The IT Student Blog

My first keyboard

Robert Broberg, a Swedish artist, once wrote a song with the following paragraph “Det som göms i snö, kommer upp i tö” which roughly translates to “What’s hidden underneath snow, will show in thaw.” Since we actually have a white Christmas this year and most everything in my dad’s garden is covered in snow I thought it would be more wise to do some cleaning in my old room. It has basically been aggregating stuff over the years I’ve been living on my own, of which a large part is old computer hardware that’s been rendered unusable.

In the cleaning process I uncovered my first computer keyboard, later elegantly marked “UBC-Router 1″ short for United Broadband Clan which a friend and I created sometime in the very very early broadband days. This has been the keyboard for my router ever since the 28kbps modem served our house. (Yeah, for those older than me there was a time before 28kbps too but I’m not that old!) The router has been running various versions of GNU/Linux, including Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo (for a long time) and when the hard disk crashed, it was replaced with FreeBSD which it ran up until this summer when a lightning finally killed the whole thing. Poor bastard.

Dual CPU Sockets

There was also an old web/mail server running on a Pentium Pro. The motherboard supported two CPUs, however, I only ever acquired one, but it was definitely a killer. This machine was running Gentoo from the start to the very end. I hope to recover the data on these disks when I get back to Göteborg, who knows what crap I’ve been storing on them over the years?!

Today, my so called server room was transformed to its original purpose again. Its glory days are well exceeded, but it will be remembered as the place where I began experimenting and for taking me into a field in which I’m studying today. Who knows what I will uncover in years to come?

What have you found beneath the snow this Christmas? Do you already know where it has taken you or are you still waiting to find out?

Never forget to do backups.

Never.

I just found out that my dear computer has taken its last breath. All my music, pictures, work, received files… gone. I know, I’ve been told before to do backups, but I never seemed to care. Well, actually, I didn’t care. I was more like: never store your life in a computer! But hey, that was obviously what I was doing; piling up my life story in a computer. And now, my life is gone. (Not entirely, but it certainly feels a bit empty).

My old computer had so many viruses that the anti-virus program stopped working. I couldn’t download new software, since it lacked Service Pack 2. It didn’t react to any external devices. Not even to my red memory stick. Pop-ups were jumping up my screen even though I hadn’t opened the browser. And it was always this woman in carnival clothes who told me I could win money without even touching my wallet. Tempting, huh?

I decided to do something about it. Disk defragging! But my disk defrag refused to cooperate. What the…?!

After weeks of ignoring my computer; I tried to start it. But to my surprise, it was as dead as a zombie. Sort of half-dead, with the fan sounding really angry and the screen just pitch black. Bloody hell.

Suddenly all the people who constantly have been telling me to do backups: YOU WERE RIGHT. (But please admit: you knew this would happen!)

To all the people out there… DO BACKUPS!!

How would you describe the Internet for a person unknown to it?

It’s not very easy. How would you start out? Maybe you would chatter about a digital world where you can do pretty much anything… date people, buy cars, play games, listen to music, talk to your friends around the world, read magazines, watch movies, learn new languages… But would the ignorant person believe you? Probably no.

When thinking about it, the Internet almost seems impossible. But still, we use it everyday without even thinking about how amazing it is. So how did it become this amazing? Let’s take a look at the history of the Internet!

An animated documentary by Melih Bilgil which depicts the history of the Internet by explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.

-Awesome, huh?