This thread really takes me back. Back in "the day" we had a VAX/UNIX system here at Case Western Reserve University known as the Cleveland Free Net. They used to have 40 minute time limits so the connection would drop after 40 minutes and you had to dial back in. There was a chat system and you'd be right in the middle of a chat and your time would end and you had to dial back in again. However, if you created a group and was the moderator of that group you got a different level of logon and you had unlimited time. I created the Synthesizer and MIDI User Group (SMUG) and got the elevated logon.

With that Unix based system, you could use Telnet and I used to Telnet into computers at colleges all over the world. From there you can use commands like grep and who and look through databases for users. I did that once and queried my last name and got hundreds of hits. I saved those email addresses to a text file, wrote a letter introducing myself and sent it to every one of those people. Oddly I was not related to even one of those people as my last name is an extremely common Slovenian name. I did make contact with a guy at a college in then Yugoslavia who was raised in Ljubljana where my ancestors came from. He told me that the name is so common I'd have to know the 2 block area where my relatives lived.

I miss stuff like that from older days. I DON'T miss that paper tape you mentioned, or COBOL and FORTRAN card programming, or tape drives in general. At one of the jobs I worked, if you worked 3rd shift your first job at 11pm was loading backup tapes. There were 3 different recording systems, they all ran different form factor tapes, and they didn't all run every day, so there was this system of sleeved pages noted Sun thru Sat on a hanging bander with exact language of what got backed up that day and what didn't. Crazy. Now that kind of stuff is thankfully all automated and scheduled.

With maturity of hardware came a certain simplicity, and Matt went back to basics with undated hardware.

And now you make me want to do the same, as I like the concept of dedicated computers.