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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...
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/
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
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.
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...
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?
If you could post a link to the Advogato story, I would very much appreciate it. I searched their site and came up empty.
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.
Noel
RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix
kayaking
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
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.
I think it is unfair to suggest that M-Net cannot support itself.
James Howard
M-Net staff