[TUHS] UREP - Unix RSCS Emulation Program

[arnold@skeeve.com]

Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> Interesting. When I was in high school in central Pennsylvania and begging,
> borrowing (and yeah a little stealing) computer time from Penn State
> systems, there was a CS professor who'd made his bones building something
> called UREP: Unix RSCS Emulation Program. ...
>
> What's notable about that, to me, was that he wrote UREP for DG/UX and was
> known to be fond of Data General machines. This let him talk to the
> university's mainframe, which was run by the computer center, ran VM, and
> was the major compute engine on campus at the time outside of specially
> purchased machines supporting research. There was a Cray somewhere on
> campus, for example, but that was purchased out of research funds and
> wasn't generally accessible. It also let Unix machines participate on
> BITNET, which was a big deal locally at the time (probably because of the
> close association with mainframes). ....

In the mid-1980s I was a sys admin at the Emory U Computing Center and
we ran UREP on our vaxen in order to be able to send and receive BITNET
mail.  It was kind of cute to watch your messages traveling the world,
as you got an interactive message back for each site it traversed on
its way to its final destination.

BUT, the code was miserable.  I had to make some changes to it (don't
remember why), but EVERY time I had to dive into it, I hated it. I
used to say that I felt like I needed a shower afterwards.

Arnold