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.

Comments

THey were really the second

[Mr. CBBS]

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.