The Urban Redneck: Drunken Violence

Drunken Violence

In the late eighties and early nineties, a friend and I schemed to set up a monthly scandal sheet covering the PC networking industry. It was to be called Random Memos: The Industry Expectorant, and we even got so far as to produce stylish tee shirts before the inevitable differences of opinion scuttled the entire venture. The idea is probably obsolete now with the emergence of industry-specific blogs, but back then there was nothing like it.

The following articles represent the tone we were going for. As it was, these were written and then faxed around to various industry people, purely for entertainment purposes. Then in the mid nineties two of them were posted on my old website. The Dallas piece was recently rediscovered in a box of old floppy disks and is revealed here for the first time since it made the fax circuit back in 1990.

The “PC networking industry” then was very different from what we think of today or even what emerged just a few years later. Essentially it was a constellation of vendors, dealers and writers surrounding Novell Corp and their NetWare network operating system, which I personally had been selling and supporting since 1985. It was actually a fairly small and tight-knit community, and one of the pleasures of business was meeting friends and associates at trade shows and other industry gatherings (especially overseas).

By the mid nineties, however, NetWare had been largely eclipsed by IP based networks and the Internet. Luckily for me, I had by then jumped to the center of that constellation, which was Cisco Systems. But it was a much larger community, if you could even call it that, and what was in 1985 an exciting new technology became, by the late nineties, mere plumbing. Which was one reason I got out of it in 1999.

The Urban Redneck

Here

There

Drunken Violence

The Great Greenwich Village Pubcrawl

NetWorld Dallas '89

Comdex Crossing

Stagg Meander in Europe