I was spending all my time learning computers, and I was starting to build systems for family and friends. Once I was lent out to another Radio Shack store that was short handed and the other salesmen kinda lamented not being able to afford the Compaq a customer was buying. Afterwords, I tried to explain to him that I could easily build him a nicer system for a fraction of what we sold Compaq's for. He was still not interested, I think he was way more broke than I realized. I grew up broke too, but I also had my eyes set on improving my situation. Was kind of a wake-up-moment that most people around me had minimal ambition about this.

I also remember having to push cell phones at RS then too, I think we pushed a lot of Sprint phones. I was still fairly young and was just learning about phreaking, but I remember my boss telling people Sprint phones couldn't be cloned like analog cell phones could back then (I disagreed, but I had to agree it was harder at least). It was apparently a thing that your analog cell phone could be cloned over the air and suddenly your bill would be crazy that month. I only ever heard rumors about that kind of thing happening.

What I came to learn later was that TSS was IBM's PC service division which it had sold off to Kodak just a few years prior. I spent most of my time doing contracted in-home PC repair for all the major PC brands of the era, including Gateway. I'd get a service call (on a RIM bullfrog two-way pager), call the customer and tell them "Hi, I'm with , give me directions to your house and I'll fix your system". Most of the consumer PC manufacturers were unequipped to provide any kind of in-field repair service on their products, so they hired TSS for this. If you bought any kind of extended warranty on your PC then you were paying for TSS to show up on-site at your home to fix it. Apparently this was better than regional central repair hubs.

Let me tell you, there were some seriously crazy stories from the front line. Most of our work was through Sears for Packard Bell (cheapest machines sell higher volume and therefore require the most service, not even counting for PB's lower quality). We serviced Acer, Sony Vaio, Gateway, Dell, and other brands, and did other point-of-sale and other contract work. I remember servicing the Gateway Destination system - that 35" CRT was huge for even a TV at that time. But being up close I realized it actually kinda sucked to use as a computer monitor. People tried to set them up in their living rooms, so imagine using your computer in the living room instead of an office, and required sitting next to the 35" display meant you saw the CRT up close which just meant the low resolution was blown up larger and you could see the physically larger pixels up close.

So yea, showing up to peoples houses meant going to a lot of random peoples houses which was mostly fine, but occasionally terrible. I had multiple instances of working on computers in a house having brownouts. "So wait, the computer reboots when the lights in the house flicker? And dispatch has sent me out with a new display for you... yea, you're gonna have to get the power company out here...". One time, I was sent to a house that was barely a shack in the woods. Main room had a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. That call in particular stands out in my mind, nice people, a 70 year skinny old dude in overalls and a 400' bearded lady in a shack. I couldn't do anything to make their Gatway machine work better as it was the power lines (lightbulb was visibly flickering the whole time I was there, that poor PC never stood a chance), so I showed her how to play her music CD's in PC (between power sags that crashed the machine) and she was tickled pink. One of my trainers had a couple horror stories: one dudes house was an underground bunker. My coworker was sent to replace a modem. After, the client couldn't find his Solitaire on his desktop, so he locked the door and demanded my coworker fix his Solitaire game before he could leave. My coworker obviously had nothing to do with that issue, but he recreated the shortcut to the desktop and was set free.

Eventually I jumped ship from TSS to IBM proper, it was a fun adventure. But that year and a half slinging in-home service calls in the evenings was an interesting time.

I only worked there for about five years and I am grateful for the experience. I'm also glad I left when I did to avoid becoming "institutionalized" in my thinking as I had witnessed others had become. I have to assume that the pearl clutching came from IBM's experience with Amdahl and its prized mainframe (zSeries). They had become so afraid of competition that they were even afraid us lowly CE's would start freelancing and selling consulting services on the side on OS/400 work. As a result of that, you have a walled garden which is very hard for fresh talent to penetrate and IBM likes it fine that way.

The interesting thing I recently noticed about the Datamaster is that I believe this system's motherboard inadvertently (or deliberately) became the very first informal motherboard layout standard, a predecessor to the original IBM PC format. The Datamaster and PC are different architectures so it's not an architectural link, but it's clear that the same engineering group that designed the Datamaster's motherboard also had some amount of influence in the PC's motherboard layout. There's nothing magic about the Datamaster's layout, it's just very sensible: power in one corner, I/O slots near the rear edge, BIOS and RAM at the other end, CPU roughly in the middle of everything it has to talk to. But before the Datamaster, systems like the 5100 and System 36 used discrete boards that just plugged into a backplane with minimal logic on it. For the era of those systems that made sense, but those dense card connectors add cost and they add electrical noise to the system. A unified motherboard design was a true improvement in design that matched manufacturing improvements arriving in the late 1970's.

Datamaster motherboard (those are not ISA or "PC bus" slots): https://www.nf6x.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_3121....

Similarly, there were loose standards like LPX in the 1990's which were never a formal design standard, but clearly every PC maker of that era was using the same logical riser-card design. Perhaps it was the same Taiwanese engineering firm doing the actual design work on the back end for everyone that generated LPX, or perhaps it was just working knowledge moving as individual engineers had success with various designs.

But there's another downside too that Quigley talks about: the arrival of the railroad at your previously isolated village. Suddenly now you have food, medicine and people arriving at a far greater pace. Your towns demographic suddenly starts to shift as your townspeople start to live longer as knowledge can instantly penetrate from the outside world. People can leave much easier too which facilitates brain drain. The railroad brings the industrial revolution to your door. The countries that survived the best were the ones that created these revolutions and then exported them. If the railroad did not originate from your country then the railroad arrived at your doorstep quite literally before you were ready for it. I don't fully understand what this means for AI, but I'm certain this is part of the reason the US is trying to lead the charge. You absolutely do not want the railroad arriving at your doorstep: you want to be the one pushing the railroad out to your neighbors. The only guarantee is change whether you want it or not. If you want some control over that change then you had better be driving the change rather than just reacting to it.

Teaching is rewarding which is why people do it, but you're asking them to take less pay for what is often a harder job - convincing kids to learn something when they have dozens of other things competing for their interest. The math aligns on the side with the teacher having the knowledge you would expect in this scenario - with a fair number of teachers not as much knowledge as one would hope they would have. On the students side, if they are bright then this is a soft-skill learning opportunity - how to navigate knowing more than your superior to the benefit of you both.

The devil is in the details though, there are some subtle features that need to be incorporated into the mechanics for the sputnik to work right. I have built a sputnik from scratch before, only after talking to Oli Diederichsen at a LockCon did I get some additional clues.

Also, I think there are plenty of other interesting things one could do besides brute forcing the lock with a simpler tool. Falle Safe has a single-wire variant on this for decoding locks. Again, the devil is in the details, just ramming wire up a pin stack doesn't get the job done.

If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.

To fix pronunciation problems I had developed a set of domain-specific "dictionaries", sed substitution scripts that would translate certain words and phrases into their phonetic versions that would be pronounced better by Festival. Besides announcing the names of songs being played, I was also feeding news articles and some other web-scraped info through it. Tons of fun to hear your project working on the air in public as you drive around town.