But first, Holly suggested I left out two pieces of information from the last posting so I’ll give you those. The first is how to say the name of this blog. In ‘techspeak’ the exclamation mark is called a ‘bang’, so my early Email address at Bear Stearns, as well as this blog, is sol bang ursa bang ari. The second piece of information that Holly said I should include is for those of you who have forgotten your Latin or your constellations. Ursa is Latin for bear, so the computer which was the UUCP gateway to Bear Stearns was called bear.
Speaking of Bear Stearns, back in 1988 when the head-hunter told me he was sending me for an interview at Bear Stearns I thought it was a streaking club. If you don’t get that, ask in the comments and I or someone else will explain it.
I was hired by the IT department at Bear Stearns to support the Fixed Income trading floor, specifically Pete the new head of mortgage research. My initial assignment was to install a network of VaxStations running VMS for the traders, research analysts and developers. There were already a few VaxStations around the 4th (FI trading) and 5th (FI research) floors at 245 Park Ave., but most of the people had dumb DEC (VT320 or color VT340) terminals connected via DecNet Terminal Servers to the big Vaxen in the Whippany datacenter, along with several smaller green Quotron screens. On my first day on the job I found about 15 VaxStation 3200’s still on their pallets on the 5th floor, waiting for me to unpack them and install them around the group. The VaxStation 3200’s were desk-side units, about the size of a radiator in a typical NYC pre-war apartment, so they were difficult to install on the crowded 4th floor trading desks, but we managed to fit a few in, along with their 19 inch color CRT monitors which weighed about 70 pounds. DEC soon came out with their VaxStation 3100 model, which was a desktop model more the size of a pizza box, so we ordered lots of those. Pete didn’t want his people to be able to take their software or data home with them on the 3-1/2 inch floppy disks which came standard with the VaxStation 3100’s, but DEC didn’t sell a preconfigured 3100 without the floppy drive, so he ordered diskless computers and then ordered SCSI controllers and 2 disks for each computer. That meant that I had to install the hardware and the software on each of the stations before it could be used. The 3100’s all came with thin-wire Ethernet, basically coaxial cable BNC connectors which allowed them to be easily networked together. They also each came with a phillips-head screwdriver for assembly. I was able to install the controller cards and disks into the servers, then daisy-chain them together with the coaxial cable and connect them to one VaxStation which had the software installed. I wrote some scripts to automatically install the software, setting the DecNet address for each computer based on the MAC address of the Ethernet interface so that they each got unique address and since the boxes had the MAC addresses I was able to give each one a unique name tied to the address. All of this is standard now, but in those days it was a fairly new idea. I set up the configuration table of MAC addresses and names, then started the script and left for the night. The next morning I would come in to a half-dozen new workstations ready to be installed on the desks. I used a simple naming convention based on the use of the computer and a sequence number, so the ones I installed were called boring names like fixd02 for a developer workstation or fixt31 for a trader workstation. The earlier VaxStations had more interesting names. The ones running VMS were named for denizens of the sea (fluke, mako, squid, etc.) while the ones running Ultrix (DEC’s proprietary Unix variant) were named for birds who ate denizens of the sea (osprey, heron, etc.). Interestingly enough, the Ultrix group eventually gave up and those boxes were reimaged with VMS, so the sea denizens ended up eating their predators.
Shortly before I got to 245 Park Ave. Bear Stearns’ networking group had started to run fiber to the trading desks so each workstation that I installed had to have a fiber to Ethernet transceiver attached. In those days, the standard Ethernet connector, when not using the thin-wire BNC connectors, was a 15 pin slide-lock connector, but Bear Stearns decided to replace all of the slide-locks with screw-down connectors because of a mishap with a Sun Workstation on the equities trading desk. I only heard about that third-hand so I won’t go into it here.
There’s lots more from these early days, some of which I still remember, but I’ll save more for another post. I hope this didn’t bore too many of you too much.