© 1997 Lawrence I. Charters
Photos by Jon C. Thomason
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 19, no. 2, March-April 1997, pp. 19-22.
(Photos taken with an Apple QuickTake 150 camera. Yes, it may be cheap, but it is also inexpensive and fast.)
On Saturday, Jan. 18, members of the Pi’s TCS Crew decided to begin the new year with a two-day project to remodel the closet housing Washington Apple Pi’s telecommunications equipment, the fabled “TCS Room.” This two-day project, like most modest two-day “fixer-upper” projects, took eight days, finally coming to a close on Saturday, Jan. 26.
Significantly, the remodeling portion was actually completed on time, thanks to the masterful direction and carpentry of Lauri Zeman. Working in the Pi parking lot in temperatures well below freezing, she was soon covered in sawdust. More significantly, her glasses first fogged up, then frosted over, and she gave the appearance of a lean, feminine version of Frosty the Snowman. As she was armed with power tools, and knew how to use them, nobody mentioned this …
Even though most of the carpentry work was done outside, a fair amount of drilling and finishing was done in the TCS Room, so virtually everything in the room was removed, and spread throughout the Pi’s office suite. While this was going on, a class was underway in the Tutorial Room, and during breaks class participants would peer, somewhat anxiously, at the very strange, often antique equipment being spread over every available surface.
“What is that?”
“It is part of the TCS.”
“The computer bulletin board? I’ve never seen something like that.”
“That’s not surprising. They haven’t made these in over a decade.”
“You must be joking.”
“Not at all.”
Carpentry was not the only thing going on. Jon Thomason, Chair of the TCS Committee, used the opportunity to coax some new and interesting possibilities out of the equipment, in particular the Xylogics remote access server used for Explorer service. Often, this brought forth such stellar conversations as:
“Take a look at this!”
“That’s great. Uh, what am I seeing?”
“I’ve reset the frammer to bitslice inverse out-of-band protobytes through the phase inducer!”
“That’s great! [Pause] Why?”
Meanwhile, several parts of the TCS (the bulletin board) and Explorer service (Internet service) were set up on an ad-hoc basis to maintain the Pi’s Web site (http:// www.wap.org) and announce to would-be bulletin board callers that the bulletin board was down for “Saturday maintenance.” The parts not necessary for this function were being inventoried, updated, cleaned, dusted, or sometimes just admired.
“I haven’t seen one of these in years!”
”What is it?”
“I – I don’t remember.”
Matt Shibla, a UNIX wizard, tweaked MkLinux (a UNIX-like operating system) running on a Power Mac 7100, adding such things as dhcpd, apache, lynx, and other things written entirely in lower case letters, usually without vowels. He exhibited extraordinary forbearance as people carried strange things past him, frequently requiring him to move. Often they’d stop and attempt to make intelligent sounding comments, such as:
“Wow! That’s impressive. What, exactly, are you doing?”
By Sunday, Jan. 19, the remodeling was complete, the complete, and most of the servers, computers, modems, and black boxes had been placed back in their refurbished quarters. Dave Weikert had the lead role in re
Late Sunday evening, everything seemed to be in working order. While many people had helped with the remodeling, three individuals — Jon Thomason, Dale Smith, and Dave Weikert — had put in between 20 and 30 hours of effort over these two days, and run up significant personal debt purchasing take-out food.
Unfortunately, all was not well. From Monday, Jan. 20, through Thursday, Jan. 23, various things appeared to be failing. Explorer subscribers were frequently reporting inconsistent results on the Internet modems, and some of the TCS systems were exhibiting strange behavior. Dale Smith and, in particular, Jon Thomason, stopped by several times, trying to fix often elusive problems. Some of the problems were easy to identify, but not so easy to fix, such as one Apple IIGS that decided to go on strike and do nothing. (Old age?)
By Thursday, suspicions were centering on the Pi’s high-speed modems, mostly used for the Explorer service. All U.S. Robotics Courier V.34 (“V-Everything”) modems can be “updated” via software, so they were. The original updates – to over thirty modems – were done the previous Sunday, but after talking to U.S. Robotics support personnel it appeared yet another update was required, using more recent software. So Thursday evening most of the Courier V.34 modems were updated again.
This didn’t work at all well: by Friday morning, about the only Explorer lines that appeared to be functioning were those using modems that had not been updated. The TCS Crew held a running electronic exchange throughout the day, discussing various possibilities, and agreed to try again after the January General Meeting, the next morning.
Saturday, Jan. 25, proved to be a critical day:
- Jack Quattlebaum, an engineer with Apple Computer’s Atlanta office, gave a terrific presentation at the General Meeting on System 7 .6 and on Apple’s purchase of NeXT and responded to nearly an hour of questions with excellent technical advice and candid business observations. This had nothing to do with the TCS or Explorer service, but it left the TCS Crew in a good mood;
- Extensive tests using U.S. Robotics Courier V.34 modems that had never been updated, that had been updated once, and that had received the full two updates, revealed that … the updates were not the root cause of the problems;
- These tests did, however, confirm a suspicion that cropped up during earlier efforts: updating the “Flash” memory of the modem works much better when the modems are cool. When the modems are hot, it often took several tries to erase the memory and download new software;
- These tests also revealed that Courier V.34 modems are designed for not only the standard, Hayes-compatible AT modem commands, but also “percent” commands, “ampersand” commands, and – most curious of all – “Octothorpe” commands. The discovery of “Octothorpe” commands (apparently designed for Caller ID functions) had no bearing on any of the problems at hand, but the name alone sparked amused, somewhat demented discussion;
- By sundown, anything edible in the Pi office had been consumed. In particular, all the chocolate chip cookies were gone, making a bad crisis all the more desperate.
All the tests had confirmed one curious fact: the Xylogics remote access server, used for all Explorer service communications, was not properly initializing modems plugged into it. Neither the Xylogics nor the modems complained about anything amiss, but it seemed clear that they weren’t on proper speaking terms. So, one at a time, all the Explorer modems were manually configured, then plugged back into the Xylogics.
Success.
After extensive testing (including testing features that aren’t quite ready for prime time yet), the TCS Crew drifted off to home, food, family and sleep. And, almost without exception, every one of them called in, via modem, to make sure everything was working before actually attending to food, family or sleep.
John Ludwigson, a TCS and Explorer subscriber, viewed the entire effort as akin to some Scandinavian epic, and posted this tribute on the bulletin board:
Laboring unseen, deep within secret grottoes, the Gnomes of Stonetown amass great hoards of wealth, treasures unknown to the mundane world of light and air. Trudging from mine to refinery, hammer to wire strippers, they slog along the road laid before them by a provident fate, mindful of their deepest needs and desires. Sleepless in their circumscribed, but limitless, world, they exist for only one purpose: to give the other world life and light, sound and pictures, magical abilities to touch things beyond the normal reach of their fingers, and to comprehend that which is beyond any single mind.
Oh, noble Gnomes. Oh, treasured Gnomes! May your own joys be many and satisfying; your creations never falter; · your lives wonderfully fulfilled!
The chief TCS and Pi “gnomes” who worked on this project: Joe Cohoon, Lawrence Charters, Jon Hardis, Lou Pastura, John Ruffatto, Paul Schlosser, Nancy Seferian, Matt Shibla, Dale Smith, Jon Thomason, Dave Weikert, and Lauri Zeman