For Thursday, May 15, 1997 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 730 words

Now and then

I'm taking a few classes right now to earn credits for a raise. I'm a notch away from top pay.

During the day I study WAN and LAN and HTML and HTTP; in the evening I listen to tapes of Sir Harry Downie, born 1903, and Thomas Chin, whose father was born in 1861, as they tell stories of the founding of San Francisco.

In the morning I learn that the Internet is pretty much sold out. All the IP addresses are signed out (255.255.255.255) and more people want connected. InterNIC will soon add two more octets to create Version 6 (255.255.255.255.000.000). Expect an Internet slowdown this summer as users double. That is, unless you have at least a 56K modem or better.

In the evening I learn that Calistoga is actually a Spoonerism. Sam Brannan, San Francisco's first millionaire and a heavy drinker, bought the land in 1859 and built a resort, much like the famous spa in Saratoga, New York. In fact, that was the intended name for the town.

However, during the dedication, Sam got drunk before climbing the podium to make his speech. He stood up and said, "I'll make this place the Calistoga of Sarafornia." Everyone got a good laugh, and the name stuck. Sam eventually lost it all to the bottle, got shot eight times by trespassers, and moved to San Diego.

The packets of information that fly across the Internet using TCP/IP are relatively small. Lots of people can send lots of stuff. It's like a highway crowded with compact cars traveling at top speeds. If you send out 60,000 blue Saturns sharing one email package, they can travel close together over the InfoHighway. At the far end, the 60,000 packets are put back together as a poem you wrote for Mother's Day.

These small packets also make it difficult to transmit smooth video-conferencing signals because the moving picture and voice take up a lot of bandwidth. When Version-Six addressing takes effect, packet size will also increase. Hence, the highway once crowded with compact cars will now be overrun with big rigs.

The San Francisco Bay was never discovered by water. Ships sailed right past it for years. The big attraction was Monterey Bay. Finally, in 1769 Gaspar de Portolá, on a walking expedition from Mexico, stumbled across the San Francisco Bay. Was he ever upset! He was looking for the Monterey Bay. He'd walked right past it. Weary and frustrated, having eaten half their mules, Portolá and his men returned to Baja, walking along the coast. Again, they walked right past Monterey Bay.

The computer industry, contrary to traditional corporate mentality, is eager to hire young graduates fresh out of college. Technicians and engineers no longer need a decade of experience to land a job. Bill Gates started the trend and it has spread through the industry. The hope is that the young employees will show more loyalty and not jump ship the first time a better offer comes along.

When Apple lays off employees, headhunters are waiting in the parking lots to offer them new jobs.

The first man to build a permanent home in San Francisco was William A. Richardson, a British seaman who jumped ship, took Mexican citizenship, and married the Presidio commandante's daughter. His first home was a ship's sail stretched over four posts. In 1839 he named his new city Yerba Buena (good herb).

In the northeast bay, Tom Larkin and Robert Semple secured land from Mariano Vallejo for another major city. Their town was to be named Francisca, after Vallejo's wife, and also because the name would associate the new city with the San Francisco Bay. When residents of Yerba Buena found out that this upstart city was taking a name so close to that of the entire bay, they petitioned to have their name changed to San Francisco. In 1847 San Francisco got its name. Semple and Larkin relented and changed the name of their city to Benicia.

A kid at MIT discovered a way to store 1.6 gigabytes on a standard 3.5 floppy disk. He hasn't been heard of since his discovery.

Want to synchronize your computer with the atomic clock? Download Atomtime, a free, small, use-once program and run it while you're online. It connects to the atomic clock in Colorado and resets your computer clock to match. Find Atomtime at http://www.winternet.com/~adelsman/software.