(Or A Surf Behind CyberSpace) |
In
May of 1996, I happened to be visiting my parents, who live
in a quiet residential area east of Providence RI. It was an
unusually hectic 10 days there, but I managed to squeeze in
a day away. My nephew, Matthew, who was at this time a
graduate student at Fordham University also happened to be
in the area visiting his folks. As we'd
both been given an invitation to drive up and see the "digs"
in the Boston area, we took advantage of the opportunity on
a sunny, warm afternoon. |
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Here's a November 1998 photo of the unassuming, yet gorgeous large house that John Romkey named "The Ranch", where many computer friends and other similarly intelligent associates rent apartments to live in and often to work in, (the house has many net connections, EtherNet, T1, a lot.) As it so happens, my nephew Matthew is among them at the moment (so he must have been impressed when we had that first "cook's tour" here in May of 1996...!) The basement also houses a lot of Net equipment, including the very server that this page is stored on. Check out the computer room's contents in pix and words below. |
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And here we have a shot of our good host during your visit, John Romkey. Like many of us, John is not too enusiastic about having his picture taken. But this one came out quite decently, and I hope he'll be a little pleased. He used to live and work in this house, but now has a quiet home across the street there in Cambridge MA, while his main residence is in New Hampshire. He's kind of a private person, so we'll leave it at that! |
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The wires from the "outside world" come in on a large plywood panel. This is a shot of the central portion. Connections are routed in the center and right, and interfaced within the box on the left. I live with a lotta wires in my studio, but this batch looked pretty impressive in 1996. It has since been added to, and organized better, too. |
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To the right of that board is this rack, which contains the actual linking equipment, for T1 and other high-speed lines. A few computers have the mundane task of filtering unwanted data even before it gets sent on to the actual host machines. John explains that this saves a lot of other hassles. I could only wince at the thought of all those blocks of software that have to remain booted and functioning without error, along with the computers they reside within. And I thought MIDI Hell was scary! |
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This view shows John's hand on the far right, indicating that this rack, which is to the left of the big board, has the Apocalypse computer sitting toward the wall. The room is clearly not in a deep basement, as the drawn venetian blinds over a half-window indicate. But I saw it only after dark, which gives a different perspective to these things. |
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And
this is the actual computer that holds all of apocalypse,
with many gigs of HD space, a fail-safe power source when
live voltage goes down, a backup system for the gargantuan
data, and a spare monitor for servicing and maintenance. Not
very intimidating, but then, what did I expect, a
Hal 9000 in a red and black cathedral of
microcircuits? The upper image is the way the server looked
in May of 1996; the lower is the server's much newer current
computer, with many more of those "gigs and megs and MHz",
taken in November of 1998 (the cover was off and to the left
for maintenance when this photo was taken.)
--Wendy
Carlos |
Wendy
Carlos, Apoc Cyber Visit
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