Tony’s Cafe

A coworker of mine told me about a billboard time capsule, so to speak, that is in an adjoining building to our office. The billboard had been in a hallway that had been locked off to card key access for a long time. A few years ago, that hallway was opened up for access to a new cafe. A short walk, down the formerly blocked dead-end hallway, around a corner, and there it was. A pristine glass billboard, no staple or tack marks, with three bills. The billboard looked brand new… and the building was built in 1974! The post on the left was for a ski wax service, no doubt by a student for students. On the right were two computer related posts…

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I’ve been told I should write some “less tech, more anecdotal” posts. (Mostly by friends who are tired of reading posts like how to build a Commodore 64 RS-232 interface.) OK. So, in that particular post, I referred to a null modem network I designed called G-NET. G-NET was the answer to our frustrations with data connectivity in our dorm, Grange Hall at UConn, in 1992. In 1989, data jacks were installed in all the dorms on campus. Most of them, like the ones in Grange, were not active. (As a side note, the Grange data jacks didn’t become active until sometime around 2000. 8 years too late! Although, had I decided that being an undergrad was a career…) These inactive data jacks taunted us by saying, “Play Modem Wars with your 2400 baud modem, fool!” We wanted something more; something high speed… something in the 38400 bps range. (That’s 0.038Mbps up/down for you broadband compares.) I figured I could probably make some kind of serial null modem network, at least between two nodes. Something that could run over telephone wire. Something with an intercom. Ah yes, I would create… G-NET. What follows is the story of G-NET, schematics, and photos of the Grange Hall dwellers that participated. (The following photos were taken with an Apple QuickTake 100 back in December of 1992.)

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I’ve always been interested in computer mediated communication. When I was an undergraduate and should’ve been studying, I wrote a terminal program in PASCAL to get two XT clones to communicate to each other. This led to the creation of G-NET in 1992 (short for Grange Network, as I lived in Grange Hall at UConn). G-NET was a null modem serial network with a party-line intercom that used telephone wire. I digress… that is a completely different story! At any rate, before the G-NET days I had my Commodore 64 (C64). I always wanted my C64 to be able to communicate with the world but I couldn’t afford a modem at the time. Not to mention monthly dialup fees! Years later, I discovered Jeff Ledger’s PETSCII pages. On his website, he details how to connect your trusty C64 to Internet Commodore BBSes (and Q-Link, no less!) via a PC. I decided I had to make an interface for my C64 to do the same.

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There have been plenty of times where I want to implement a simple daemon in Debian Linux. I know, I know… I could just install a Debian package and have the daemon created for me (if it’s included). There are times, though, where I want to compile the latest version of an application (like Asterisk). Also, I might want to compile darkice with lame support. (Darkice only has ogg support in the Debian Sarge package). Preferably, I’d like to create a daemon which sets mixer levels then runs darkice. I’ve found various tutorials and howto docs on the Internet but they haven’t been simplified enough. This post will outline a straightforward way to create a daemon in Debian Linux. In this example, I am running Debian Sarge.

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