Johnston Flood

Lynn Johnston’s “modern classic” family comic strip, For Better Or For Worse (It’s not “For Better Or Worse”!), is in reprints, and the Boston Globe, which I still get as a newspaper, carries it. Since Lynn isn’t producing new daily strips, on her web site she writes comments about the old ones. Tuesday, she explained that she will soon be the age that Charles Schulz was when she met him. Lynn says that she’ll be speaking at the Charles M. Schulz Museum, and she mentions that she stays in touch with Jeannie Schulz. Jeannie can be heard in this recent audio interview. (And, no, I didn’t forget Monte Schulz’s birthday on February 1. I wished him well on Facebook.)

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Feb/Airtalk_CharlesSchulz.mp3|titles=KPCC: The Legacy of Charles Schulz]

Last September, Lynn did a video podcast interview. You’ll find it here in six parts.

Inspiron 530 (2008-2011)

My primary computer, a Dell Inspiron 530, purchased in April, 2008, is dead. Motherboard problem. Won’t even come out of POST (Power-On Self-Test). Guess I won’t be updating it to Windows 7 after all! Until I decide on a replacement, the little Acer Aspire One netbook keeps rockin’ on, and for heavier-duty stuff like scanning and editing audio/video I can use the old Dell Optiplex GX-260 that’s been idle since Eric got his Acer laptop last August.

RIP DEC

Digital Equipment Corporation is long gone. It was bought by Compaq, which in turn was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. But as long as DEC founder Ken Olsen was alive, the legendary Massachusetts minicomputer company wasn’t truly dead. Now Olsen is gone, leaving behind a legacy that is both classic and curious.

For years, DEC was second only to IBM (albeit a distant second), and its influence here in Massachusetts can’t be overstated. The so-called Massachusetts Miracle of the 1980’s was led by Ken Olsen and Digital, and the idea that DEC could disappear almost overnight was unthinkable; but like Prime, DG (Data General), and Wang, DEC was swept away by the rapid move business and industry made from minicomputers to microcomputers. Massachusetts endured a grueling recession in the first half of the 1990’s that was ended thanks to the Internet revolution.

Olsen left DEC but, unlike Steve Jobs, he never returned to the company he created. Once or twice Olsen was featured in the Boston Globe, saying he had an idea he was developing, but nothing came of it. For all practical purposes, Olsen was retired. One of the noteworthy things that Olsen did was to hire Bob Taylor in 1983, just as the Massachusetts Miracle was about to kick off. Taylor had left Xerox PARC, where he managed the development of a few innovations, including the Graphical User Interface, LASER printers, and Ethernet, and that was after his years managing the creation of a little thing called the Arpanet, the predecessor to the Internet.

Life in the shared lane

Network World, and IDG, its parent company, are around the corner from where I work. One of their columnists tells a tale of woe with his shared web hosting account on GoDaddy. (Having a shared account means you’re paying about $100/year to be on a computer with hundreds, or even thousands, of other web sites, usually on the same IP address.)

Dealing with the support people on the phone led the writer to a classic moment in technical support, where he says to the grunt on the other end of the line, “Let me get this straight. You want me to do something you didn’t understand, and you can’t tell me what it is, but you still expect me to do it?” That’s the thing about frontline support. One minute you’re talking to a newbie customer who’s easy to confuse and put off, and the next you’re confronted with a confident heavy-hitter who writes for a major tech publisher.