Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Earl Baugh <earl.baugh@gmail.com>]

My first job out of college was at a company (1986ish) that did seismic and meteorological modeling and monitoring.  At college we were on csnet ( on our Vax, running BSD 4.2 ).  At work, I was deliriously happy to have my own Sun 3/110 to work on, vs having to fight to share the Vax.  However,  I was having email and Usenet withdrawal... so after completing a 6 month scheduled task In about a month ( thank you lex and yacc :-) ) I was looking for things to fill the time and asked my boss about email. He said, well there is this dedicated line up to Virginia that he used every once in a month and checked his email.. and sometimes helped the seismologists pull some data.  He thought the folks on the other end might be able to help.  He gave me the name and phone number - it was Rick Adams. ( and yes, this was a dedicated circuit into seismo... well the Annex box physically right next to it :-) ). 

Shall we say, I called fairly quickly, and was working with David Comay who helped support things there ( the center for seismic studies - css ) and got an early version of CSLIP...  Then excitedly ( though a tad nervously) learned how to rebuild a Sun 3/110 kernel and get it installed.  

The newsfeed and email speed, shall we say, didn’t suck 🙂

Oh, and btw, seismo wasn’t uunet.  The original uunet was a sequent 8 processor box ( I believe ). One of my trips to DC I got to visit with David and saw the box as it was there at css with seismo. ( if memory serves me, it was in Ricks office ).  Rick had gotten permission to host it there to “see if there was a business model for providing internet access”, which now I think we can definitely answer yes :-) 

There still is a seismo, but obviously the box isn’t the sun 3/2xx series machine it was then. 

Earl 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 18, 2021, at 10:27 PM, Chris Torek <torek@elf.torek.net> wrote:
> 
> We used to say: "Seismo bangs everybody"
> 
> (then they became uunet, then Worldcom bought them)