Interface Abundance
Many years ago I had my roommates computer, my computer, and a friend’s computer in front of me. I was on a BBS on my roommates computer, on my BBS on my computer, on a third BBS on my computer, and reinstalling DOS (pre-Windows days, mind you) on my friend’s computer. This was also pre-mouse days, so it was all just keyboards. While chatting with two different people online, reconfiguring my BBS, and reinstalling DOS, I was beginning to feel overload. I got a little sloppy, and decided to reboot my BBS to update the config changes that I had made. I was on the wrong keyboard, and accidentally rebooted the BBS that I was logged into where I was a SysOp. That made the owner unhappy, but once I explained to him what was going on, he understood. He actually thought it was a little funny. It was a few hours of typing on three keyboards, and multiple interfaces. It was a good time.
I’m back in the same boat. I have my old Linux server from my old house that I’m decommissioning. I’m copying files from it to my laptop as a temporary measure until I can get a new file server built. I’m also working on Perl on my work laptop, and I have my laptop powered up where I’m doing research for the Perl script that I’m trying to write. There are four keyboards, two touch-pads, and two mice on my desk right now. I’m doing a pretty good job of keeping them separate. No mix-ups just yet. Things are good.
As soon as I finish copying files from my old Linux file server, I’ll power it down, unplug everything, and move it aside to get it out of the way. Then I’m going to move on to my wife’s old Windows 98 box. She says that she has everything off of it, but I want to make sure that I don’t have anything of mine on the computer before it gets gutted, rebuilt, and sold. Once I’m done with her system, I’ll move to my old desktop, and save everything that I have on it.
My old desktop is destined to become the new file server in the house, but I want to find the two largest hard drives that I have in the house, and use them to build the file server. Should be fun and interesting.
