Blast from the Past...Techie stuff

   I used computers when I was in the service, but to call it a computer was interesting, if I recall, it was a 100 KB disc suspended in a nitrogen filled canister, to program it, we used hexadecimals numbers on what they call a MOTTS panel which was back-lighted.  When I got out of the service, I bought a computer, it was an XT, with a 286 processor.  I paid a lot of money for it...I remember going to a electronics store on the northside of Atlanta to pickup a keyboard which used the DIN connector.  I paid if  I remembered correctly about $140 for the keyboard.  It had the "IBM" click that I like.  Well time has passed, it has been 23 years since I bought that computer and all of it has been consigned to the scrap heap of history...except that keyboard.....I still use it.

    I found a PS/2 adapter in the late 90's and used it on the ATX form factor case, I tend to upgrade computers so this computer with my reliable XP in it has my same keyboard that I used back in 1991.  I love that keyboard, it is built like a tank.

                This is a recreation of the Microsoft webpage back in 1994, in celebration of 20 years of the website's existence Microsoft made a recreation to put on its regular website.

In 1994, there was no World Series because of a strike by the Major League Baseball Players Association. Nelson Mandela made world news — and history — by becoming president of South Africa. TV shows like “Seinfeld,” “ER” and “Murder, She Wrote” peppered evening viewing fare in the U.S.
“Speed” was one of the more popular movies that year. But speed was not a reality for a very young World Wide Web in 1994, with pokey dial-up modems the norm for getting onto the Web. There were only a few thousand websites then – compared to nearly 1 billion now – and Microsoft was among them. In the 20 years since it has been on the Web, Microsoft.com has remained in the top 10 most-visited websites worldwide.
Twenty years ago, there was no Facebook, of course, no eBay, no Amazon, no Wikipedia. It was Web less-than-1.0.
In 1994, among the reasons Microsoft started a website was to put its growing Knowledge Base online. At the time, the company managed support forums for customers on CompuServe, one of the earliest major Internet dial-up service providers.
“We had started to build up a community there; people would answer questions for each other,” recalls Mark Ingalls, a Microsoft engineer in 1994 who would become Microsoft.com’s first administrator. He was also the only website employee at that time, other than his boss. But the staff doubled early on, when Steve Heaney was hired to offer vacation relief, Ingalls says.
In terms of “Web design,” the notion, much less the phrase, didn’t really exist.
“There wasn’t much for authoring tools,” Ingalls says. “There was this thing called HTML that almost nobody knew.” Information that was submitted for the new Microsoft.com website often came to Ingalls via 3-1/2-inch floppy disks.

“Steve Heaney and I put together PERL scripts that handled a lot of these daily publishing duties for us,” he says. “For a while, we ran the site like a newspaper, where we published content twice a day. And if you missed the cutoff for the publishing deadline, you didn’t get it published until the next running of the presses, or however you want to term it.”
Today, there are a number of individuals who work on Microsoft.com. Chris Balt, Microsoft.com product manager, says the home page has to “support consumer users and enterprise users, home users and developers, teachers, students … If you think about the huge range of audience that comes to our website, it’s a unique challenge.” Plus there are the “stakeholders,” the business groups within Microsoft.
“They all want their spot on the home page that gets 20 million to 30 million visits a month. But my job exists to serve the user and to serve our customers – so first and foremost, the job of the home page is telling people what Microsoft is about; it’s helping them accomplish a task. That could mean fixing a problem. That could be learning about new products. Or that could be learning about old products.”
Microsoft.com was also one of the first corporate sites in the world to be built using modern, “responsive” design, meaning its design adapts to and renders appropriately for any device, Balt says.
“Responsive means it can be accessed on a phone, it can be accessed on a tablet, you can look at it on your Xbox – and it completely adjusts to suit the unique properties of the device that you’re using.”
Trent Walton, Dave Rupert and Reagan Ray of Paravel Inc., in Austin, Texas, did the most recent redesign of Microsoft’s home page, its 17^th in 20 years. It is the home page that visitors now see.
To help celebrate the 20^th anniversary, Walton and Rupert re-created the 1994 page from scratch, describing it as “sort of like an archaeological dig, digging through dinosaur bones, to find out how they did this then,” says Rupert.
“It seems really simple, but we had to kind of peel back the years and go down to 1994 technology – where your browser doesn’t support images, for example,” he says. “In 1994, it was more of a triumph to have a Web page in and of itself, whether or not an image was attached.”
Walton says Microsoft.com’s responsive design is how more websites will be in the future.
“The idea is that we need to build things more simply so that they work in more places, as well as on more kinds of devices,” he says. “These days it’s not just computers and phones that can access the Internet, but things like cars, glasses, watches. Web design is about building a really solid website that be accessed by as many different types of devices as possible. No one wants to be told where and how to access the site – they want to do it on their terms. If they’re on a phone, they want to do it that way; if they’re on a desktop with a 27-inch monitor, they want to do it that way. So, it’s up to us provide the experiences they want.”

A box of about 80 floppy disks together with one USB memory stick. The stick is capable of holding over 130 times as much data as the entire box of disks put together.

The first Microsoft.com home page, in 1994: Mark Ingalls, the first administrator of Microsoft.com, says at that time, using the slow dial-up connections of the era, this page would have taken awhile to load. “For most folks at home in that day and age, you would have been able to count to three or five before that picture showed up on your screen,” he says.

Ar-15 Mod to my AR-15 pattern rifle

I have an "older" AR-15 an "J-15" made by E.A. Arms from Baton Rouge LA.  I bought it when I first got out of the service in 1991. It is definitely "pre ban" so I have the bayonet lug on it.   It needed some help and since I was an armorer in the Army I rebuilt it with some parts I had lying around.(no "go-fast") crap   Since then the technology involving AR-pattern rifles have changed and I knew that my rifle with plain iron sights was definitely obsolete or a "classic" as they say.   I had mention to AM his site is Here about upgrading my AR pattern rifle.  he suggested that I go with a "Vortex Strike-fire" and a flattop for my AR to bring it more to the level of today's rifles.   Well I started looking around and at a site called Slick Guns I saw a link for a site called Red Barn Armory their site is here and I picked up a complete flattop including forward assist and "dust cover" for a little over $100 bucks.  I saw a Vortex Strike fire on ebay for around $130 and then picked up a folding sight from NC Armory.
    While I was visiting my brother I decided to start upgrading my rifle.

As you can see, I had already removed the barrel(I love the modular design of the AR) and reattached it to the flat top.  The old upper receiver is an original M16 pattern before forward assist.  I never had a problem that required the assistance of the "forward assist"  But the new one has it along with the brass deflector.  I will mount the "old" receiver to the original barrel that I still have, you know the old triangular suppressor  and original triangular fore-grips on it.

     

This is what it looked finished.  The fit of the new receiver was "tight" especially on the second "take out pin", but it cooperated without any major effort.   On the table is an AR-15 armorers tool, necessary when removing barrels.  As you can tell there is a color difference between the older rifle and the new parts.  I also used a flip sight from North Carolina Armory, got it off Amazon.   In case y'all are wondering about the Velcro, I had a "Delta" cheek piece for the stock, they are made to slide over the stock, but I cut it and used Velcro so I can remove it and reattach it as necessary for a scope I had bought 12+ years ago.  I decided that due to today's environment that such an arrangement is "tactically inefficient" or basically it was a not so good idea.

This is what it looked like for the past 10+ years... I decided to change it and take advantage of the modular possibilities of Mr Stoner's design.

This is what it looks like now.  I still have the A-2 barrel on it.   My brother called it a "musket" since he is used to the M4 pattern rifles.  I might change it out in the future, but I do like the barrel, it is what I am used to when I was in the service.    I also picked up a "bore sighter" to help align the optical sight with the barrel.  I need to locate some "smiley" face stickers for the lens cap though.   It looks good for a semi-auto rifle;)

This is me aligning it up...I am using the camera on my kinda smart phone to take the picture, I wasn't sure how the picture would work.  I since have aligned the dots.  I know from my ballistics class that a bullet will climb at first before friction and gravity overcome the velocity of the round.  I have the red/green dot a "smidge" above the bore sight laser.  I will tweak it once I go to the range I will make the final adjustments. 
      The sites I have mention, I am getting no compensation or "swag" for dropping their names.  I was impressed enough by their quality and service to give them the "free" advertisement.   I am looking forward to going to the range.