From watches to passwords on paper, everything that's old is new again KETTLE Windows XP is turning 25, and with AI still causing a memory crunch we're really missing the days of low-overhead OSes from Microsoft that just worked. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Those platforms also let you subscribe to …
Around mid-'90s I was using ntalk or ytalk to communicate with someone in a SE Asian Uni but at some point talk wouldn't work — I don't recall the reason firewalls ? talk is a really lousy protocol; the other end lost login access to a Unix server and confined to Windows or Mac — the other end suggested ICQ which was new to me but I found a *ix client and managed to get the connection working.
It was only long after I stopped using ICQ did the penny drop as to what the letters meant. Bit slow I suppose.
Still, interesting to read of the subsequent history of ICQ.
Never used IRC largely because the need never arose but I believe it was pretty massive amongst technical types.
I don't remember my ICQ #id but I am pretty it would still be written on the wall of my office at the time along with the SGI, Sun etc passwords used to access patches etc as at that time every outfit with whom you dealt thought it was a great idea for eveyone to have an account (had to be an active email address for their spam spreader) with a password even to access essentially public information.
It's vellum, but you get the idea. Around 13 copies of the 1215 Magna Carta were issued. Four survive today. That's a 30% survival rate across eight centuries.
How much accessible data do you think will still be around from now, in 800 years time?
Passkeys excluding the use of a paper backup make them a lot less resilient than passwords. Passkeys are an immensely stupid idea being pushed by companies that can bank cash from having them enforced by moronic politicians. Just use long, different passwords that do not use words.
I'd suggest W7 was the best MS OS for ordinary users. Downhill since then, dramatically.
I know these guys are tech journalists, but I'm amazed that people are using so many gizmos that are time limited or less resilient due to their tech. I don't use any of them if I can possibly help it. In the 1980s I had a clock radio, a digital watch that told the time and a personal stereo. I still do. I have no desire to have any of them incorporate WiFi, connect to the net or have AI.
Playing whack-a-mole is not a cyber defence. Our important stuff should never connect to the public internet and everything else should have a tech-free plan B. And it should be tested like a fire alarm. Everything should work if the tech goes off. Schools should not shut because their prison-style safeguarding tech can't check every child. Hospitals should have paper data for when the power goes off. Supermarkets shouldn't close - they should take cash, so make sure the staff have calculators, as most people can no more add up than write legibly nowadays. That is how you make your society resilient, not national clouds, not better AV, not keeping your MS rubbish updated.
It would be nice to think that the halfwits in government - COBRA, SAGE, whatever might actually realise that, but all they really care about is the next trendy bit of tech and how they can get a bung out of it. Our resilience lies in things that work offline: cash, pen and paper, calculators, watches, FM radios. None of the morons who run the country give a toss about that.
Reduce your tech use, don't rely on it, keep some cash on you, use simpler tech. All we ever really needed was a Works package, so why pay for more when it has bugs, is less resilient and costs a fortune? Leave others to be stupid and lazy, and build some resilience for yourselves, your family and your business.
The only problem is it's annoying to input a 63-character WPA password (i.e. not "correct horse battery staple" because that survives less than the lifespan of a mayfly if someone's running a brute-force dictionary attack) from paper. Maybe requires a printer to print replacement pages in a ring-bound book in a reliably OCR-able font?
"How much accessible data do you think will still be around from now, in 800 years time?"
My guess is a lot. I can use the same example as you did, because while there are four existent copies of the Magna Carta, there are zero existent copies of many of the other documents from the time because they were less important. But there are millions of copies of the text of the Magna Carta all over the place. I think modern data will be more resilient, not because it's on something that lasts longer, but because it can be copied so much more easily.
It will only be more resilient if someone bothers to re-write it into new media every decade or so.
Think this isn't so? Try reading an IDE or ST506 disk nowadays, or a QIC, LTO4 or DLT or even a half-inch tape. Floppy disk? How about 5.25" or 8" floppies. And how long do you think optical drives last when new computers don't come with them.
Flash memory is inherently volatile, albeit over years.
If data is kept on-line, then you're depending on the storage provider to remain in business, and again copy the data to newer generations of system. And you're almost certainly locked in to a subscription that will expire with you.
Just think the number of small websites hosted out of early ISPs that disappeared when someone stopped paying the bills. There must be millions, all gone.
Preserving this data requires effort. Effort costs money, and it's not always clear who will keep paying. Paper (or vellum) just lasts. It's not indestructible by any means, but it remains usable even if treated quite harshly.
At the last office we kept all the server passwords in a little metal 'cashbox' to which some of us had keys.
Because if someone had broken into the office that was a big enough problem as it was.
My very first IT job though was in the late 80s to 1991 for a small company where the MD thought "Windows is just a fad, it'll never catch on!"
Which was where I thought that job wouldn't last much longer, and it didn't.
At my first IT job access to a nationwide realtime (1980s) system was by a physical key that slotted into the terminal keyboard and was cut to give privileges appropriate for the user's position - early RBAC.
When a program with a memory leak ran amok and threatened to bring down the whole OS (looping so fast ops commands couldn't interrupt it), I had to accompany the Most Senior Programmer to the Ops Manager's office to act as a witness and countersign a register, so he could get the One True Key from the safe. It allowed patching of absolute memory addresses on a running system. He used it and an object code listing to patch the program's memory space so it terminated properly. Exciting times.
"Because if someone had broken into the office that was a big enough problem as it was."
And you didn't consider what else might be a problem. For example, some employee who knew how to misuse the passwords if they could get them picking the lock on that box, copying the passwords, and walking off with that copy? Or someone with access knowing the passwords and misusing them after they were fired? And probably those things didn't happen, but you being lucky doesn't mean the reasoning was good.
Is that really true? Why? After all their whining about cutting off old versions of Windows and making people pay for extended support to keep getting patches, why in the world are they still producing and releasing patches for XP two decades after SP3 was released?
Because a shit-tonne of legacy IT still uses it. ATMs, big expensive CNC devices, lifts, CT/MRI machines - basically things that have a colossal life-span. Wouldn't surprise me if there weren't some significant government or critical infrastructure being used in some fashion - power plants for example.
> Agreed. It was, unlike XP, an OS for grown-ups. I kept it as long as I could.
I tend to agree.
Although, let us not forget, Windows 2000 Server also brought in the nightmare of Active Directory. The MICROS~1 kudzu vine that still entangles most enterprises today: nobody understands it well enough to take a machete to it and hack it back to the bare minimum.
AD perpetuated the X.400/X.500 bureaucratic nightmare that Exchange was built upon in the mid-1990s: screw this Internet stuff, to hell with Unix, we're doing it the ITU-T way!
I deployed some small W2KS systems and I deeply disliked it.
XP was the version that made me ditch Windows, after about 15 years and a career largely built around it. Mac OS X on desktops, Linux on laptops.
Today, though, the limits of W2K make it little use, whereas XP64 is still surprisingly usable... with the added thrill of danger: is today the day a virus will destroy my computer?
I've been using Windows since 3.1 and 95. I really likes XP but from memory, drivers could be an issue as could occasional Blue Screens of Death. I don't miss having to run disk defragmenter or other such maintenance software regularly or getting malware downloaded from apparently innocuous websites (adware, spurious toolbars etc). I never used the teletubbies interface preferring the old style W95 looks. XP networking could also be flaky, especially if you used more than one network
For me personally, peak Windows experience was W7. It was more stable than XP and the ability to view thumbnails in explorer (without 3rd party software) was a big bonus for me as I have thousands of photos, many of which end up in reports.
I am OK with W10, in fact I even like the menu, but it's bloated in comparison with W7.
Would I want to go back to XP? No.
Would I go back to W7? Yes.
As a slight detour, a late colleague worked in the travel industry, for s well-known package holiday company. Before being computerised, they had a system of huge boards with sticky paper containing booking details. One weekend, the air conditioning went haywire and turned the room with the bookings into a sauna, with predictable results. Backup? What backup?
