Hehe. One of my first tasks as a student worker was dragging coax through the department’s dropped ceilings, upgrading their network from Apple’s “Localtalk” to 10-base-2, because the university hadn’t gotten its own internal networking sorted out. There was ZERO security - anyone who could plug in could send print jobs to the President’s office - access controls didn’t exist. In retrospect, daisy-chain is a really dumb network architecture, but coax was cheaper than cat-5, the total length of cable was way shorter, and you didn’t have to buy any kind of fancy network switch.

Magical times. I learned so much, without it feeling like learning at all, and it was so exciting I never needed a repeat lesson. I could probably still find the resistor you have to cut on a Mac+ motherboard to upgrade RAM, but I have to look up the syntax every time I want to create a new SQL table. Makes me wonder what kids today are putting together for similar experience. Selfhosting seems close, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world where my grandma (or, I suppose, by that time, I ) pick up a Lemmy-box from BestBuy, slot it into the router, and join the federation.