Thursday 11/30/2023
Tidied up, watered the plants, and headed out to Shustek. We are filing the papers of Bert Sutherland. This means going through the boxes donated by his family, and putting each document in an archival manila folder, with cataloging information written on the tab. This isn’t the actual cataloging step. That happens later, probably much later. This just gets things identified and into archival storage material. Today among other things I noted a memo to Sutherland from Bob Taylor. Just a stapled memo made in 1965 on a typewriter but Sutherland had written across the top, “ARPA genesis” and indeed when I looked, the bulk of the memo was Taylor laying out at a high level how a network of connected computers would work, complete with the acronym IMP (Interface Message Processor). IMPs were the earliest form of router, we have one of the first IMPs on display at the museum. So this was a memo laying out how to build the internet, before there was an internet.
During the day I got an email dispatch from the tech squad. Ilse had a problem with her password. After I got back I checked her out. Ilse is quite old and as far from being a techie as it is possible to get. Here’s what I wrote when I closed the call,
Ilse has a Chromebook made by Acer. It is working fine.
She had somehow managed to hide the web page with her gmail inbox and was looking at a google search page. It wanted her to sign in to Google. Which she didn’t know how to do, but didn’t need to, anyway.
I shut the Chromebook down and restarted it. It comes up showing her name and asking for her password, which she knows (it’s on a sticker on the keyboard). I entered it, and Chrome said, should I restore your apps as they were? Sure, do that. So up comes the Chrome browser.
I notice that there are about 25 tabs open all to the same thing, her mailbox. I close them all except one, and there is her email inbox. So she is good to go.
Just another day on the tech squad.
Codgerville 