iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10h

Also 7 years ago... I missed the event, but I got the shirt! I was lucky to work both at Bell Labs and at Nokia.

Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/10/2026

7 years since the #Internet50 event at UCLA. Very cool day. samueli.ucla.edu/internet50 I got Vint Cerf and Bob Metcalfe to sign my little artifact from 1973.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/10/2026

OTD 1977: Digital announces the VAX-11/780. It became the standard "1 MIP" unit of computing.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

OTD 1985: IBM finally announces a Token Ring product.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026

OTD 1992 - official start of Ipsilon Networks and 3 years of crazy, intense fun poking the bear (Cisco).

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026

OTD 2011, we lost Dennis Ritchie. R.I.P.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

September 30th: Birthday of Andy Bechtolsheim, 10 Megabit Ethernet, and the 1-millionth system shipped by #SunMicrosystems. Coincidence? I think not!

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

OTD 1990: #SunMicrosystems announces NeWSprint and SPARCprinter. Very cool, not very successful.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

This faint chicken-scratching is apparently how a Doordash order gets relayed to the kitchen at my favorite Indian restaurant. I did NOT get what I ordered.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

What do you think? Graphics guy or CPU architect? Anyways, the car is there every time I bike by.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

Forgot to include the customer feedback mailer!

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

From the Sun-4/SPARC announcement event - July 7, 1987.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

OTD 1985: #SunMicrosystems announces the Sun-3/1xx workstations based on the Motorola 68020 - true 32 bit computing. I loved those machines. Made Sun a billion dollars before SPARC was ever released.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

OTD 1941: The birth of Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of #UNIX. I had the great honor and privilege of working directly with Dennis during my summer at Bell Labs.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

Today is my great-grandmother's 150th birthday. She out-lived her husband here by 38 years, and became a very successful real estate agent.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

Behold the #SunMicrosystems SunLink Communications Processor - released in 1985. This one sits on a VME-Multibus adapter. It was a Multibus card OEM'd from Systech of San Diego (they still exist!). I used their VRTX RTOS just as a boot loader and wrote my own code for the board. 1/6

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026

OTD 1972: IBM announces the System 370 models 158 and 168 - first with virtual memory.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2026

Datamation, April 1970. The 360/195 was the fastest IBM machine at the time.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2026

When the void follows you, you'd better follow back.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

From my grandfather's photos: "1920 Cavalryman - Fully Equipped"

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

It seemed pretty good at the time! Abysmal MTTF performance for the IBM 360/91 at Princeton in the 74/75 school year. From a Computer Center newsletter. The general improvement trend in software MTTF is as they matured from the conversion from HASP to LASP just before these metrics.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026

University of Texas Computation Center with a CDC 1604 and 160. From a general brochure, 1961/2. Later they had CDC 6600 and 6400.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2026

I got your Open Source Operating System right here. (1959) SHARE Operating System for the IBM 709/7090/7094: drive.google.com/file/d/1vrlJOfXNxx…

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

Found an old recipe book from Marfa, TX among my aunt's old things. Some things are best left undisturbed.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2026

OTD 1995: Legato Systems goes public. Founded by brother Bob and other folks from Sun. Red Herring: drive.google.com/file/d/1KWCzF5phK5…

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/07/2026

OTD 1959: Fire destroys Pentagon data center. Data center design & safety got a lot more serious after that.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/07/2026

OTD 1956: Burroughs acquires Electrodata, the southern California developers of the later B5000 series. Blog about the development of the Electrodata/Burroughs 205 and 220 machines: datatron.blogspot.com/2018/02/intro…

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026

OTD 1970: IBM System/370 announced. The main reason for the bump from System/360 to System/370 was the use of IC memory instead of core. Virtual memory features took another 2 years. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/370

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026

OTD 1945: von Neumann's EDVAC report published. The beginning of modern computer architecture. web.mit.edu/sts.035/www/PDFs/edvac.…

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2026

Here's the answer. The program was found inserted into this manual, probably printed on the original Flexowriter console. drive.google.com/file/d/171t-K3TzWz…

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2026

Name that programming language! (Wrong answers appreciated!) Hint: "Personal" computer, circa 1963.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/06/2026

Father's day burgers with my son At Jumbo's Win-Win in Philo, CA. Mighty fine!

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/06/2026

OTD 1975: The first UNIX Users Group meeting - the organization that evolved into USENIX. archive.org/details/unix_news_july-…

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/06/2026

70 years of A.I.: OTD 1956, the Dartmouth Workshop: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_wor… Personally, I was happier when A.I. meant American Idol.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026

Speaking of John Tukey - I found this plaque on my recent visit to Princeton. The plaque is in the E.E. department, although Tukey was always in math & statistics department. And Cooley was at IBM. #FFT

Plaque titled "IEEE Milestone" commemorates the 1964 first demonstration of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). It details its impact on computing and applications.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026

Apropos of nothing, here's a Sun Multibus Ethernet card (1983). It used Intel's 82586 chip and an array of 256MB of memory because (a) Multibus was slow, and (b) The Sun-1 didn't support DMA from Multibus. The horrors of programming this mess and others are […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/06/2026

Layout of the basement of the computer center, including the Ready Room. This was at 87 Prospect Avenue; recently demolished for giant new building.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/06/2026

"Someday my Prints will come" - waiting for output in the "Ready Room" at Princeton's Computer Center.

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/06/2026

It's 2002: the dot.com bubble has burst, telecoms are struggling, data is coming to cell phones, the Internet is still growing, but rife with what will be known as "network neutrality" problems. We need a new public network. The future I wanted to see […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/06/2026

OTD 1982: #SunMicrosystems ships 1st Sun-1 workstation. Customer is "Solo Systems", never heard from again.

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