[Xitami] VISTA, crashes, etc.

[Russel Olinger]

You said WordStar - you're my hero.  People often ask me what got me started 
in computers, and routinely point out my first days on a computer using 
WordStar.  Most have no idea what it is or what it was.  But I can honestly 
say that using WordStar (a summer job doing word processing (I could type 
fast) for a company that took printed federal regulations codes and put them 
on disk for gov't contractors) got me familiar with keyboard interaction and 
more importantly a fundamental understanding of coding.  WordStar is almost 
like HTML in a sense where ".b blah blah blah blah .b" would bold the line 
(or what ever the syntax was), it was those kind of associations that 
literally made something in my mind go "click: ah I get it!" and then after 
that I sought out Pascal to begin teaching myself programming.

18 years later I am an accomplished sr level network engineer, routinely 
program in JS/PHP/Perl/MySQL etc, run my own web based businesses.  All of 
which is self taught (as I was a History major in college) and I still smile 
when some one asks how I got started in computers.  I grin with a bit of 
fondness as I answer: "WordStar"

ah, the memories.  :-)
-R
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Reid" <preid at rci.rutgers.edu>
To: "Xitami Users General Discussion" <xitami at lists.xitami.org>
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2008 9:10 AM
Subject: Re: [Xitami] VISTA, crashes, etc.


> > The way it reads is that any user accessing the site, the first one
> to see the message has the option to abort your reboot
>
> "a VB routine to access the site via winhttp ever minute.  If it fails
> to get a response it will become visual, warn the person using the
> machine that it will reboot in 1 minute.  If the user does not abort the
> reboot it reboots and Xitami restarts on the reboot."
>
> Says to me that he runs the webserver in the background on a workstation
> which may have a colleague *sitting at it*.
>
> Back in the late 1980s, I ran servers in workstations. A 286 can do
> NetWare 2 and WordStar at the same time. And you could rig it so NW
> errors did, or did-not, get posted to the screen for the user's
> attention. At home I often ran Xitami just for local uses.
>
> I suspect that a dedicated machine is usually a better plan than a
> user-workstation. Users tend to flog windows (yes, and unixes) into a
> jam once a month, while my server-only machines run many months.
>
> OTOH, if a machine has a regular user, and the power blips or a re-start
> stalls, the user will do something (kick it, hard restart, or call
> Gary). One of my low-use unattended machines was down for a day and I
> didn't know.
>
> > 9 out of 10 times, a service restart fixes the problem
>
> In NT4 and up, yes, service restart usually clears the problem. (I don't
> know Vista.)
>
> -- 
> Paul Reid
>
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