This should perhaps be called 'questions that probably would be asked - if
anyone ever asked me anything - but which, in their absence, I have decided to
ask - and answer - myself.'.
Feel free to tell me off about the design of this page, such as the use of
<blockquote> tags here.
Q: What is 'Brooknet'?
A: 'Brooknet' is the name that I give to my collection of battered, clapped-out
computers, or the ones that are on my intranet, anyway.
Hello to other Brooknets out there! Amongst these are:
There was a brook.net, but it's gone. Perhaps I should buy this domain?
(At this point, I went off and had a look at it, but the seller wanted a rather
large price - $14,000 - for it. I offered $140; I don't think that this will
be accepted.)
Q: Why the name 'Brooknet'?
A: For 'hysterical raisins': the first time I ever connected a computer to
another computer - and called it a 'network' - I lived at a house called
'Brook Cottage'. The 'original original' network was a serial PPP link
between my Amiga 1200 and Commodore Amiga CD32, which I called '.locnet' (for
'local network'). I renamed it a few weeks later,
when I decided that the original name was rather unimaginative.
If you want to be really pedantic, there was a network before that, though it
didn't use TCP/IP - it was a shared serial bus between my Tandy 102, BBC
Microcomputer and Amiga 500 and I ran a chat system with it: 'RTalk', and
then the packet-based 'PacketTerm'. That one didn't have a name; if it
had one, it would have been 'Easternet' because I was at Easterground Cottage
at the time (1990 - 1991).
Q: What's with the gull 'favicon'?
A: Since I moved to Hillsborough Terrace, I've seen a lot of herring gulls.
I have seen a family of gulls move in, raise chicks and fly away again. The
gulls have been both a source of entertainment and the cause of the occasional
argument between myself and the neighbours: I fed them - the gulls, that is -
and the neighbours didn't like it. Someone else was feeding them as well,
and they carried on doing that after the estate agents had told me not to.
Luckily, I didn't get in trouble a second time and the whole thing has now been
forgotten (I hope). One day I took a picture of one of the gulls and cropped
and resized it (the picture, that is) - the result has become the 'favicon' of
the site.
Q: You've used one of my pictures and/or files and/or linked to my site and I'd
like to contact you. How do I do that?
A: Use the information on the 'contact page'.
Page last updated at 20:54 on 13-Dec-08