Happy 26th Anniversary to Pats Fans

[Actual Pats Fan]

I'm a relative newbie on PatsFans, and my discovery and introduction was born out of immense personal grief and sadness, upon the passing of Julius Adams.

We all gotta go sometime, and the Jewel lived a long, great life. But any person with any awareness of the Boston Patriots (who drafted him along with Jim Plunkett prior to changing the name to New England Patriots) can see that Julius not only comported himself as a champion on the field, off the field, and in the locker room, but also in public, in the spotlight, in front of the cameras where people simply did not see anyone anywhere demonstrating open, unapologetic, uncompromising pride and strength as a member of the Patriots, counteracting the rampant, brazen ridicule and derision that was already in high gear as far as media portrayal of the franchise was concerned since the merger was consummated.

Any objective analysis of the 1970's & 1980's must acknowledge that it was then that the Patriots established themselves as championship contenders and consistent winners in the modern era of the sport.

And Julius wasn't just there, he led the way through many triumphs and tragedies, bridging generations as he was teammates with Houston Antwine and Bruce Armstrong.

He has lots of company in Russ Francis, Mosi Tatupu and Darryl Stingley as men who should have been recognized, honored and celebrated by being inducted into the team's Hall of Fame when they were still with us.

 

[Actual Pats Fan]

I'd been here less than a year when I got lambasted on the Pats-Falcons Super Bowl GDT at halftime where I kept insisting we still had a chance and we could win it.

 

[n1997y]

Yep, me too. Didn't post because I was a contract employee at the late, great Digital Equipment Corporation and was reading stuff on company time. What else were you supposed to do when building the software took so long? Was making very good money and didn't want to put that at risk just to post stuff to USENET. I'm sure my boss would do his best to sweep it under the rug if someone made a stink about it since he was so short staffed, but you just don't want to risk it by leaving an electronic paper trail.

Was shocked to be walking around late at night (contractors were paid overtime, sweet!) and looking over a cubicle wall (I'm tall enough to do it) and seeing a guy looking at p0rn he downloaded from the infamous alt.binaries groups. I thought that person was insane to put a job at risk just to look at a tiny picture of someone naked. Just take the sweet cash you're earning and buy some mags, dude!

I was a sys admin as well as sw engineer for DEC, and worked with their corporate security on a few things. There was no routine monitoring program. That wasn’t KO’s style, and there would be enough messy policy issues around it that nobody would open that can of worms. Only way you’d get caught would’ve been really really bad luck, or to really screw up somehow, or to be targeted because somebody was out to get you. And if somebody was targeting you like that it was because you screwed up. Still very prudent not to take such risks.

 

[Patjew]

Red Letter Days In Patriots History, post-Y2K:

January 27, 2000 - Bill Belichick Hired

March 24, 2000 - CMGI Field Construction Begins

April 26, 2000 - Tom Brady Drafted

June 17, 2000 - PatsFans.com Registered

And to think we were all freaking out about Y2K.

 

[Bill Lee]

I was a sys admin as well as sw engineer for DEC, and worked with their corporate security on a few things. There was no routine monitoring program. That wasn’t KO’s style, and there would be enough messy policy issues around it that nobody would open that can of worms. Only way you’d get caught would’ve been really really bad luck, or to really screw up somehow, or to be targeted because somebody was out to get you. And if somebody was targeting you like that it was because you screwed up. Still very prudent not to take such risks.

Agree. A lot of it was my own internal paranoia. DEC had a lot of internal online forums that were really good, but I did notice some criticism being directed at employees who spent time on the non-technical ones. Also as a contractor I felt vulnerable. Renewals were frequent and it was an "at will" situation, they could get rid of us at any time with no questions asked. This was during the Internet gold rush and I was being paid quite well, I didn't want to do anything that could kill the goose laying the golden eggs.

One cool thing was that a few engineers used lunch time to do LAN gaming. They were playing ACM, basically a flightsim game. Pretty remarkable since this was the early/mid 90s and most of us had workstations with 12 MHz MIPS R2000 CPUs in them and were using old-school 10 Mbps Ethernet. I think the shared server was a 25 MHz R3000 but that didn't do any of the rendering. They were allowed to play at lunch but it really did drag the network down so pretty much at 1:00 they had to stop the games so people could get some work done. And, again, it was all salaried employees. Contract employees just didn't take the risk of being criticized for goofing off.