Sunday Boot-Up: PDP-11s, WordPress, and Texans Football
Today is a Sunday. It is late October and Halloween is coming up at the end of next week. But today, I am chilling out and watching my tech YouTube channels where they fix old technology and bring old computers back to life.
My usual Sunday watch is Usagi Electric who today has several projects that he is working on. This week, he is installing a 40 year old hard drive into an out-of-date PDP-11 from the 1970’s, not quite as old as me, but close. But after plugging everything in, it just worked, better than Mr. Usagi Electric expected.
Right now it is twenty minutes to noon and I am waiting on my American football team to come on. It is a good time to write and think about the things I usually think about. I think about things like what I am going to teach this week to my students. I think about working with old tech, running my web server, and other things. Yes, it is 2025 and I run a web server on a 10 year old Mac Mini running on Debian Linux. If you are seeing this page, then that is what is serving it at this moment.
This is my first post, so I don’t know where this blog will go from here. Like everything else in my life, I drift from idea to idea and try to search for things that I am good at. This post has a couple of uses for me. First, it is to try out the WordPress software I loaded on my server. Second I want to write — and this is the prompt that came up in my mind to write about. This is just a bunch of word vomit for the moment. Third, I wanted to waste a little bit of time until the Houston Texans came on the television.
I don’t expect much out of the Texans play this week, this is one of the teams I expect them to lose against, the San Francisco 49ers. The game comes on in about 9 minutes so I will let you go for now.