From: gdmr@inf.ed.ac.uk (George Ross)
Subject: [TUHS] Non-US Unix Activities
Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2017 15:36:53 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <201704071436.v37Earlq009811@farg.inf.ed.ac.uk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 07 Apr 2017 14:55:20 BST." <B4AE948D-49F5-48FB-8952-099280B12D20@tfeb.org>
(I'm from the Computer Science side of things. We (CS), AI and CogSci were
joined together to form Informatics not very long before the fire, so I was
often in the building but only familiar with parts of it. I got to know
Forrest Hill *much* better.)
> Sometime after I had left (I was there from 1989 to 1999 on and off), on
> 7th December 2002, the building burned down due I think to a fire which
> started in the club below it. I am not sure if the fire spread up the lift
> shaft (which didn't go down below the machine room level).
My understanding is that it wasn't the lift shaft's fault. There were other
vertical shafts through the building, and it was one of those which spread
the fire. Apparently the fireman who opened it up got quite a surprise.
> The thing which was lost which *actually* mattered was the AI library ...
Yes, that was a real shame.
> I believe (this may not be true and if it is not then I apologise in case
> anyone who was involved reads it) that the AI department was making backups
> but *not* taking them off-site (SB ones to FH & the other way around) at the
> time of the fire. They *were* putting them in the fire safe though. The
> fire safe (which wasn't in the machine room as it was absurdly heavy so it
> sat in the back entranceway of the building) fell through the floor, *but
> survived intact*. So they were lucky.
That's a pretty reasonable summary, and we were indeed, mostly. And the
firesafe was at the other end of the building from the worst of the fire.
There were a few people, though, who were taking personal backups and
keeping them safely locked up in their desk drawers. We learned a lot from
that experience! (Now we don't even consider Appleton Tower and the
Informatics Forum, just across the street from each other, to be
sufficiently far apart, so we mirror everything off-site to KB a couple of
miles up the road.)
Incidentally, <http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/> has a rather unstructured
collection of historical Edinburgh computing stuff, though it is a bit
skewed by where the contributors were originally based. The CAAD people
were into UNIX quite early IIRC, but we don't have much from that side.
Dragging us back onto list-topic, we were pretty much entirely a Sun site
at that point. We (CS) used to do our own thing hardware- and systems-wise,
but eventually UNIX boxes of various kinds started to appear. Initially it
was a VAX 11/750 running 4.2BSD, which I mostly managed, then a Pyramid, a
Gould (shared with AI and EE), then lots of Suns. It was economies of
scale, really: they could sell us stuff cheaper than we could build it
ourselves. Now we're mostly Linux on PCs, though with a motley collection
of other odds and ends hung off.
So I'm mostly an interested listener on this list!
--
George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP, University of Edinburgh,
School of Informatics, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9AB
Mail: gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk Voice: 0131 650 5147 Fax: 0131 650 6899
PGP: 1024D/AD758CC5 B91E D430 1E0D 5883 EF6A 426C B676 5C2B AD75 8CC5
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-04-07 14:36 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 50+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-04-05 22:22 [TUHS] A decision Warren Toomey
2017-04-06 20:08 ` Josh Good
2017-04-06 20:32 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-04-06 21:23 ` Aram Hăvărneanu
2017-04-06 21:46 ` Josh Good
2017-04-07 11:56 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2017-04-07 12:20 ` William Corcoran
2017-04-07 14:05 ` Andru Luvisi
2017-04-07 15:09 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-04-07 15:23 ` Larry McVoy
2017-04-07 15:25 ` ron minnich
2017-04-07 20:25 ` Josh Good
2017-04-09 5:57 ` Michaelian Ennis
2017-04-06 23:09 ` [TUHS] Non-US Unix Activities Warren Toomey
2017-04-07 5:15 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-04-07 19:56 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-04-07 8:44 ` Alec Muffett
2017-04-07 9:32 ` Robert Swierczek
2017-04-07 10:24 ` Alec Muffett
2017-04-07 11:35 ` jsteve
2017-04-07 16:09 ` Alec Muffett
2017-04-09 6:34 ` Random832
2017-04-09 11:03 ` Alec Muffett
2017-04-09 16:57 ` Toby Thain
2017-04-09 19:20 ` Random832
2017-04-10 13:06 ` Tim Bradshaw
2017-04-09 22:45 ` Steve Johnson
2017-04-10 5:40 ` Robert Swierczek
2017-04-10 13:10 ` Tim Bradshaw
2017-04-07 17:57 ` Robert Swierczek
2017-04-07 18:24 ` Toby Thain
2017-04-07 20:23 ` Robert Swierczek
2017-04-07 20:53 ` Toby Thain
2017-04-07 21:51 ` Robert Swierczek
2017-04-07 22:08 ` Steve Johnson
2017-04-07 22:36 ` Larry McVoy
2017-04-07 22:01 ` Alec Muffett
2017-04-08 17:28 ` Lawrence Stewart
2017-04-07 10:40 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2017-04-07 12:09 ` Tim Bradshaw
2017-04-07 12:25 ` jsteve
2017-04-07 13:55 ` tfb
2017-04-07 14:36 ` George Ross [this message]
[not found] <mailman.729.1491557525.3779.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2017-04-07 14:29 ` Arrigo Triulzi
2017-04-07 23:31 Richard Tobin
2017-04-08 10:57 ` Tim Bradshaw
2017-04-08 11:13 ` Jason Stevens
2017-04-08 9:46 Berny Goodheart
2017-04-08 10:28 ` Jason Stevens
2017-04-08 14:31 Doug McIlroy
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=201704071436.v37Earlq009811@farg.inf.ed.ac.uk \
--to=gdmr@inf.ed.ac.uk \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).