Joey

A friend of mine asked me to conjure up a working Windows 98 computer for her daughter to use to play some old school edutainment games (y’know…from the good ol’ days where you bought the game on a CD-ROM and that was that, rather than getting nagged to purchase ‘lives’ or ‘coins’ or whatever). I managed to come up with a basically-working one that just needed a bit of work to get prepped for the task, namely, upgrading the hard disk. When I did this, the 200GB drive only detected the first 2GB. I remembered that this computer was from the era when it was required to manually tell the motherboard how much storage space the hard disk would be able to handle…but not in GB’s, in Cylinder/Head/Sector (CHS) format. To further complicate things, the computer only allowed me to reference the first 64GB of the drive, because the motherboard couldn’t address any more than that. Even so, a 64GB hard disk in the Windows 98 era is a bottomless well; I edited video on a tenth of that.

The process of doing all of this dug into the deepest recesses of my memory. This was especially challenging because most of the support information for computers of this era predates Google, and thus, most web pages that Google scours – though notably the Google Groups archive of Usenet was particularly helpful for searching purposes. Other things, I either guessed, simply remembered, was able to piece together, or called my friend Bob who described his 58-year-old self as ‘ancient’, especially when I brought up fixing an issue by “performing a text edit on autoexec.bat”. Ultimately, things are going smoothly; I look forward to completing my work on this machine.

The Washington Post published an article last year about disruptive technologies and how they changed our society. While we tend to think of ‘the internet’ as disruptive (and indeed it was/is), the argument the article makes is that the even more disruptive 20th century technology was the refrigerator. Pre-refrigeration households spent approximately 58 hours a week on housework, in the 1990’s, that was down to 19, for houses that were, on average, about twice the size. More relevant to the point, things like pickling, meat curing, canning, cheese making, and other forms of food preservation were things that were generally part and parcel with cooking, that relatively few people in the western world today need to do – and even those that do (professional meat curers and cheese makers aside), are usually doing so due to personal desire, rather than a requirement to prevent food spoilage.

I haven’t thought about cylinders, heads, and sectors in years. I’m *just* young enough to remember seeing CHS figures on the labels appended to hard disks, but too young to have actually had to configure a BIOS with one. I remember running into a SCSI controller once, and hearing that it was quite the project to set up even a relatively simple SCSI controller with a RAID array, but I’ve never made one – setting up a RAID array with SATA drives and modern controllers is a breeze by contrast. Network cards that used to have their modes and parameters set by DIP switches are now configured entirely in software. I don’t remember the last time I had to manually determine IRQs for my hardware, I’ve never set up a network that used coaxial cabling, I never had to manually install a TCP/IP stack into a computer in order to get it on the internet, and I only barely remember the ire that was “changing the font” within Wordperfect 5.1, especially if you didn’t have a mouse.

How much knowledge has been removed from the general societal consciousness due to its need being abstracted away through technological advancement? What else has been lost because it was “common knowledge” until it wasn’t? It’s amazing how even the banal, everyday things that nobody notices now are noticed later – like the number of people smoking indoors in this gallery of shopping malls from 1989.

Perhaps the fact that I’m less than 30 days from turning 30 has something to do with my pondering about the passage of time. For the first time in my life, I’m seeing a clear delineation between the ‘present’ and the ‘past’. I’m starting to see knowledge I gained become obsolete.

Life itself looks different.

A client at work had me build him a home media server. The client asked that I, specifically, build the server for him, and that it be a built machine, rather than a purchased one. Why? Because he knew that I’m the kind of person who still prefers a customized, built computer over an off-the-shelf Optiplex with a four terabyte hard drive hanging off the USB port…but then again, he’s the kind of chap who is just fine with spending four figures on a computer that doesn’t have a glowing fruit on it.

My boss and I have a different relationship with Sonicwall routers – he swears by them, and I swear at them. I’ve become a fan of pfSense as of late. It’s what lives at my house, and at least one of my dear readers also has one – not that she’s consciously aware of it in any meaningful sense, but that was one of its selling points. The problem with pfSense is that it’s generally intended for installation on one whatever hardware you’ve got lying around…which is nice for people like me who have old Optiplex desktops camping out doing nothing, but less of a bargain for people who would need to buy things.

I’ve got somewhere I may need to install a rack-mountable router, which has got me looking into doing a custom build for the project. I was happiest with a $600 build I spec’d out today on Newegg, but given that pfSense sells rack mountable, supported iterations of their firewall for $800, it’s not exactly a huge money saver in the context, and the money that’s saved is lost by the fact that their device takes 8 watts of power when running, whereas mine takes closer to 100W. On the flip side, mine was engineered for silence, there’s no way my build doesn’t run circles around them in raw performance, and it’s trivial(ish) to migrate between pfSense, Untangle, and Smoothwall with nothing more than an hour’s time and an external CD drive.

But there’s a reason I filed this under ‘Philosophy and Faith’, in addition to ‘Computers and Tech’ – I started to think beyond the build, and into the bigger questions involved. There was a scene on The Big Bang Theory several seasons back, where the guys were experimenting with home automation in a manner that involved sending a signal around the world to turn on a lamp. When Penny walks in and asks why they would do something that ridiculous with literally no advantage over a simple light switch, their answer, in unison, was “because we can”. They said it in such a matter-of-fact way that gave the sense that such an answer should have been as obvious to her as it was to them. Although I’ve never done that sort of project, I’ve got my own portfolio of things I’ve done under the heading “because I can” – I’d argue that “installing pfSense at home” would reasonably fall within that category, when there was nothing technically wrong with my Asus RT-N56U that’s still serving as an access point.

For an organization who will never need the gargantuan amount of throughput that will be happily shuffled around via pfSense on a custom build that’s at cost parity when power usage is factored in, why am I pursuing a custom build? Is it because I’m treating it like a grown-up Lego set? Is it because of a desire for the sense of personal investment? Is it because I prefer the responsibility of keeping hardware running over the perceived safety of having that task handled by a third party? Has my deep-rooted hatred for Sonicwall, combined with my luck-of-the-draw experience with calling tech support, given me the default stance of “I want something I can fix, because nobody else will”?

Or, maybe the fact that I refuse to be dependent on a third party is the reason I am good at what I do. Perhaps there is value in the de facto requirement that I alone be responsible for its upkeep. Maybe my sense of security comes from the fact that a showstopping problem on a custom built pfSense appliance could be rectified with a set of procedures that start with “install Untangle”, “install SmoothWall”, or “install Endian”.

Then again, perhaps “because I can” is a phrase that doesn’t make sense to most people, for the sole reason that, for the majority of people, “building a custom made router” is not a task that falls into that category.