Subj : How did you find out about bulletin boards?
To   : nelgin
From : Bob Worm
Date : Wed May 01 2024 14:01:36

  Re: How did you find out about bulletin boards?
  By: nelgin to Bob Worm on Wed May 01 2024 00:16:31

Hi, nelgin.

 > I used their software, WINDIS, I think. I was fascinated watching the SMTP
 > traffic come through when using debug mode, or maybe it did that all the
 > time. Very smart system. I took a tour of Demon Internet while I was down in
 > London for a job interview. Interesting stuff.

Hmm - I vaguely remember them giving out Turnpike for a while but my recollection is *very* hazy! Soon after I started going online everything began to standardise so you didn't need weird custom stacks any more...

Was it an interesting tour? Maybe a couple of decades in telecoms has jaded me but possibly the first couple of times seeing a modem rack would be a fun time.

I once applied for a job at a company making network switches. That was absolutely fascinating because they made their own silicon and pretty much everyone there (I think less than 25 employees total) knew the product inside out. The way they thought about stuff was so different from how I'd ever approached it on the "consumer" side of the deal.

They did a proper role play in the interview where they played a customer with a problem in their production network and I had to support their product (which I'd never seen). It was a fun way to check whether candidates knew the fundamentals or just what vendor X tells you about their box. I still smile when I remember the guy asking me "is it safe to run that command?" to which I replied "go for it, it's just a lab box", then he came back with "No, this is my production network, remember?" :)

I remember being in one of Cisco's product awareness training sessions where they were getting all excited about their 1us fixed latency products and I was sat there thinking "they were doing 150ns when I interviewed at that place 3 years ago?!"

BobW
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