Site News Visitor No. since 980824 (Page last updated: )

News about this website and the online VS will appear here from time to time.

Nov 05, 2005 - Updates made to reflect New VS (VS22000). The VS Models tables and VS Family Portrait have been updated to show the New VS.

Sep 26, 2005 - Hurricane Rita disrupts our operations Beginning on or about Monday, Sep 19, Hurricane Rita became a threat to the Gulf Coast area around Houston, Texas, where we have several company and staff facilities. Even though we are located 60 miles inland, there was the potential for severe damage and threat to life and limb. Some of our staff evacuated as early as Tuesday.

Overnight from Friday, Sep 23 to Saturday, Sep 24 we experienced numerous power outages that continued through late Sunday, Sep 25. Click here to see the storm information page that temporarily replaced our website front pages. Fortunately, Rita made landfall in Louisiana and didn't bring the storm strength originally predicted.

In the week following the storm we brought our systems on line again and our people returned. One firewall failed in the power outages and had to be replaced, causing a weird outbound email problem that wasn't solved for about a week.

Apr 11, 2005 - MAJOR SERVER FAILURE RESOLVED, WEB, EMAIL WORKING AGAIN. After several days of wrestling with AIX and sendmail, things seem to be almost back to normal as of early this morning. sendmail is the ugliest software ever written, and having to work with it poses a risk of serious brain damage.

Apr 09, 2005 - MAJOR SERVER FAILURE AFFECTS WEB, EMAIL. A power incident on Apr 7 resulted in the RS/6000 that handles Web and email here becoming unbootable. Some of the 14 hosted domains and a few hosted email addresses are affected. All email was inoperative for about two days. Things should be pieced back together sometime this weekend.

Jan 18, 2005 - Minor updates, including News: New VS technology is being readied for release, changing the outlook for VS applications for the better, and the Lightspeed NVS product line was acquired by a new company dedicated to serving the VS community.

Sep 17, 2004 - Air conditioning failure continues: The air conditioning outage here continues. It is now scheduled to be repaired tomorrow, Saturday, September 18.

Sep 16, 2004 - Air conditioning failure: The air conditioning system here failed today. All non-critical equipment has been shut down until repairs can be effected tomorrow. Among the systems presently powered down is the Live VS Web Server.

Jul 28, 2004 - Important news: We posted an announcement on the News page in seven languages to the effect that something very big is happening in the VS world and soliciting all VS sites to get in touch with us.

Since starting the Unofficial Wang VS website in 1995 we have heard from at least several hundred VS sites around the world. Lately we've been scouring the 100,000+ emails in our archives for VS contacts and trying to reach as many of them as possible. Unfortunately, many email addresses become invalid over relatively short periods of time, so we're unable to contact everyone who has sent us email through the years. Also, there are many VS sites at which no one has ever contacted us even though they may have been visiting the website.

If you work at a VS site and have not been in touch with us recently, please send us an email and tell us who you are, what kind of VS you have and how you use it. All the reasons people have had for abandoning the VS are about to disappear. We have the information because we're in the middle of what's about to happen. The only way you will get early word on what it's about is to get in touch with us.

Nov 29, 2003 - Loss of email: We lost a PC on Oct 10 and so far have been unable to recover more than a handful of email messages that existed only in that system. If you wrote to us or expected a reply from us in the period of Aug 14 through Oct 10, 2003, please and, if possible, forward any messages to or from us you may have on file from that period. Please note that if you do not email us, we will be unable to contact you if our only correspondence was during that period.

Aug 09, 2003 - OUTAGE. A severe storm knocked out cable Internet service in this corner of the county between 1638 and 2049.

Jul 10, 2003 - OUTAGE. In the last day or so servers here have been off the air for personal reasons that are nobody's business. As of this morning, all servers are once again on the air.

Apr 21, 2003 - MAINTENANCE COMPLETED. At least this cycle has been completed. All storage on one of the RS/6000s has been moved completely out to a multihost RAID -- the RS/6000 has no internal disk drives at all. The Live VS Web Server has been reconfigured to live in a 5-slot VS5000 box to conserve power and is also running on a RAID with no internal disk drives. In the next phase the VS volumes will migrate from their present temporary RAID to the multihost RAID.

Apr 13, 2003 - MAINTENANCE is going on here this weekend. Servers will be shut down from time to time today.

Mar 29, 2003 - Extensive tidying up of the Website. COBOL ReSource received its own menu button in the last week, as did the Forums, which are fully functional. My email address at the bottom of most pages is now generated by JavaScript to minimize harvesting by spammers. If you run with JS enabled there's no visible difference. If you run with JS disabled, clicking on the email link will take you to a page that displays my email address in a graphic and you'll have to type it into your email program. The last of the broken SysTran translation blocks should be gone now. The Feedback page has been updated to reflect my disuse of ICQ. Extensive content is now offered for COBOL ReSource, which may also be reached at www.cobolresource.com

Jul 30, 2002 - There is new material in several pages -- RAID, Removables, VS Wanted! and the Forums have been live for several weeks and now include Wang VS, COBOL ReSource, and a growing repository of VS Q&A from my archives.

Jun 24, 2002 - New Forum up and running in test mode. Delphi, long the site of the Wang VS Forum, is cutting off forum host access on Jun 26 unless we hosts fork over $$$. I choose not to be coerced in that manner, so there is now a forum package installed and working here. It is available through the Wang VS Forum links at the upper right of most of the pages, and directly through this URL:

The new site is functioning in test mode until I shut down the Delphi forum.

Jun 10, 2002 - Third party convenience features no longer work. This Website has long used Mind-It and Systran as well as hit counters, all provided by third parties. Mind-It was acquired and is now a subscription service. Systran has become a fee-based service and stupidly invalidated their earlier links. Some of the hit counters I have used still work while others fell victim to changes at my original ISP. These are all low-priority things for me to follow up on and replace.

Jan 10, 2002 - FIXED EMAIL LINKS... Oops! I just discovered that my email links in 48 places throughout the Unofficial Website were still pointing to an old ISP I no longer use. When I got rid of that ISP I overlooked the state of these links. If you have sent mail recently using a Web page link and received a bounce, please accept my apology and try again.

Jan 10, 2002 - Fixed links in the VS Shareware page to point to the new location of the Live VS Web Server, which hosts the VS Shareware files.

Jan 01, 2002 - Happy New Year to All!

Dec 03, 2001 (approx) - Moved to new IP address. My ISDN Internet service got *so* bad in recent months, lately with 80% packet loss, that I switched over to business class cable Internet. After several rounds of problems with gateways to share a single IP address among the many computers here it is now working. 2 megabits/sec in from the world and 384 kilobits/sec out to the world.

Nov 15, 2001 (approx) - Fixed disk stiction problem with the kind advice of the VS Webmaser at VS headquarters. "Smack it," he told me. No, not in those words, but yes, that is how a "stiction" problem gets unstuck. The drive is now fine.

Nov 03, 2001 - A critical disk drive failed on the VS, so the Live VS Web Server will be off the air until that is repaired. This is the first disk failure here since Wang delivered the VS6230 in 1997. It has a 525 MB system volume and three 2.1 GB IBM drives. One of the 2.1 GB drives failed to spin up after several days powered off, apparently a victim of the infamous IBM "stiction" problem.

Oct 30, 2001 - Network reconfiguration here will keep the Live VS Web Server off the air until Saturday, Nov 3, 2001. The connection here has been switched from ISDN to cable modem and changes to accommodate the gateway and new internal IP addresses are still in progress.

Feb 24, 2001 - High wind is causing frequent power dropouts and threatening to drop power altogether this early morning. If you wish to connect to the Live VS Web Server please check back later today.

Feb 07, 2001 - The new Website is still under construction, due to be completed Real Soon Now™. The only thing I can say right now is that I have become very active in COBOL ReSource and RS/6000 and that the new Website will feature my business services and COBOL ReSource.

COBOL ReSource is a Wang-developed VS environment for unix that allows VS COBOL and Procedure applications to be moved intact to unix. There are several such products in the marketplace but this is the only one that keeps your VS COBOL source code intact, requires no conversion per se, and includes the real Wang COBOL 85 compiler as well as numerous utilities, VSSUBS and such ported from the original VS source code. If you're interested, .

My ISP has been falling down on the job again with respect to mail delivery for the hosted domain "tjunker.com." As a result I have temporarily modified all the "mailto" links in these pages to mail to "tjunker@wt.net" which seems to function more reliably. By March I hope to be relocated with a new ISP and be rid of wt.net's chronic server problems and crappy upstream feeds that sometimes route into a black hole. I will also be running my own mail server. Yep, when it comes to Internet servers, if you want it run right you have to run it yourself.

Nov 06, 2000 - The Live VS Web Server is temporarily off the air for development. It should return to service within 24 hours. If you have an urgent need to access the Server, email me.

Aug 15, 2000 - Exciting things are in the works. An entirely new Website is under construction. It will feature products and services offered by Thomas Junker, including COBOL ReSource, VS ODBC Server, Migration and Support Services, and a range of hardware for VS and RS/6000 systems. The present Unofficial Wang VS Information Center will be a featured part of the new new Website. Weekends will continue to manifest periods of maintenance work on the Website material hosted on the RS/6000 here.

Jul 25, 2000 - The Live VS Web Server is temporarily off the air while I deal with some expired license key issues connected with the evaluation VS6780 I am running. Contact me by email if you have a pressing need to see VS Web Server or show it to someone. (This only lasted a day or two, but the Live VS Web Server Status Page was inadvertantly left in the "Offline for Development" state)

Jul 25, 2000 - We are BACK ON THE AIR after 46 hours absence in the wake of a lightning strike that burned out the ISDN router and a modem-equipped PC. Three cheers for Getronics, who got a replacement router here in less than 24 hours following my phone call to them. Another router of the same model, purchased at auction and also shipped in overnight, seemed in working order but refused to route, probably one of those configuration mysteries.

Jun 23, 2000 - I will be doing some maintenance on equipment here over the weekend. Although you won't be able to see this announcement during any outage of the RS/6000, if you see it before or after, you will be able to understand that outages are to be expected between Friday night and Monday morning, Houston time.

Jun 23, 2000 - Several unannounced connectivity outages in the upstream path have blocked access to both The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center and the Live VS Web Server in recent days. UUNet has done maintenance between 0300 and 0600 hours, definitely on 20 Jun and 22 Jun and possibly on other days, interrupting connectivity to and from the ISP that serves the RS/6000 and VS that support these Websites.

May 30, 2000 - A more stable change now has The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center at www.tjunker.com instead of an IP address. This was accomplished quickly and inexpensively by switching the IP addresses of the RS/6000, which had no host name, and the VS, which has long been the target of the www host name. The Live VS Web Server is still reachable through the VS WEB SERVER menu item in the Unofficial website.

I believe I have corrected all the links in The Unofficial website. Feel free to report any problems to me. There are still corrections that need to be uploaded to the Live VS Web Server site, so don't be surprised if links there are incorrect.

May 23, 2000 - The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center had to be relocated in the wake of the precipitous destruction of all phoenix.net websites by Pointe Communications, the third successive owner of what used to be Phoenix DataNet since 1995 when the Center was established in the phoenix.net domain. Last Thursday Pointe wiped out all the phoenix.net websites in the wake of a flawed transfer agreement in which the retail customer base had been sold to Internet America last September. IA had supposedly acquired the phoenix.net domain name and had assured customers that the domain would be operated for at least another year. Now, months later, the plug was pulled on the websites because neither company acknowledges responsibility for hosting the phoenix.net websites. Needless to say, I don't recommend doing business with either company, but if you wait a week or two one or both will have changed their names in the next round of mindless mergers and acquisitions.

The result is that I have moved the Unofficial website here, to one of my own computers, and I am trying to get the operators of the phoenix.net domain to provide a complimentary redirection page to send visitors here. Without such a page I have no way of letting the majority of my visitors know the new URL.

For the time being, The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center is located at this address:

http://www.tjunker.com/

May 09, 2000 - The Live VS Web Server pages have been slightly updated to subtlely call attention to the mysterious new CPU, to mention that VS Web Server is in release by Getronics as a free, Open Source product, and to update my email address.

May 08, 2000 - Since early this morning the Live VS Web Server has been running on a new VS processor. There's not much more I can say about it at this time. Suffice it to say that it's fast. I am evaluating the new CPU for Getronics and will write up and publish full details in due course. If you have a very keen and calibrated eye you may be able to notice some differences in the CGI demos, where CPU performance affects the response time for CGI programs. You won't notice any significant difference in download speeds of large files because the VS here is restricted by a 128 KBps ISDN link to the Internet. You may notice, though, some added crispness in response to some items. On my LAN I notice a large difference communicating with the VS.

The VS customers who should watch this development closely are those presently using large-format VS models of roughly VS12000 and smaller whose performance or operating costs are making it difficult to justify keeping the VS, and those using VS6000 systems who need substantially better performance or larger user populations than they can presently support.

This is a very exciting development, but details will not become available until Getronics announces a product, which should happen shortly. Meanwhile I am evaluating the equipment to be able to provide detailed information when the lid is taken off. Many thanks to the good VS people at Getronics for this opportunity.

May 06, 2000 - For the techno-geeks who stay up late browsing product specs for UPSs and such, I have succeeded in restructuring my AC power and UPS arrangements here so that my primary PC monitors the APC SmartUPS 1400 that runs the VS and RS/6000 and notifies the RS/6000 when it's time to shut down during an extended power outage. The PC is on an unmonitored 1 KVA UPS that provides greater reserve for its light load than the 1400 does for the VS. This much works fine, and the PC, RS/6000 and large UPS all shut down in the desired sequence. Next will be notification to the VS via HTTP CGI to shut down the VS Web Server, TCP/IP and WSN. At that point any outage that exceeds five minutes will lead to the orderly and graceful shutdown of all the critical computer equipment here. The only thing I haven't figured out how to do is to get the VS to power itself down. The RCU board can do that under remote control, but I'm unaware of any facility to cause a power down from within the VS. If anyone knows how to do this I'd certainly like to hear from them.

I note from reading below that it was May 10, 1999 when the first UPS went into service here to keep the VS running. I wrote then that I hoped to tie in monitoring and CGI shutdown. It took a full year to put in place what I have here now, and CGI shutdown will follow just as soon as I find some time to write it.

Also, I'm thinking of switching from ISDN to SDSL. Unfortunately my 20,000+ foot distance from the CO will only permit about a 200 Kbps data rate, but that would still be substantially better than ISDN and cheaper, to boot.

May 05, 2000 - The Live VS Web Server will be unavailable at times this weekend, effective with the posting of this notice. A number of dull and a few exciting tasks are in my queue, including installing a new VS6000 CPU board that is here for evaluation (exciting!), UPS reconfiguration (interesting because of software monitoring), straightening up (very dull), and trying to plan a remodeling of the computer room and facilities.

May 02, 2000 - Early this morning we were treated to "tornadic thunderstorms." An extended power failure lasted from about 0300 CDT to 0915. We were up all night listening to tornado warnings and weather updates.

Aside from today's storms there have been some other recent outages here due to work being done on the VS6230T, and there was a storm about a week ago that also shut things down for quite a few hours when power failed for an extended period.

Apr 11, 2000 - Severe storms came through here about 0500 hours, causing an extended power outage of several hours. It was not possible to post a notice here at the time of the outage. The VS was brought back on line at about 1605 hours.

Apr 01, 2000 - Very severe storms rolled through here about 0300 hours. Power went off a few times but the computers went right on humming on UPS. Conditions were so violent, though, that I decided to bring the VS and RS/6000 systems down. Having done that I decided to keep the VS down for the day for Spring cleaning. The VS was back on line Sunday night but I overlooked resetting the Status Page, which continued for several days to indicate that the VS was off the air due to storms.

Feb 26, 2000 - I just noticed today that Getronics has managed to completely mess up its Website and make all the VS pages inaccessible. The direct links to VS information no longer work, and the front page JavaScript is so badly broken that I can't explore the site to see whether they have relocated the VS material. I will do what I can to make the VS material available, either through links or through mirroring, the latter if permission is forthcoming.

Dec 28, 1999 - TAKE NOTE: IP addresses here have changed. If you have any URLs bookmarked that contain hard IP addresses of pages in the Live VS Web Server, they will no longer work. Use the VS WEB SERVER menu button in The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center to get to the server status page -- the page that tells you whether or not the server is on the air -- and bookmark that page.

Nov 22, 1999 - The Live VS Web Server is temporarily off the air for development work. It should be back on the air later today, Monday, Nov 22.

Nov 14, 1999 - The Live VS Web Server is temporarily off the air for development work. It should be back on Monday, Nov 15.

Nov 07, 1999 - The Live VS Web Server is temporarily off the air for development work. It should be back on Monday, Nov 8.

Sep 05, 1999 - Lost ISDN line at 0047 CDT. An ISP problem prevented reconnection. This may not be resolved until later in the week. Until it is resolved there will be no access to the Live VS Web Server or to the VS Shareware binaries, which are hosted on the VS.

Aug 22, 1999 - Power failed briefly at 1719 CDT. UPSs worked perfectly on VS and PC, but VS was taken down as a precaution against prolonged outage as is a chronic problem here. This affects the Live VS Web Server and the VS Shareware binaries, which are hosted here even though listed in the regular Unofficial Wang VS Information Center. UPDATE: The VS was placed on line again at about 2000 CDT.

Jun 15, 1999 - ISP failed at 0615 CDT. Service restored at about 0930 CDT.

Jun 12, 1999 - Beta 4 of the VS Web Server went on line at 1905 CDT. Beta sites have been advised by email to download their copies.

Jun 02, 1999 - 1500 CDT, the Live VS is temporarily off the air for development work.

Jun 01, 1999 - 2015 CDT, the Live VS is back on the air. This is pretty much Beta 4 on line now. Please let me know if you observe any anomalies. There should be no observable differences between this version and what was running earlier today. All the recent Beta 4 changes affect configurability through the Server database.

Jun 01, 1999 - 1800 CDT, the Live VS is temporarily off the air for development work. I'm putting the Beta 4 server database and executables in place.

May 22, 1999 - 1839 - The VS is back on line.

May 22, 1999 - 1400 - The VS is off line while I do database work. Email me if you have a need to see it.

May 12, 1999 - More storms! Severe thunderstorms rolled through here starting at 0930 today, with many lightning strikes within a few tenths of a mile. Power dipped, never dropped completely, but EMI threw the VS into Control Mode, cratered the microcode in WS 0, and hosed TCP/IP. I'm keeping the VS off the air until the weather clears. Email me if you have a need to see it. NOTE: I later discovered that not all the VS components were actually plugged into the power strip fed by the UPS. It now appears that the VS was thrown for a loop not by EMI but by spikes on the power line. It would be surprising if the well-shielded VS were susceptible to EMI, but the extreme proximity of the lightning strikes led me leap to that erroneous conclusion.

May 10, 1999 - Power failed at 0603 CDT in a severe thunder storm. I have no idea how long it will be out. UPDATE: Power was out for about eight hours, and the VS was brought up sometime after that. The storm put some tree limbs into a high-tension line and we had five hours of horrific explosions as the 35,000 line arced repeatedly, making its own lightning consisting of 6-12 foot sizzling fire and booming sounds that could be heard for miles. Lightning also damaged and set fire to two homes in the same vicinity after hitting a gas meter outside one house and erupting out of the gas pipe in the attic of the other house. It also fried a satellite antenna cable and -- get this -- caused a water leak. Fortunately, the only problem that affected us here was the loss of power and air conditioning.

The VS is now on a UPS!!! No more outages caused by momentary power dips. In time I hope to tie the PC UPS monitor software into a VS Web Server CGI app that will gracefully shut down the VS Web Server, TCP/IP and WSN when power fails for extended periods.

Apr 28, 1999 - I have posted "Server down for development" while I work on VS Web Server software. There have been a number of brief interruptions in the availability of the Live VS over the last week or so, the result of some intensive development work. The regular Unofficial VS Website remains unaffected.

A 1,000 VA UPS is on order to protect the VS from transient power outages.

Apr 26, 1999 - Power dropped on the Live VS during severe thunderstorms at about 1345 CDT.

Apr 23, 1999 - Several power failures affecting the Live VS occurred around 1600 CDT. The VS was allowed to remain down while power problems in the neighborhood were being resolved. The VS was back on the air about 2245 CDT.

Mar 30, 1999 - The server is back on the air.

Mar 27, 1999 - The server is temporarily off the air for development affecting PACE databases used while the server is running.

Mar 20, 1999 - I'm doing some IPLs today. If the Web Server doesn't respond, try back in a few minutes.

Mar 17, 1999 - A power failure knocked the VS off the air at 1315 CST. The VS and the Live VS Web Server were back on the air at 1455.

Mar 15, 1999 - The Live VS Web Server had to be restarted at 1515 CST after 30 days of continuous operation. I caused a task crash and dump in an unrelated activity that had the side effect of hosing TCP/IP.

Feb 5, 1999 - ISDN service was restored after an overnight outage.

Jan 22, 1999 - My nitwit ISP restored email and Web service this afternoon after an outage of 16-18 hours that began yesterday afternoon, Jan 21. They had shut off a number of reseller sub-accounts, including mine, as a result of their own inability to ever keep their accounts straight. The accounts were shut off late in the business day without notice of any kind, and with no ISP provision in place that would allow help desk personnel to alert management after business hours to serious account situations needing immediate remedy.

I've been wrestling with the dilemma of moving to another service, perhaps a Web-hosting-only service, for some time. I have stayed with phoenix.net / c-com.net / pointecom.net (buyouts and mergers change the name about once per year) only because I know that a change of address is a great bother for Website visitors and email correspondents.

Jan 21, 1999 - I returned Tuesday, Jan 19, from a week in Tewksbury with the good people at Wang Global, and a few days in New York. During my absence the VS suffered two power-failure-induced IPLs, both of which required intervention, as my unattended autostart proc is apparently not yet seamless. Around noon on Jan 13 the VS stopped responding, probably again due to a power hit, and the difficulty of talking family members through another IPL was too time consuming to entertain, so I left it that way until the evening of Jan 19. If you tried to reach the VS on Jan 8 or 9 or between Jan 13 and Jan 19 and experienced difficulty, I apologize, but it was largely beyond my control. The VS is once again on the air "24 x 7" and will continue to be so except for very brief interludes when I may break TCP/IP as a result of related development work. If in doubt, e-mail me. See the FEEDBACK page for full information on contacting me by a variety of means.

Dec 25, 1998 - A TCP/IP glitch developed at 1559 CST today, probably as a result of testing I've been doing in the last few days with a Visual Basic client. The server may have become unavailable at that time, but I didn't discover it until later in the evening when I managed to crash TCP/IP entirely. Unfortunately, that ended a 38-day run of the Web Server, during which time it handled 4,128 connections, took in 1,225 KB and served up 44,215 KB of data. CPU usage, mostly due to 10-second wakeups to check for administrative messages, was 0.4518% over the 38 days.

I'm using this opportunity to keep the server down over the holiday while I work on some connectivity options and try to fix the handling of the split POST messages that some browsers send. E-mail me if you need to view the live Web Server for any reason.

Dec 8, 1998 - ISDN is working again and the live VS Web Server is available again as of about 2020 CST. The server has been running without interruption for almost 23 days.

Dec 8, 1998 - I AM CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING AN ISDN PROBLEM. As a result, the live VS Web Server is temporarily unavailable. It is up, but cannot be reached. This also means that my access to email is rather limited. With any luck, the problem will be resolved tomorrow, Wednesday, Dec. 9, and the server will once again be reachable. I apologize for the inconvenience. The VS Web Server has now been running continuously for about 22 days, during which time it has received about 3,000 "hits."

Nov 8, 1998 - A new Poll page contains opinion polls with viewable results (can you guess who was the first to cast his vote?). The link is "Poll" in the dark header bar that sits atop the right half of the screen. Or click here to see it now.

Nov 6, 1998 - CGI is now working, with working examples available for viewing at the Live VS Web Server.

Oct 26, 1998 - The Beta VS Web Server is here! The VS Web Server page has been updated, and things have been rounded out at the Live VS Web Server. Check it out!

Oct 23, 1998 - The IP addresses at my personal facility have changed. This has no effect on The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center Website or on my email address. You will only be affected by this if you have bookmarked any of the URLs at the Live VS Web Server itself. If you have, please delete or update them. You may reach the Web Server at its new address by going through the regular Website and selecting VS WEB SERVER from the menu buttons. The page to bookmark is the Status page reached by pressing the wide, blue-green button on the VS WEB SERVER page. The Status page has links that you can be sure will be updated in case of any change to the IP addresses.

Oct 22, 1998 - A new PDF sample document is now on the Miscellaneous Documents page of the Live VS Web Server. The Music page has been updated after someone complained that everything he played sounded like harpsichord. You may have to Reload/Refresh each of those pages to see the latest versions.

Warning: the IP address here may be changing again in the coming day or two. You can always reach the Live VS Web Server by going through the VS WEB SERVER menu button.

Oct 18, 1998 - More power failures. Every time I send mail to the VS Web Server mail list announcing more features or more things to see, we get a power failure within hours. This time it lasted four hours, from 4-something a.m. CDT to 0833 CDT, but it wasn't until 1400 or so that I had a chance to bring the VS on line again. Then, after sending another mail explaining the outage, we got a brief power hit at 15:13 that knocked the system down again. It was back on line about ten minutes later.

Oct 17, 1998 - This is exciting! The Live VS Web Server is now offering for your browsing pleasure: A PowerPoint presentation about itself, a small music library containing MIDI and MP3 sound files, sample clickable documents including an Excel spreadsheet and an MS Word document, MPEG movies from NASA, and the "old" stuff from a few days ago, the huge Space Shuttle photos and embedded Scott Joplin on the front page. All this just to make it very, very clear that the VS Web Server is serving up a storm. If your browser is fairly up to date you should be able to click on anything you find there and see it or hear it on your computer.

Oct 16, 1998 - New features went on display this morning in the live VS Web Server -- music and movies, with other binary file formats to be made available as soon as I can put together Web pages to show them. Wouldn't you know it, though? A couple of hours later we had a complete power outage, at about 1230 CDT. It lasted 40-45 minutes, and the VS was back on the air at 1402 CDT.

Oct 6, 1998 - Power failed briefly at about 0715 CDT. The VS Web Server has been off the air briefly several times overnight, as I needed access to files and databases opened by the server.

Oct 3, 1998 - The VS Family Portrait has been revised to show the VS7300 in something more like its proper scale in relation to the other models.

Sep 29, 1998 - The VS Web Server is now handling large files, including GIF and JPG grahpics. To make the point that the Web Server is shaping up, I created a 25MB library of public domain NASA graphics on the VS. They are mostly 8" x 10" shots of Shuttle and other launches, and range from about 200KB to 900KB. It's too bad my ISDN line won't show off the full data transfer rate of the VS, but it still gets the point across. Here on my LAN the largest of these images loads in 15 seconds. Across the Internet, through my ISDN link, they will load in 16 seconds to about 1 minute, 10 seconds, assuming you have at least 128kbps ISDN. Corporate connections are usually faster than that, so my link will be the limiting factor. Visit the VS Web Server Demo from the menu, or click here for NASA photos.

Sep 21, 1998 - Power failed at 0145 CDT. From the looks of it, another neighborhood transformer has failed, and power will be out for at least three or four hours, so the VS will be off the air until sometime later Monday. Postscript: Power returned about 0500, the VS was put back on the air at about 0610.

Sep 20, 1998 - The third major air conditioning failure of this season mandated shutting down the VS late Friday (Sep 18). Repairs were effected Saturday, but the house was not cool enough to resume operations until Sunday.

I have expanded on my proposals to turn around the VS and the VS market. Links to my comments, now entitled "My Prescription for the VS," are now in both the About Wang and About the VS pages.

Sep 16, 1998 - Significant progress has been made on resolving obscure technical problems in TCP connection management in the VS Web Server. It now seems to handle everything I can throw at it in the way of ungracefully terminated connections. The new ISDN connection is also working well. Severe weather knocked out power here yesterday evening (Sep 15), a few hours after I had invited a number of people to visit the new VS Web Server. There was a lightning strike within 100 yards or so of the house, with no apparent ill effects other than near cardiac arrest for those here at the time.

Aug 24, 1998 - I will be switching to a new Internet Service Provider this evening or tomorrow for a trial period to see if throughput can be brought up to ISDN standards. The VS has been off the air recently anyway, for development, so nothing will visibly change. Be aware, though, that if you have bookmarked any URLs containing the IP address of the VS, those URLs will be different during the trial and may change back again later if the trial does not result in a permananent switch to the new ISP. If you reach the VS via the VS Web Server menu button, you will be unaffected by any IP number changes <hint! hint!>.

Aug 11, 1998 - The VS and the Web Server will be off the air a lot this week for development and system reconfiguration.

Aug 1, 1998 - I added a new Year 2000 page to pull together earlier news regarding Y2K and the VS, and to provide a place for adding new information. The first few menu graphics changed. If you have any odd behavior or apparent mislabeling of the 2nd through 6th menu buttons, it is because of your browser cache. To refresh just the buttons without the need to clear the cache, go to this page, then press Reload/Refresh, then Back.

Jul 28, 1998 - 4230 workstation zero failed at about 1545 CDT. After several IPL attempts and power cycles it is working again, but not normally.

Jul 26, 1998 - Air conditioning repaired, temp back to 70. Connection test servers will be up, but the alpha Web Server will not necessarily be up, as I will be doing development work. The Web Server Status page will indicate which is the case.

Jul 25, 1998 - Air conditioning has failed. Again. As a birthday present to me, no doubt. I could really learn to hate this house. Temp is hitting 80 inside, so I'm taking all computer equipment off line (0300 CDT) to stop heating the house with it.

Jul 17, 1998 - Eight power failures occurred here in a 66-minute period starting at 1750 CDT. Following restoration of power I reworked my autostart proc to handle reorg of a file, files not properly closed, etc. Back on the air at 2308 CDT.

Jul 14, 1998 - Severe storm activity passed through here this afternoon sometime before 1600 CDT, knocking power out three times in several hours. Connectivity to the VS was restored at 2020 CDT.

Jul 13, 1998 - The Alpha VS Web Server is temporarily offline for development work. If you have a pressing need to see it, contact me through my Feedback page. The VS itself remains online, running the HTTP Connection Test Servers.

Jul 12, 1998 - The 4230 workstation is back on line, so things will now get back into gear. The Alpha VS Web Server will have to be taken down while I work on it. I'm not yet sure if I will invest the time in arranging to have two concurrent versions, one for display and demo and one for development. It's a bit inconvenient to rename the subroutines to permit a development version to be modified and compiled without affecting the demo version.

Jul 6, 1998 - Discovered that Stupid Router Tricks have prevented outside accesses from reaching the VS even though the VS is fully reachable on the LAN. Then lost power here at 2025 CDT. Restored after midnight, lost again at 0200 CDT on Jul 7, restored again by about 0400. Main Website at ISP unaffected.

Jul 5, 1998 - Regained control of VS through alternative form of connectivity. Servers are up, but development still on hold.

Jun 29, 1998 - Back in Houston. My only VS Workstation is dead. Seeking replacement, alternatives... meanwhile, VS cannot IPL.

Jun 28, 1998 - Workstation down, VS temporarily off the air.

Jun 24, 1998 - Still out of town, in New York.

Jun 21, 1998 - Out of town - alpha install of VS Web Server.

Jun 16, 1998 - The air conditioning seems to be fixed. The VS is back on the air 24 hrs a day.

Jun 15, 1998 - Continuing air conditioning problems have necessitated shutting down all equipment here the last several nights. A brief ISP connectivity problem also caused the systems here to be unreachable between 1300 CDT and 1400 today.

Jun 13, 1998 - The soon-to-be alpha VS Web Server has been on line a lot of the time during the last few days at couple of special URL's sent to interested parties by email. Now, this evening, the A/C has failed. The inside temperature is passing 80 and I will have to shut everything down pretty soon. Film at 11.

Jun 05, 1998 - Lost all Internet connectivity at about 1700 CDT due to a server problem at wt.net ISP, affecting access to the VS. Service was restored about 45 minutes later. Later, severe storms passed through from about 1915 CDT until after 2100, but everything stayed on the air. We still have lightning and thunder at 2140, but several miles away now. The PC is now on UPS. The VS will be on its own UPS in about a month.

Jun 01, 1998 - A power outage here yesterday knocked the VS off the air from about 1845 to 2125 CDT (1345-1625 GMT), and it was another half hour or so before I restored IP routing to the VS. I have some equipment on UPS but I don't yet have a UPS of sufficient capacity to power the VS. An unrelated ISP mail and DNS server failure at 0015 CDT (1915 GMT) this morning and still ongoing at 0630 CDT (0130 GMT) has interfered with my ability to send email. This was resolved at the beginning of the business day. Later in the afternoon another power hit knocked things off for a brief period.

May 24, 1998 - Many of you have asked for a real discussion forum. Now we have one, albeit a trial, and as yet unproven. It's the Wang VS Forum, courtesy of Delphi, the online service. I just created it this evening, so it may not be available for a few hours (days???), but give it a try.

Also, there are some links now in the Historical References section of the About Wang page.

Also, there is a new page on my thoughts about what Wang should do with the VS. It's linked from the About Wang page.

May 22, 1998 - Another VS Shareware listing, again from Wang New Zealand. OPERMSG is a subroutine that provides programs with the same ability to issue messages as Procedure language does.

May 20, 1998 - Three more VS Shareware programs are now available. SSACHECK is a subroutine from Wang New Zealand that allows Procedures (and programs, too) to easily determine whether the current user is a System Administrator. CALENDAR is a simple calendar display for 1900-1999 dates. SLEEPER is another submission from Wang New Zealand that holds shared files open to reduce open/close overhead and VTOC activity.

May 19, 1998 - The first VS Shareware program is posted for download. It is VSBENCH2, a utility that identifies the VS model on which it is run. See the VS Shareware page.

May 19, 1998 - I decided to join forces with Amazon.com, the giant on-line bookseller. As a result, I can provide direct links to Amazon's catalog entries for the few books directly on the subject of Wang. General searching is also possible through the Amazon.com search box you will see here and there in my pages. As time goes on I will be adding direct links for technology books related to using the VS -- programming, languages, networking, etc. I hope you find these additions more useful than annoying.

I should probably also explain the huge LinkExchange banner on the Entrance page. I took that step in an effort to reach more VS users. With more than 10,000 VS systems in operation worldwide, it's a no-brainer that there are between 50,000 and 100,000 people working directly with VS issues, not counting users. My Website has received less than 15,000 visits total in 2-1/2 years, meaning that most of the people most affected by VS issues don't know I am here. LinkExchange is a cooperative "banner" program, so it will result in a banner ad for The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center flashing up on people's screens here and there at other participating Websites and may result in greater awareness of this Website in the VS community. I believe that would help us all.

My banner, which you are free to include in any Web page you manage, looks like this:

If you'd like to include it in one of your Web pages, just right-click and save the graphic above, then select and copy this HTML code:

<A HREF="http://www.phoenic.net/~tjunker/wang.html"><IMG
 SRC="tuwvsic.gif" BORDER="0" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="60" 
ALT="The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center"></A>

May 18, 1998 - Another menu button has sprouted. "Articles" takes you to my articles from Access to Wang. New ones will appear here after they have been in print for 30 days. Kind thank-you's to Access to Wang for their permission.

May 11, 1998 - VS Shareware -- an idea whose time has come. I've created the page, now all we need is some shareware.

May 3, 1998 - The VS has been on the air 24 hours a day for most of the last week. It would be helpful if more people visited the VS and banged on the connection test servers there. The direct link to the server jump-off page is VS Web Server Status.

Apr 28, 1998 - I'm trying to leave the connection test server running 24 hours a day on the VS. Click on the VS Web Server menu button, then on the large server status button. That will take you to a page that has links to up to four VS server tasks. Each one reports its statistics, including VS task stats, KB in/out and per second, and IP addresses of incoming connections. Feel free to bang away on it. The reported number of listens should always return to 31 (32 minus your connection) after activity subsides.

I'm still ironing out ISDN kinks... the line is working, both connections remain "nailed up" 24 hours a day, but so far I can't get a full 128 kpbs to move through it. Also, I haven't been able to get an incoming voice call on channel 2 to drop the second data connection in favor of the voice call, although this works fine for outgoing. I'd like to hear from anyone who has solved all the mysteries of configuring a Cisco 700 Series router. I believe I've got it configured correctly, but without seeing it function perfectly I can't be sure.

Apr 25, 1998 - ISDN IS UP AND RUNNING! The telco guy showed up a day early, on 4-23. "You're early!" I said. "Hey, I just happened to be in the neighborhood," he responded. "If you don't want me to install this today, I can come back another time. I have eight orders for tomorrow, and I don't think they're all going to get done." Yeah, right, I was really going to let this guy walk away! I grabbed him and pulled in inside, and when he left, my ISDN was up and working. The router was another matter. But that's also another story.

After the first all-night session I had both 64 kbps channels nailed up and accessible from my PC. ISDN makes modems look like slugs on drugs. It's not all that much faster, but it's light-years better. Call setup takes about two seconds. The connection is always perfect. It never drops by surprise.

After the second all-night session I got the Thin ethernet linking the PC and the VS connected through a hub to the router. I also installed a 900 mHz portable phone with headset to work through the second ISDN channel so I can talk with you while the PC and VS remain connected through the first channel. The PC is also equipped with Internet Phone with video, but that's still in early trials (I'm on my third camera, heading for a fourth).

As I write this, I have just finished constructing a temporary new Web Server Status Page. It doesn't really show the status yet, but it does provide a link to the VS, which has its own IP address now. In coming days, when the VS is on the air it will be running a Web connection test program and not the old demo Web server. I'm moving the software forward to handle multiple connections, and the only thing that is presentable this week is the test connection server. It's not exciting, but it is a dynamic statistics page generated by a live VS, and it handles up to 32 concurrent connections, which the demo server did not.

Apr 18, 1998 - The Cisco router arrived this week. Also, ISDN was ordered this week, scheduled for installation Apr 24. All this is part of getting the VS on the air 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It will also facilitate everything I do over the Net in support of VS related activities, and allow adding technologies such as video teleconferencing.

About the graphic

Green Video Storm (by T. Junker) was created by video feedback (by pointing the camera at the video screen displaying the camera output). The endless nest of images within images was disrupted by what appears to be a storm of green energy breaking through from the inner screens, penetrating the outer screens and threatening to emerge from the CRT. This was created with a USR Big Picture camera and Webcam 32 software. Other cameras I have used presented more orderly video feedback with the expected endless "corridor" of images within images, not unlike the effect created by the opposed mirrors found in some elevators. Click your BACK button to return to the top of the page.

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