Weakness of a facade (weakness_of_a_facade.mod)

Posted by govatsapadam on Sun 31st May 2020, rated 8 / 10.

Yeah, this is cool enough for me! The drums and basslines are driving this tune home neatly.

Posted by The Finn on Sun 31st May 2020, rated 8 / 10.

some background from the composer...

Gompers High School was looking to modernize their computer labs, and myself and two fellow students put together a proposal for a unix-based lab to update the PDP11/44 and 11/23 RSTS/E systems used for FORTRAN, BASIC, and during some years, PDP11 assembly. We were thinking a 486 for a file server, 386SX for the workstations, and I vaguely recall either SCO or Coherent being proposed for OS. (BSD vs SysV debates were common among our group.)

A campus-wide Ethernet backbone was also part of the proposal, so existing computers in classrooms (we had some macs and IIgs along with Apple II+) and the library (IBM PS/2 and a Tandy 1000) could potentially be brought online.

We were included in a district-level conference and discussion, provided a presentation, and the administrators seemed impressed, but in retrospect I'm not sure how much of it was a polite pat-on-the-head or if we were actually giving them ideas.

The Gompers High School computer lab was reworked, the FORTRAN PDP11 was retired, and we ended up with... novell netware. It was what the school district had formal support for at the time, and the computer teachers were not unix experts (or even novell experts) by any means, so in hindsight I completely understand the decision.

High-school-me at the time was devastated, not understanding why the school district could not embrace our obviously technically superior unix-based proposal. Dave Harlow was one of the computer science teachers, and bore the brunt of my frustration.

this song was my outlet.