I have been pirating software 1985-2004, and at the tail end of it I was sort of an admin (more precisely, a helper of an admin who didn't speak English well) of one of the largest scene FTP sites in Central Europe. Which makes this all the weirder -- for once I wasn't pirating LOL.
This was such a huge part of my life as a non-BBS-connected 14-19 year old in the 90s. First via CD-ROM in 1992/1993. Then via the Internet from 1995/1996 and onwards.
It was maintained by people working for the US Army at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The first atomic bomb site (Trinity) is nearby:
Getting access to the SIMTEL CD-ROM was a fantastic revelation for me - so much glorious source code. Especially the turbopas/vga directories - but really, that whole CD-ROM kept me busy and learning for years.
I remember this. Couldn't help feel both excited and a bit ripped off. Being 10 or 11 at the time, seeing things like TeX and X-Windows made me think of Texas and X-wing. They didn't work at all and for sure weren't entertaining.
It was a program that provided 37 or so extension functions for batch scripts. Many of them that performed an expression evaluation left a result value in the environment of the parent process. Details and source code can be found in this old blog post:
I had a few shareware programs on Simtel in the early 90s. I think the one that brought in the most money was a Novell login frontend that put the display in VGA mode and rendered a floating message of the day in a nice font as a screensaver. It was imaginatively named “vgalogin”.
I remember the magical feeling of getting random checks in the mail from folks that used it.
Oooh! The memories. First year university in Australia and discovering the internet, IPs and FTP. Everything felt so accessible then. Even 20 3.5" disks for an install of SLS Linux felt easy and effortless... Now, shoot me if I need to transfer not in a network.
I used to get new Slackware by taking over a row of lab machines and FTPing to A:. I'd move all but one chair out of the way & roll down the line; by the time the last one was started the first one was done. I would get A, AP, and N sets and then download the rest from my apartment.
Keith passed away in 2017, aged 80 ( https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/freep/obituary.aspx?n=keit... )
I was happy to have met him and thanked him for his services.