Paul Allen’s Living Computer Museum computer collection being auctioned by Christies – last day tomorrow (12/9/24)

Paul Allen’s computer collection that was previously on display at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle is currently under auction by Christies – the last day to pick up your own DEC PDP-10, IBM 7090 Mainframe or many other historical computers is tomorrow (12 Sept 2024).

The museum has been closed since COVID, and Paul Allen’s estate have decided to sell off the collection. Many of the machines are in working order and were maintained by the museum, so hopefully the machines will find new homes where this computer history can be experienced by many in the future.

What tech stack was I working with in May 2003?

Clearing out some stuff in the home office I came across this CD-ROM of tech tools, products and libraries that I was using at work at this time:

  • JBoss – the open source Java EE app server of choice at this time
  • Xerces – Java XML Parsing library (DOM)
  • Amazon WS Kit – not sure what this was, maybe an SDK for AWS?
  • Apache – HTTP web server
  • Caucho Resin – no longer around – if I remember right this was an optimized Servlet runtime
  • EJ Tech Profiler – I think this was a competitor to JProfiler?
  • Homesite – HTML editor
  • IBM WS Kit – SDK for Java XML webservices
  • IntelliJ – still around today. At the time I don’t think it was as popular as Eclipse or Netbeans, but is probably the best. Java IDE around today

Interesting look back at Java versions in use at the time:

  • Java JDK 1.4 (at the time, also called Java 2 after JDK version 1.2, abbreviated as J2SE)
  • Java EE 1.2 and 1.3 – abbreviated to J2EE – the days when J2EE was actually called J2EE before dropping the 2 and just becoming Java EE after Java EE 5 was released in 2006)

New BBS documentary: Back to the BBS part 1

There is a new documentary about BBSes posted to YouTube this week, ‘Back to the BBS’. Rather than focusing on the history of the BBS such as Jason Scott’s awesome ‘BBS The Documentary’, this one looks at using BBSes in the current time, and why there is an increasing interest in using BBSes today.

Part 1 is 43 minutes and walks through using telnet based BBSes today, and includes a number of interviews with people looking back at when BBSes were in their height of popularity, and also interviews a number of Sysops of current day active BBSes and their users.