@adam
@cmason
...
Hope it's Armory!
It's not, we just did a session with Alan and he told me he's been heads down and doesnt know a thing about the metacoins that wasn't known last summer. I told him they needed to integrate it ASAP and that it was a very big deal.
Good advice. This is the problem with being on the bleeding edge, you have to keep it up, or you get left behind.
I remember going to COMDEX in 1996 at the Skydome in Toronto. (I still have the beer coasters to prove it!) Lots of cool stuff, including one of the first demos I ever saw of a flat LCD panel (12 inches, I think). But there were also companies with demos of modem hardware, including racking systems and support for facilities management. I believe Telebit was one of the companies presenting.
So, you had companies going all-in with modems, on the eve of broadband. It's almost a satire today, but these were serious companies, and we bought a lot of their stuff. And it was good, reliable, well-made, but, unfortunately, soon to be obsolete. I still remember working in a very cold server room, replacing slot-mounted modem cards in a big enclosure. The products were actually pretty awesome, but a year later, no one cared.
We spent a significant amount of time and money buying actual real estate, setting up technical facilities, providing for security and maintenance, in about 8 locations across Canada, so that most people would have a local dial-up modem number they could use. This seems almost crazy today, but that's what ISPs did, back in the day, if they wanted to compete. You can't expect customers to dial long distance to get on the Internet, right?
