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Notes On The World's First PA Unix System
AC submitted this article at RootPrompt, about M-Net, which claims
to be the
world's first
public access Unix system. The politics, the gossip, and the flames
predate IRC, MUDs, and Usenet. Just going to show there's very little new under the sun.
The article says it started in 1983. I don't see how it could be the "The First Public Access UNIX System" considering that Usenet existed in 70's and before that there were many user forums.
This way I don't have to guess, I will actually be able to see the poor system going down :)
Load is already over 3 and rising...
Here, just do this
:)
l :)
telnet to m-net.arbornet.org, create a new account (enter newuser), fill in some details, fill in yer pass again and viola
Regards, Mleko
http://homepages.tig.com.au/~sydney/icq2000.htm
Windows Bloatware but hey
You got a point, so just to be mr. NiceGuy, I changed to an uptime script instead
while true; do
uptime >> uptimelog
sleep 60
done
What? "PA Unix?"
Oh. Nevermind.
That is a piece of hacker history there. You never
understand the real impact places like that have
on young hackers untill you are much older. The
community that is created that is the most important thing
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
M-Net likely was the first PA (public access) system. It differed from the University systems in that it was free (as in beer) to any and all. No university, corp, or goverment affilation required.
The system was hosted on an old Altos box and mainly served as a highly active confrencing system. The software was an early version of PicoSpan which later evolved into the messanging system on the used on the WELL.
prh@m-net.ann-arbor.mi.us (a long time ago)
Is it just me, or does the mainpage design look a little familiar? (cf here)
Some uncanny resemblence of green separating bars? /. imitators *ahem* get a new webmaster *ahem*
*ahem*
Given the latest suing craze, CmdTaco could probably sue them for stealing a trademark look :-)
Human nature is one thing that stays the same as
much as we strive to improve ourself with technology.
Things are still the same politics, the gossip, and the flames. The only thing they are happening at a faster rate.
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
They were often proving grounds for many a hacker in the pre-web days. When password files weren't shadowded and UUCP config files were great for finding other computers. When sex ruled USENET and people traded ASCII pictures of women. UUNET was the gateway for plenty of mail.Back when the whole host database for the internet could fit on a small HD. After a while , there were quite a few public access unix providers for a while before SLIP and the advent of the WEB. But none of them ever had 3 billion dollar market caps like free ISP's do nowadays. flash cartoons
http://www.iretro.com
http://www.iretro.com
Empeg Kicks Ass
i only know of one public access VAX/VMS machine. Were there any other OS? Maybe a public access Multics system? Sort of like how dockmaster was? Anyone here rememember Altos on x.25 in germany at 26245400080177. Who here was cool enuf to have a shell? PS: If i get my hands on one. I'll put up a public access VAX
http://www.iretro.com
http://www.iretro.com
Empeg Kicks Ass
BSD 3.1
When was the first version of BSD launched at Berkeley?
rJames.org - illustration
Actually, Chinet was the first public access
unix system. It was up in 1982 on a compaq lunch
box portable with a pair of 300 baud modems. It was called wlcrjs then (no domain names, just ! paths) after randy sues and ward christensen, the inventors of the first BBS, CBBS, first up in Feb 1978. It then went to a pair of Altos 586's worknetted together, a 3b2/300/310/400, a few 386 machines and its current dual p2. Been up continuously since 82. It was the major news and email feed for the chicagoland area. Had a full news feed from ihnp4, the bell labs machine at Indian Hill. Used a trailblazer modem for the news feed. A single 70 meg drive held a full week's worth! Many of the owners of former and current ISP's in Chicago started off as kids on chinet, learning unix and hacking away. For a while, chinet even had its own resident FBI agent. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Polish agents were using chinet as a mail drop for communicatin to their government. Up until the wide spread use of the Internet, chinet would have up to 300 users at any one time, all hammer-dialing on the 12 dialup modems. A majority being Eastern European, Indian, Pakistani people with no other way of getting email and news.
M-net was a much more heavily used system because of the local Univirsity, but chinet was the first.
Sounds like some of the software the users came up with for their own convenience just "prior art"ed a bunch of what people are trying to pass of as new just 'cause they put it on the 'web.
Are they still running it on that same Altos? That would probably be worth a story by itself.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
M-Net is where I first learned to program Unix..We used to use the Merit dialouts to call into it from all over the state (Merit was a psuedo-public michigan educational network).
Ah, the days of asking Marcus Watts how to do this or that in C and Unix.
Cheap net availability basically destroyed it.
Down the bottom, in the comments:
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
North Coast Public Access *ix opened in July 1991, running Xenix/68000 on a TRS-80 Model 16. It was bare-bones at the time (no BBS features at all, just a shell prompt or a slightly buggy menu-system shell script). (it appears they *still* don't have a web page...)
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
Hmm... I was a member of Grex (cyberspace.org) back in the day, and was on Mnet, its evil sister site too. I seem to remember that one was a spinoff of the other, and both are ancient. Brings back memories. fuz@cyberspace.org
If there's a tech news site out there that's doing a better job than /. (read: the kind of job /. used to do), I'd like to know about it.
It's a shame, really. I used to be able to rely on /. publishing in a fairly timely fashion all the important tech/geek/nerd news. Not any more :-(. Hasn't been that way for quite some time.
Now I find that I'm back to having to check all the other tech news sites. And then /. for the ones they may have missed. And with Taco's insistence on forcing ACs into starting out in "flat mode", along with /.'s generally poor performance and lame "moderation" system, I'm back to participating more in Usenet than I am on slashdot. Even reading, much less commenting. We need an alt.slashdot.stories newsgroup, is what we need.
Note to "moderators": This may not be quite so off-topic as you might think. Consider the news topic and what /. once was and still purports to be!
I wonder if I'm the only person in the world who found PicoSpan incredibly easy and fun to use, even when I first tried it.
In my BBS days, I would run up massive phone bills calling m-Net because I really loved the way the software worked and the community over there. The BBS software I subsequently wrote copied m-Net/PicoSpan's conferencing idea, but tried to make it a bit more user-friendly. I ran my five-line system at a tiny profit until my hard disk died.
Interesting that the original owner gave it up because of the flamewars - one of the reasons I didn't ressurect my system after the hard drive died was that I was tired of the complaints people made about them. I tried a number of different moderation schemes but none of them solved the root problems I faced.
The one thing I really loved about the BBS world is that most people could meet in person. I had numerous parties, made numerous friends and even a couple of lovers through the BBS. My social life has been pretty much dry since then, because people I encounter on the Internet tend to be in other states or even - often! - other countries.
D
----
I've been using Nyx since the early 90's. You can get an account by telneting to nyx.net logging in as "new", and following the directions...
did anyone else happen to see that rootprompt looked EXACTLY LIKE SLASHDOT? just a thought....i guess we're popular, eh?
News agentcys will pick up storys from other news agentcys. It's pritty normal.
It was on advagato but not on Slash...
If Slashdot breaks a story Advagato will carry it. Becouse thats what "The pros" do. That is assuming Advagato really are pros.
Any given news agentcy wants you to be able to get ALL the news from them. To that ends they will report on ALL news reguardless of who broke the story first. Becouse if your viewers/readers arn't getting the news from you.. they arn't comming back.
Accually this is one of the problems in the news media. Some news agentcys will report on someone elses story but they don't check the facts of the story as such they carry the bies of the preveous reporter.
Example: Reporter [A] reports on Linux, Gets information on Linux from Microsoft, Reporter [B] adds facts from using Linux but otherwise repeates the MsFUD from [A] reporter [C] adds comments with out knowing what is what.
However I have noticed that some.. in order to get a better story.. will go back and fact check. Thies reporters will of course give there own slant but that slant will contain NONE of the slant from preveous reports.
Reporter [D] files a report devoid of MsFUD and instead files an RMS slant...
But if you get worryed about web sites "stealing" storys.. you'll be after any website with content of any value...
Becouse you can not break the story all the time.. some times you need to get it from some place else.
Anyway Slashdot originally wasn't about breaking news it was about pointing everyone to the people who did. The only reporters Slashdot has is the community.. and if the community dosn't break the story thats hardly Slashdots fault.
I don't actually exist.
Man this takes me back. I remember ten years ago wandering around the BBS scene in the Ann Arbor area and discovering M-Net. At that time I was using an Atari 800XL, so I didn't even know what a DOS prompt was, let alone a shell prompt ("what the heck is this '$' and why can't I do anything with it?"). I totally forgot about about it once I went to U of Mich and discovered the internet. Man... noce to know that it is still around.
"I shoulda never sent a penguin out to do a daemon's work."
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
Sounds a little like Echo, the East Coast Hang Out started in 1989 by Stacy Horn in NYC, (http://www.echonyc.com) though Echo is really probably more like the Well in being geared toward non-techie social interaction. Still, the flamewars, the RL meeting, the elitism of the old-timers, etc., all sounds familiar. As does the fact that it's really only limping along now, not necessarily growing, due to its difficult interface in these times of Internet startups for the masses.
It is very douptful the first anything is known.
Rembering that all this stuff was pritty much hobby back in the start very few people bothered to document themselfs.
It is very likely the first BBS shut down a long time before it could ever become known as "the first". Thies were all hobbys.
The oldest "known" BBS would be the most anyone could hope for.
Same for open access Unix.
or any on-line firsts predating the 1990s.
I thought my own "random prompts" latter known as "prompty thingies" were the first "ad banners" then I find fortine cookies and Murphys laws predate my "random prompts" by a number of years. More painful is someone had a rotating prompt before my random prompt. His being for advertising no less.
It'll be easyer to document the last BBS or the last open access Unix system than it will to document the first.
Ps. Anyone rember Xmodem net?
I don't actually exist.
The Delphi online service ran on VAX/VMS. Guess that doesn't count as public access though.
Besides M-net, the only other active BBS I know about is the ISCA (Iowa Student Computer Association) BBS at:
bbs.isca.uiowa.edu (use telnet)
ISCA BBS has been a great local-style bulletin board for many a year...
Any other active boards still out there?
Quoting Richard Bartle, from Early MUD History:
...of "Advagato" or whatever it is... anyone?
(advagato is surely misspelled -- it gets no hits on google)
Geeky modern art T-shirts
If you could post a link to the Advogato story, I would very much appreciate it. I searched their site and came up empty.
If there's a tech news site out there that's doing a better job than /. (read: the kind of job /. used to do), I'd like to know about it.
/., and the s/n ratio is magnifique.
Two promising contenders are Kuro5hin and advogato. Both are slightly different from Slashdot: kuro5hin lets users moderate stories and has stricter anti-spam rules, and advogato requires users to be "certified" by others based on their participation in the free software world. kuro5hin is updated much more frequently, but the tech level of each is much higher than here on
And I must apologise to kuro5hin, who were the ones who mentioned the M-Net story, not advogato.
Did the 1982 version of Chinet run Unix?
..!umich!m-net!ecs, and everyone who saw it commented that it was rediculous to give an email address as the contact address for software.
I recall the pre-Altos version of M-Net running on an Atari 800. M-Net went Unix very early.
I remember when Chinet was announced on the Altos version of M-Net, perhaps when Chinet went to Altos. M-Net already had half a dozen modems then, and a chat system called "party". (Party supported piping the output of Unix commands into the chatspace, a wonderful feature.)
Jerry Pournelle came to visit M-Net but left -- he found the threaded discussion software "Picospan" too hard to use. This was back when he was known as a science fiction writer, before he got a job writing a column about the hardware he couldn't install for Byte.
I released a freeware 8bit Atari disk sector editor and gave my contact address as
In Orlando, there were a number of public Unix systems around 1985. Two that I remember were bilver (run by Bill Vermillion) and robstoy (run by Rob Talley). bilver was a Tandy model 16 (68000) system running Unix, while robstoy was a Microvax running Ultrix. We had login accounts, mail, newsgroups, and the ability to upload/download files via XModem and Kermit as well as ftp. There were no fees on these two systems, although they would quickly cancel accounts that abused the systems.
robstoy was interesting in that Rob ran (or lived, actually) inside of emacs at the console, while allowing dialup access; this on a machine with only 4MB of RAM. The only other system name I remember was tarpit, a mail server run by Rob Thrush at Automation Intelligence. It was an IBM 286 running SCO Xenix 286, and it handled all mail (personal and newsgroups) for everybody in the central Floriday area at the time.
Except for today's eye-candy and ultra-hype, we had all the essentials and lacked for nothing. The only useful function the web has that we didn't have are search engines. And if I needed to find something out, I could ask on a newsgroup and find out within a few hours. I'm sure that someout would point out streaming content (audio and video) that you can get over the net, but today's offerings still can't match cable, and the net, for those types of services, is very constrained.
Not that I really like it that much, but there exists cyberspace.org. Can't really do that much with it, though, so I wouldn't really recommend it.
If their using Slash, which I suspect they are...they haven't indicated that they are on the page...in fact, they haven't indicated what the hell they're using period...odd...
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
Yes Kibo is still around, although I don't think he is grepping all of usenet for his name anymore...
Anybody remember the science fiction novella called "True Names" by Vernor Vinge? I read that as a sprout, must have been written in '81 or so. It's about a kind of den'o'iniquity BBS and the cyber-criminals that hang out there. They had 3D avatars/login handles and interacted without knowing each other. I thought that was so far-flung at the time. After that, a friend introduced me to BBSs on his Amiga. There were quite a few in Kansas in the mid-80s. Used to play a mud, Sherwood's Forest out of Manhattan, KS. Anybody from Kansas remember?
I guess Grex got slashdoted this morning. I have been logging onto Grex daily since March 1993. IMO it has the best discussions in cyberspace period. You can still get Unix/Linux advice there from Marcus Watts (among other gurus) in the jellyware conference. Plus free Sun OS. unix shell etc (though it's nice to become a member for 6/month) to support their services.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Rootprompt.org is all new code and written in PHP. However, slashdot has influenced a *lot* of websites, and several complete weblog packages. Recently I made the mistake of assuming that Technocrat.net was based on an early version of slash. I later learned that it was based on squishdot. Heck, lots of stuff looks like slash nowadays. (I have since corrected the error, as is suggested by the "updated" date ;).
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Looks like Rootprompt is doing this if your interested in Unix issues and stuff.
lots of vax machines for sale here.. Vancouver Bc canada.. $100.00 a pop at the local computer bargain bin place.. from big huge ones.. to ones that resemble standard desktop pc's..
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
As someone else pointed out in this thread, the "pros" steal stories from each other all the time. Kuro5hin's run many a story that someone first found on slashdot (a recent dual-story about the transparent tape drive and IBM's nano-drive ran, and I'm pretty sure *both* of the leads came from here). Most of slashdot's content, and slightly less (but still most) of mine, consists of links to stories on other news sites. So everyone's stealing stories, because the stories aren't really the point. The point is the discussions.
Ok, this is rambling now. Anyway, that's my take. If slashdot steals stories from me, well, I'm pleased, cause someone's bound to point it out and get me some traffic :-) But it's not something to be ashamed of, really. There's a lot of room in the market here-- no reason slashdot and kuro5hin can't share roughly the same topic-space, now is there?
BTW-- the story on kuro5hin ran as "The Once and Future M-Net"
--
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Here is another free UNIX box machine for anyone who has a ISP and can use Telnet. cyberspace.org It is also located in Ann Arbor, and is used just as much, if not more. But watch out, indian users abound!
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
In 1983 and 1984, Les Kent was running a public unix system called "proper" on a Dual Systems 68000 in San Leandro CA. It ran one of the early Unisoft UNIX variants, and he gave accounts to anyone who heard about it and asked. If I recall correctly, about 15 of us came to a get-together at a Lyons in Hayward or Fremont. He had a Usenet feed, and one could read the entirety of the day's articles in about an hour on a 1200 baud connection. It was up at the time of the "hello from Chernenko" hoax on April 1st '94, with the message routed through "kgbvax!kremvax".
I suspect there were at most a handful of similar systems up in that timeframe world wide.
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
It was called nyx. And it looks like it's still around.
I remember stumbling across it from the public Gopher (remember Gopher?) server at the local university (Michigan State).
Anyone else remember QSD?
I think it very possible that there was an earlier system - Chinet or one of its predecessors may have been first, but not by much. I don't think there are other serious contenders.
It's kind of dumb arguing over who is first. Things weren't as connected back then. Lots of people worked on things like this independently in different parts of the country, with very little communication between them. They were all doing things that hadn't much been done before so far as they knew.
More history of M-Net and spinoffs is here
The Well can reasonably be considered an M-Net spinoff.
The top of the box hinged up. The circuit board was in the hinged top - it was a single-board computer, not designed for add-on cards of any kind, though by the end we had all sorts of third-party daughterboards piggy backed on it. The bottom part of the box held drives (8 inch hard drives and floppy drives) and power supplies and such. It ran for many years with the top up, because RF interference from the drives would crash the computer if you hinged the board down. Its main nice feature was that it had 16 serial ports. Perfect. Its main obnoxious feature was that the C compiler defaulted the 'int' type to 16 bits. This made porting software to it intensely painful.
Mike had about five or six of these things at peak. He'd gather them from various sources, pass them along to people who wanted to start systems like M-Net. Parts and machines got swapped in and out. I'm not sure that even Mike could have identified 'the original' by the end. But there was so much switching around and so few of these machines were ever made in the first place, I figure any Altos 6800 that you find has a decent chance of having been M-Net at some point. :)
Note that the people who started it pretty much represented the "old guard" at M-Net. If you want to know about the early history of M-Net, you pretty much have to go to Grex to ask, because that's where all the M-Net old-timers are.
Grex and M-Net are still pretty similar, but differ in a few obvious ways. Grex culture is not particularly flame prone. Grex has more users. Grex actually manages to bring in enough donations to support its operations and is financially stable. Grex has weirder hardware.
Jan Wolter
M-Net Staff, 1984 to 1988
Grex Staff, 1995 to present
At the unix login prompt, you'd type 'newuser'. Instead of asking for a password, it would ask you for various information, and then instantly create a new unix account for you. So to get on M-Net you didn't need to know the right person to ask for an account, you just needed to know the phone number. You weren't required to tell the truth when asked for your name, so it was easy to be essentially anonymous. There exist all sorts of shades and degrees to "public access," but M-Net always pushed it almost as far as you can go, from the very beginning (surely someone, somewhere has tried setting up a system that gives away free root accounts (on purpose, I mean) - that'd go further).
One of the consequences of an unrestricted newuser program is that you can't really boot people off the system. They just create new accounts and come back. This means that you have to deal with "problem users" by social means rather than technical means. You have to either convince them to stop being a problem, or you have to learn to deal with them as they are. This is difficult, but ultimately healthy.
By 1991, M-Net had made difficult transition from being a privately-owned system run by a benevolent dictator, to a communally-owned, non-profit corporation, where the users write the rules for how the system is run. Management is elected by the users who care enough about the system to donate money to its upkeep.
I think M-Net (and even more so its splinter sister system, Grex) represent something close to the best that can be done in terms of offering cost-free, advertisement-free, censorship-free, public access shell and conferencing systems on the net. And it isn't something they just started doing recently. They've been doing it for the full 17 years of there history.
I believe Chinet is a bit older, but it has never during all its history been as open as M-Net, and has often been pretty nearly closed. Firstness is not the cool thing about M-Net. Openness is.