new thread
It's a long time since I posted here, so it's time for a new picture (which can be used as avatar as well). The picture was taken last summer.
This year I am celebrating 40 years since I grew my hair longer - and the beginning of years of disputes with my parents and the authorities on this subject. Fifteen years later I left all these problems behind when I fled from the communist-ruled Romania in March 1988.
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A Linux Longhair
Irrelevant as it is, your name wouldn't happen to be influenced by the Linux kernel would it?
I'm curious to know why the police would have such a problem with something so small as hair.
You weren't around in the 60s when we started growing our hair
long were you?
The police then had a very real problem with long haired men,
especiallly those who protested the Viet Nam war.
The police are more tolerant of long haired men now but that
wasn't the case back in the 60s in the US of A.
I'm afraid to say I wasn't even around, I was born waaaaay later but to my understanding there was a bit of friction between the police force and the flower power movements especially when it cam to 'Nam.
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And THANK GOD for those longhair protesters, willing to wage war against the establishment, to the edge of ANARCHY, to put an end to the Vietnam war. The fear of ANARCHY from coast to coast here in the USA is probably what put an end to that war more than anything else. God bless those protesters. They saved a lot of lives, amen. End of rant.
Scott
That was part of it. Another portion of it was TV, people seeing
the death toll brought into their living room day in and day out
as also a good portion of the momentum to end the war. There was also a lot of anger against the draft.
Ultimatley Nixon did get re-elected in 1972, and the war ended several years later. But even though the war ended the US of A continues to fight the war to this day (just look at the anger that follows John Kerry whenever he runs for office. Or the anger when Jane Fondas name is mentioned.
I have been using Linux for about 20 years and made a living as Linux sysadmin. I even had a beer with Linus Torvalds (the creator of the Linux kernel project) back in the early 1990s - he introduced me to the Guiness beer...
Dictatorial regimes like the ones in Romania, China (during chairman Mao), North Korea etc. do not tolerate anything that is outside the norms imposed by them. In Romania during the 1970s and 1980s the regime tried to combat the influences of the "decadent" Western culture. In 1971 the late dictator Ceausescu, after being "inspired" by visits in North Korea and China, adopted a series of measures to promote and enforce "socialist" norms and morals in every aspect of the citizens' lives. In essence his aim was to turn Romania into something similar to North Korea. As a consequence many local satraps (communist party bosses) adopted city and county ordinances that banned things like wearing jeans or tie-dye shirts (or anything related to the hippie trend), or listening to Western pop and rock music, or men growing long hair and beards. Legislation was also adopted that banned satellite antennas (when the technology became available in the 1980s) or listening to foreign radio stations like Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, BBC or Deutsche Welle.
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A Linux Longhair
Alright, now THAT is pretty badass. Did you ever get to meet Richard Stallman (head of the GNU Project)? What kind of guy was Linus anyway, still as what he is now?
Interesting how they wanted to be like China and North Korea, how have such situations stabilized over the past few decades and have they adopted more westernized culture or still doing their own thing?
I met Richard Stallman a few times. The first time it was in the early 1990s in Bucharest. I had lost a lot of weight at that time (only to gain it later with interest...) and I looked pretty much like him.
The Communist regimes were quite different from each other in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Hungary had implemented a pretty liberal economic system (they allowed privately-owned small businesses) and let people travel abroad without restrictions. Poland had gone through a lot of turmoil during 1970s and 1980s: recurrent popular protests against rising prices and shortage of essential goods, the establishment of the independent "Solidarity" trade union (the only such organization in the Communist block), the martial law implemented by the authorities as a response to "Solidarity"; by the mid-1980s the authorities implemented economic reforms and lifted the restrictions on travel abroad. In East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria all sectors of the economy were under a rigid central planning system; the citizens of these countries were not allowed to travel outside the Communist block. In Romania the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had established an extravagant cult of personality centered around him and his wife Elena; the economy and all aspects of political, social and cultural life were under a Stalinist-style central control.
In 1971 Ceausescu visited China (ruled at that time by Mao Tse-Dong) and N. Korea (ruled by Kim Il-Sung, the grandfather of the current leader) and was impressed by the degree of control the central leadership had over their populations. After that visit Ceausescu began to implement policies aimed at achieving the same degree of control over Romania's population. Combating the influence of the "decadent" Western culture was part of this policy.
Regarding long hair and beards: Hungary, Poland and East Germany had no restrictions (in East Germany the authorities had basically given up on combating the influence of West German TV and radio on the population). Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria had dress codes in schools, but otherwise the authorities in these two countries were quite tolerant. In Romania, while there was no central policy against long hair and beards, most local jurisdictions implemented such restrictions at the whim of the local party bosses. Many workplaces banned their employees from having long hair or beards. Especially in the late 1970s long haired men were stopped by police on the street and forced to cut their hair - I was chased a few times by police while riding my bicycle but they never got me, as I was able to flee through parks and on alleys and trails where the police cruisers couldn't go.
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A Linux Longhair
Great avatar, I always wondered about a guy trying to have long hair in a communist society. Would they give you a forced haircut? I know in the,last few hundred years long hair on a guy signified he was a revolutionary such as the french and americans during the revolution eras.
Hi Linux Longhair
Looks like a beautiful summer day, when that was taken, which I'm looking forward to seeing after this winter that never seems to end.Aside from that your hair and bread look great.Glad you were able to escape Communist rule so you are able to live a free life now and keep long hair:)Cheers.
Mârk
Looking great, LL! Persistence pays off in the long haul.
Linux, Love and Longhair forever,
- Oren
Heya Linux!
First off, great hair, my friend :)
Funny you should mention communist Romania back in the late 80's, as I am born and raised in Romania myself, and left the country at the age of 7 (in late 90') and never looked back. Can still remember the classroom with us having suits on, leather briefcases and all that, and the teachers hitting us on our fingers with rulers... crazy shit man ;)
Anyways, were do you live nowdays, and how do you feel about Romania now? Adica, mai esti si acasa cate-o-data? ;)
I was in high school ("liceu") in the early 70s and we had to wear uniforms and we were not allowed to have longer hair than 5 cm (2 inches). Later I studied electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Bucharest - the dress code was more relaxed and I let my hair grow longer. I had however to keep it hidden under my shirt because some faculty staff were behaving like satraps with the students. There was a lecturer who started his first day with us with the remark that some of us students had hair that was too long and he wouldn't accept us next time if we didn't cut our hair. Later, while working at a project institute for the Romanian Railways, I had run-ins with the communist party boss at my workplace. Despite this I kept both my hair and my job because I was the only one in that division who knew Intel 8080 assembler programming - and we had projects based on that type of microprocessor.
My last visit to Romania was in 2003. I am now living in New Jersey.
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A Linux Longhair
I had an IMSAI 8080 and I ended up writing for it a word processor, a membership database program, an address book, and a program that sent and copied Morse code. I had to build a board to do the Morse stuff. The computer came with no software. In the "chicken or egg" scenario, I can assure you all that hardware preceded software. The computer came as a kit, and it had over 2000 solder joints in it. Then when I got done, I got to start writing software in 8080 machine code. The first program I had to write was so it could read the keyboard and send text to the screen. Before that, all data went in on switches and came out on blinking lights.
Around 1980 I was writing letters home on the computer, while at work we still wrote letters in longhand and gave them to a secretary to type. Computers were mainly seen as a hobby activity back then, and it took a few years for them to work their way into the workplace. By the 1990s I had become quite indispensable in the office because I had written all the software that did our engineering calculations. Yeah, they tolerated the way I looked.
There was no public Internet in 1982. A lot of ham radio operators figured out how to tie computers together over radio, and we began to send messages to each other. These messages were what later came to be called "e-mails". The computer that distributed all e-mails in and out of San Francisco was ours, and it was located in the room where I now sit. You could say we had San Francisco's first ISP.
Bill
Thanks, Bill. I love hearing about the early days of personal computers. I wish I'd been around then as the pioneer times must have been exciting.
I bought an old Altair 8800 off eBay about five years ago. Never got around to trying to get it working but I just loved it anyway. Sadly, I needed money and was forced to sell it two years later (2010). It sold to Ray Ozzie of Microsoft for a then record price of over GBP 3,700 on eBay (it was a lovely example - complete with all manuals). Nice profit for me but I still kinda miss it. :(
Yeah, I'm a geek! :)
Damon
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I started using compuetrs in 1973 when I started college in
Electrical Engineering. I'm not sure what computer it was
in 1973 but several years later it was replaced by a VAX 11/780.
After that i got an Atari, a few IBM pcs.
I still remember those days fondly.
When I went to college in the late 1970s (electrical engineering too, with railroad control systems as special) I took a Fortran programming course. The data center had three mainframes - a Romanian clone of IRIS-50 (French mainframe similar to IBM-360 produced in the late 1960s), an IBM-7040 and an IBM-1130. We had to punch our programs on Hollerith cards and deliver the card stacks for batch processing. I got pretty good at card punching, doing 40 - 50 per minute. I learned also the IRIS-50 operation and assembler language and one summer I worked as night shift operator on that machine. It had a 32-bits CPU, 256 KB of memory, four 6 MB detachable disk drives, two 1/2" tape drives, a card reader and a 1200 lines/s 132 character drum printer. IRIS-50 clones were the mainstay of Romanian data processing until the mid-1980s.
In 1981 I built from scratch an Intel-8080 based computer which was used to control the signals and switches on my model railroad. Later I upgraded that system by replacing the 8080 with a Zilog Z-80 microprocessor and installing 256 KB of paged memory. In 1986 I added two 8" floppy disk drives (smuggled in from Hungary because they could not be obtained in Romania). I began to run a rudimentary BBS on that system, which brought unwanted attention from the Romanian Securitate police in late 1987 - my BBS was used to distribute reports of an anti-communist revolt which took place in Brasov, about 100 mi from Bucharest, in November 1987. That was the main reason I decided to leave the country in early 1988.
In the fall of 1987 I was called in for two weeks of military training - that was something we had to do every few years at that time. When I got to the unit where I was assigned they sent me back because I was unfit physically (due to my obesity), but not before they forced me to cut my hair - another reason for me to bug out...
My computing equipment was confiscated by the authorities after I left...
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A Linux Longhair
When I took my first computer class it was in Fortran on IBM
punch cards.
Fortran was the first programming class I did in college. In high school we did some assembly language. All of that was using punch cards, and you might have to wait weeks to see if the code you had written would run.
The first computer we had at home was a Sinclair Spectrum. It had a modulator so you could connect it to the TV as there was no monitor, the keyboard was made of rubber, code was saved on and loaded from cassette tapes, and the printer needed heat sensitive paper. It was 8 bit, and had 64k of RAM. Yes, that's k, not megs.
The OS it used was Sinclair Basic, based on the programming language, and fast routines used the PEEK and POKE commands to dump chunks of Z80 machine code into the middle of BASIC routines.
We bought software on cassette, or more often typed it verbatim from code listings published in hobby magazines. One of my friends got the lady from down the street, who was a legal typist, to type code into his computer!
I remember the ZX Spectrum! I never had my own one while in Romania, but I always had two or three in various stages of construction and testing for paying customers. Spectrums were popular in Romania because they were the cheapest home computesr one could buy in the West. Romanian diplomats, airline crews and truckers used to bring these machines from their trips abroad and sell them for three or four times the price they had bought them for.
In the mid 1980s I made several travels to Hungary and Poland - the only Communist block countries where one could buy home computers. Some stores sold the ZX Spectrum as a kit to be assembled by the buyer, at a fraction of the price of the assembled machines. I used to buy a backpack full of these kits (plus some other merchandise to bribe the Romanian customs officials with), then, once home in Romania, I assembled them and sold the ready-made Spectrums for 10 or 15 times the price of the kit - and I was still below the price of Spectrums from other sources.
I worked also with a few friends on a ZX Spectrum compatible computer that could be built with components available in Romania. The machine was bigger than the original - about the size of a modern laptop but much thicker - because of the PC board (about 6 x 10") and because it had a power supply inside the case. It had both modulated (TV PAL system) and direct AV outputs.
Otherwise I bought my first Spectrum after I left Romania. It was a Spectrum+ (with a real keyboard rather than the foil keys of the standard model) and it came with two Microdrive units - miniature tape drives that used closed loop cassettes with a capacity of about 90 kB.
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A Linux Longhair
Ah yes,the IBM 1130 was the first "real" computer I got to deal with too. We were taught programing in Fortran and basic on that clunker also. One of the destinctions of our particular class was to find a new way to comand a core dump that the operators hadn't seen before. They weren't amused. Now I just curse and swear at micro-squish when it does it's usual crap. We also were exposed to the flipping paddle switches and blinking lights of the 8080 and designing our own analog computer circuits. This was back between 1974-1978 in Columbus Ohio in one of those Bell and Howell tech schools. (O.I.T.) I'm sticking on a photo taken of me in my graduation gown holding my diplomas taken at the apartment complex where I stayed at the time. Damn I was so young then unlike the old fart who looks back at me in the mirror now.
A lot of ham radio operators
I've always wanted to get my ham radio license, but i detest morse
code.
I believe the code requirement has been dropped. But it is nice to be able to send dits and dahs. Bill can probably ascertain this.
Yes, it has been dropped. There are a lot less people active in the hobby since cell phones and the Internet became common. People who just want to communicate now use those for the most part. Ham radio is left with those who want to play with the equipment. No one is impressed now with talking to people around the world. You can do that on Skype.
A major advantage of Morse is that with much less power you can get a transmission through. All the recipient has to do is figure out whether at any instant the signal is present or not. With speech, he can't just sense whether the sender is talking or not. He has to understand the individual syllables. This takes a much clearer and thus stronger signal. This advantage of Morse is what kept it on as a requirement for so long.
A lot of people had trouble using the code. It has come to my mind that, if most people have trouble with something, can you still call it a learning disability? Or do you turn to the other people and say, "You have a gift."
Top Morse operators can send data faster than the best text message senders. This was revealed several years ago when Jay Leno pitted experts at both against each other on the Tonight Show. The Morse guys won easily. They were two old guys and they really embarrassed the two young texting guys who they beat.
Bill
Back around 1964 when I started growing my hair long I had a neighbor who had his ham radio license. His brother did too.
Ever since then I wanted to get my ham license, but morse code always stopped me.
Well, now you have no excuse!
Well Bill, if the Morse guys need even a little more speed this should help them get a better fist:)
Mârk
Good one, Mark! Hehe.
Ted
Hi Ted,
Other than Bill I figured no one would know what the hell this thing was;) LOL
Mârk
It's a bug, of course! Almost all hams would know what it is. You push the paddle one way and it makes rapid "dits" (which the general public would calll "dots"). This enables the operator to send dits faster than he could bounce his fist up and down otherwise. In the other direction, the key either makes "dahs" (dashes) or it is continuous and the operator has to make the dahs himself.
I never could use one of those. I'm too much of a klutz. I stuck with a straight key (where there is just one knob and you push it down to beep and let go for it not to). You have to form all the dits and dahs yourself. I got to where I could send up to about 22 words per minute on a straight key, sometimes on a good day I could get up to 25. Guys with bugs could go much faster.
I still have my straight key, which I got in 1963. Yeah, it's fifty years old. And I'm 66. That is why I look even older than the key in the photo. I got my first ham ticket when I was sixteen, and this is the only key I've ever owned. I got it the month I got my ticket.
Bill
Hi Bill,
Ha ha, yea that key does have some years on it but something like that would last forever as it was built to last.That bug I have belonged to my Uncle who was a ham just like many other family members but getting the ticket had eluded me somehow.Pictured was another interesting item from his "station" that I acquired some years ago.Think it was referred to back then as a lollipop mic.Kind of wonder if they still make cool,well built stuff like this anymore.Anyway great looking key Bill as it might be fun sending a coded mlhh response someday;)LOL
Mârk
Hi Mark,
Gotta love that old D104 microphone! I always liked those. They even had a gold plated one that cost over 200 dollars. Cool photo, Mark.
Ted
I was going to post that "That looks like a D-104!" but Ted, you beat me to it. They were the rage with CBers back in the 1970s when CB radio reached its peak.
Bill, K9AT
Hi Bill,
Yes, I remember my friends had D104 mikes. I always liked the Turners. I think it was a 444D or something like that. I think I also might have had a Shure model also. I never used the D104 because I found it way too sensitive. 73 Bill.
Ted
Here's my ob ject of the past but guess what? I still use it despite being technology from the 1920's!
When I was about 10 years old (mid 1960s) I saw one of these in the station master's office on the Targu-Mures - Praid narrow gauge railway in central Transylvania. The telegraph was used to send and receive codes between stations - the system was called 'telegraphic block'. The line was active until 1995 or 1996; now there are works underway to restore it for tourist traffic. I doubt however that they will use telegraph for communication. By the time of abandonment the telegraphs had been replaced with telephones.
Another adventure at that time: my grandmother knew the pilot who flew the route between Bucharest and Targu-Mures. On the way back to Bucharest, after take off, I was allowed to stand behind the pilots in the cockpit of the Lisunov-2 airliner (a DC-3 built under license in the Soviet Union) and watch the action as we flew south over the Carpathians.
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A Linux Longhair
Bill, I am sure I am one of those with a learning disability specific to Morse code. I eventually got my 20 wpm, but that was decades after I first started trying.
In a major emergency, off-grid powered ham radio operators can jump in and help with communication when internet, cell and other conventional services are compromised or completely out.
Yes, I've seen that Morse code vs texting showdown - it was great!
- Oren
It's gone now, at least as far as testing is concerned. Now you only have to pass the theory tests. The international requirement for a Morse test died in 2003. The US took 4 years to implement that, whereas some European countries had their rules changed by the end of the week.
I think QRZ.com has some US practice tests.
I hate Morse code myself! I eventually passed it, but I'm glad other people don't have to.
Wow, it sounds somehow terrifying! Although the system overall (suits, strictness), I suppose, is pretty much alike Ukrainian.
Sorry for replying instead of LinuxLonghair, just wanted to tell
Your reply reminded me greatly of an original clip to full version of Pink Floyd's "Another brick in the wall" (here is a link on youtube -
Serge.
I was at the Roger Waters "The Wall" concert in Berlin in July 1990. It was held in the "no man's land" in East Berlin between Vossstrasse, Potsdamer Platz and the Berlin Wall (today the entire area has been built up as Berlin's new business district). It was awesome, with huge balloons shaped as characters from the movie (the Teacher, etc.) floating above and a wall made of styrofoam bricks built during the show on the scene, only to be demolished at the end of the show. Scenes from the movie were projected on that wall.
I was standing quite a distance from the scene (which had been set up near the wall, facing East; later I found out that my location was quite close to the bunker where Hitler took his own life at the end of WWII.
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A Linux Longhair
Sounds just like the United States! School uniforms, arrests for drawing the wrong picture in art class.
Hi Linux Longhair,
Thanks for the nice update! You are looking wonderful as well as your hair and beard. That's a long time to have your hair long. I very happy you fled the oppression of the Communists in Romania. I am dismayed by the conditions people have to live under in Communist ruled countries. Keep up the good work with your hair! Best wishes to you and yours for a nice weekend and rest of the week! I love your username by the way:)
Ted
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Your hair and beard look great. It is good you got away from all those close minded control freaks. Communists rarely, if ever, think outside the box.
Scott