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Unix Operating Systems Software

Notes On The World's First PA Unix System 89

Posted by Nik from the NP:-Enid dept.
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.
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Notes On The World's First PA Unix System More

Notes On The World's First PA Unix System

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  • Not the earliest (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.
  • I'm logged in there and running top, just to see when the full slashdot effect kicks in.

    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...

  • Re:Not the earliest (Score:3)

    by cccdoug ( 102692 ) on Sunday March 19, 2000 @12:39AM (#1192783) Homepage
    I was going to contest the claim, too. But I'm still researching.

    For example, I remember way back in those days (I was in high school...gee, I'm old) Freenets were popping up all over the place. I remember the Cleveland Freenet was the first of these, but a quick search shows that it began in 1986.

    Prior to that, yes, Usenet existed, but I don't remember it being public access. You had to be a university student at a university that had access or perhaps work at a company, research lab, or government office that had access.

    But there was a public-access unix account that could be had on a system at a university in Colorado around that time...I really want to remember its name so I can look for some history on it. They would let you use their compilers and access Usenet (only if you snail mailed them a signed disclaimer and a photocopy of your driver's license/state id card). If anyone can remember that system, please post about it!
  • Let's see... the load is now 12... number of top processes running: 120...

    > killall top

    load is back to 2
  • Here, just do this

    telnet to m-net.arbornet.org, create a new account (enter newuser), fill in some details, fill in yer pass again and viola :)

    Regards, Mleko

    http://homepages.tig.com.au/~sydney/icq2000.html
    Windows Bloatware but hey :)
  • You got a point, so just to be mr. NiceGuy, I changed to an uptime script instead

    while true; do
    uptime >> uptimelog
    sleep 60
    done

  • VA Linux? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm tired of hearing about VA Linux.

    What? "PA Unix?"

    Oh. Nevermind.

  • You're probably thinking of Nyx (nyx.cs.du.edu, "The spirit of the night!"). My vague memory suggests that it might have been a Pyramid box, however I could be wrong.

    I don't know if it was around in '83, though.

    (A quick stroll over to altavista tells me that it's still around as nyx.net. You can read the history [nyx.net]. It started in '87 on a PDP11 and later migrated to a Pyramid.)

  • 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/ [theotherside.com]
  • Human nature is one thing that stays the same as
    much as we strive to improve ourself with technology.
    Things are still the same politics, the gossip, and the flames. The only thing they are happening at a faster rate.


    http://theotherside.com/dvd/ [theotherside.com]

  • public access unix (Score:3)

    by Jeep Bastard ( 107065 ) on Sunday March 19, 2000 @01:59AM (#1192794) Homepage
    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 [iretro.com]

    http://www.iretro.com [iretro.com]
  • i only know of one public access VAX/VMS machine. Were there any other OS? Maybe a public access Multics system? Sort of like how dockmaster was? Anyone here rememember Altos on x.25 in germany at 26245400080177. Who here was cool enuf to have a shell? PS: If i get my hands on one. I'll put up a public access VAX

    http://www.iretro.com [iretro.com]
  • BSD 3.1

    When was the first version of BSD launched at Berkeley?

  • THey were really the second (Score:5)

    by Mr. CBBS ( 12562 ) on Sunday March 19, 2000 @03:09AM (#1192798) Homepage
    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.
  • M-Net is where I first learned to program Unix..We used to use the Merit dialouts to call into it from all over the state (Merit was a psuedo-public michigan educational network).

    Ah, the days of asking Marcus Watts how to do this or that in C and Unix.

    Cheap net availability basically destroyed it.
  • http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?a rticle=170 [rootprompt.org]

    Down the bottom, in the comments:

    First By: Anonymous ( 19 Mar 2000 08:16 ) ( reply to comment )

    Problem being, of course, that M-net is the second. Chinet, http://www.chinet.comwas the first. Up in june 1982 with a Compaq lunchbox, xenix and a pair of 300 baud modems. Sitting next to the first ever BBS, CBBS, invented by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess in Feb, 1978.

  • North Coast Public Access *ix opened in July 1991, running Xenix/68000 on a TRS-80 Model 16. It was bare-bones at the time (no BBS features at all, just a shell prompt or a slightly buggy menu-system shell script). (it appears they *still* don't have a web page...)
  • NYX (nyx.net formerly nyx.cs.du.edu I think). It has since dissociated from the university and moved to an office in Littleton, CO.
  • Erm, what about freeshell [freeshell.org]???

    It's been around for ages.....
  • 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

    ----
  • OK, so I can't read...... I didn't realise it'd been around for more than 15 years :-) Anyway, if you need a free shell account, freeshell [freeshell.org] is pretty cool.

  • I've been using Nyx since the early 90's. You can get an account by telneting to nyx.net [nyx.net] logging in as "new", and following the directions...
  • &nbsp

    did anyone else happen to see that rootprompt looked EXACTLY LIKE SLASHDOT? just a thought....i guess we're popular, eh?

  • News agentcys will pick up storys from other news agentcys. It's pritty normal.
    It was on advagato but not on Slash...
    If Slashdot breaks a story Advagato will carry it. Becouse thats what "The pros" do. That is assuming Advagato really are pros.

    Any given news agentcy wants you to be able to get ALL the news from them. To that ends they will report on ALL news reguardless of who broke the story first. Becouse if your viewers/readers arn't getting the news from you.. they arn't comming back.

    Accually this is one of the problems in the news media. Some news agentcys will report on someone elses story but they don't check the facts of the story as such they carry the bies of the preveous reporter.

    Example: Reporter [A] reports on Linux, Gets information on Linux from Microsoft, Reporter [B] adds facts from using Linux but otherwise repeates the MsFUD from [A] reporter [C] adds comments with out knowing what is what.
    However I have noticed that some.. in order to get a better story.. will go back and fact check. Thies reporters will of course give there own slant but that slant will contain NONE of the slant from preveous reports.
    Reporter [D] files a report devoid of MsFUD and instead files an RMS slant...

    But if you get worryed about web sites "stealing" storys.. you'll be after any website with content of any value...
    Becouse you can not break the story all the time.. some times you need to get it from some place else.

    Anyway Slashdot originally wasn't about breaking news it was about pointing everyone to the people who did. The only reporters Slashdot has is the community.. and if the community dosn't break the story thats hardly Slashdots fault.
  • Man this takes me back. I remember ten years ago wandering around the BBS scene in the Ann Arbor area and discovering M-Net. At that time I was using an Atari 800XL, so I didn't even know what a DOS prompt was, let alone a shell prompt ("what the heck is this '$' and why can't I do anything with it?"). I totally forgot about about it once I went to U of Mich and discovered the internet. Man... noce to know that it is still around.


    "I shoulda never sent a penguin out to do a daemon's work."
  • Sounds a little like Echo, the East Coast Hang Out started in 1989 by Stacy Horn in NYC, (http://www.echonyc.com [echonyc.com]) though Echo is really probably more like the Well in being geared toward non-techie social interaction. Still, the flamewars, the RL meeting, the elitism of the old-timers, etc., all sounds familiar. As does the fact that it's really only limping along now, not necessarily growing, due to its difficult interface in these times of Internet startups for the masses.
  • BSD 3.1

    That's BSD/OS 3.1, a derivative of BSD 4.4. See the latest article [slashdot.org] about BSDi and FreeBSD.

    When was the first version of BSD launched at Berkeley?

    Looking up my Unix family tree, it shows 1BSD being in late '76.


    "I shoulda never sent a penguin out to do a daemon's work."
  • It is very douptful the first anything is known.
    Rembering that all this stuff was pritty much hobby back in the start very few people bothered to document themselfs.

    It is very likely the first BBS shut down a long time before it could ever become known as "the first". Thies were all hobbys.

    The oldest "known" BBS would be the most anyone could hope for.

    Same for open access Unix.
    or any on-line firsts predating the 1990s.
    I thought my own "random prompts" latter known as "prompty thingies" were the first "ad banners" then I find fortine cookies and Murphys laws predate my "random prompts" by a number of years. More painful is someone had a rotating prompt before my random prompt. His being for advertising no less.

    It'll be easyer to document the last BBS or the last open access Unix system than it will to document the first.
    Ps. Anyone rember Xmodem net?
  • The Delphi online service ran on VAX/VMS. Guess that doesn't count as public access though.
  • Damn! I used up the last of my moderation points last night, otherwise I'd give this a +1(funny) and +1(informative).

    Ah well.

  • No, I tried to find out who has the original Altos (I had heard it was still in use, possibly as a dumb terminal somewhere). But I never did find out exactly where it is.
  • Actually, it would be interesting to have a list of currently active BBS systems.

    Besides M-net, the only other active BBS I know about is the ISCA (Iowa Student Computer Association) BBS at:

    bbs.isca.uiowa.edu [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?

  • The politics, the gossip, and the flames predate IRC, MUDs [...]

    Quoting Richard Bartle, from Early MUD History [apocalypse.org]:

    The very first MUD was written by Roy Trubshaw in MACRO-10 (the machine code for DECsystem-10's). Date-wise, it was Spring 1979. The game was originally little more than a series of inter-connected locations where you could move and chat. I don't think it was called MUD at that stage, but I'd have to ask Roy to be sure. Roy rewrote it almost immediately, and the next version, also in MACRO-10, was much more sophisticated. This one was definitely called MUD (I still have a printout of it). [...]
  • ...of "Advagato" or whatever it is... anyone?

    (advagato is surely misspelled -- it gets no hits on google [google.com])
  • 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?

    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 ..!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.
  • and, kindly enough, merit is still around. i just think it's funny how i've not been enrolled at a michigan university for going on 5 years now and my merit/michnet account is still active and works. 'course, it gives you ppp to the internet now, which is kinda slick, and just about every school district in the state has dialups.

    arbornet.org is cool. it was my first exposure to the internet in '92, i believe, when they were still on a 128k line. another cool old freenet that some of the guys from m-net created was nether.net... it is down most of the time now. anyway...

    --bc
    ------------------------------------------
    the amazing bc
    latin/funk flugelhorn & trumpet
    webnaut, music junkie, sysadmin from hell
  • 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.

  • Not that I really like it that much, but there exists cyberspace.org [cyberspace.org]. Can't really do that much with it, though, so I wouldn't really recommend it.

  • If their using Slash, which I suspect they are...they haven't indicated that they are on the page...in fact, they haven't indicated what the hell they're using period...odd...
  • Looks like SlashCode... but it isn't... unless CmdrTaco finally gave in and rewrote a PHP3 version, and then proceeded to release it to them without telling anybody ;)
  • Anybody remember the science fiction novella called "True Names" by Vernor Vinge? I read that as a sprout, must have been written in '81 or so. It's about a kind of den'o'iniquity BBS and the cyber-criminals that hang out there. They had 3D avatars/login handles and interacted without knowing each other. I thought that was so far-flung at the time. After that, a friend introduced me to BBSs on his Amiga. There were quite a few in Kansas in the mid-80s. Used to play a mud, Sherwood's Forest out of Manhattan, KS. Anybody from Kansas remember?
  • It is not slash it is custom code written in PHP.

    Noel

    RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix [rootprompt.org]

  • I guess Grex [cyberspace.org] got slashdoted this morning. I have been logging onto Grex daily since March 1993. IMO it has the best discussions in cyberspace period. You can still get Unix/Linux advice there from Marcus Watts (among other gurus) in the jellyware conference. Plus free Sun OS. unix shell etc (though it's nice to become a member for 6/month) to support their services.

  • It looks like they are using PHPSlash, so the resemblance isn't all that surprising.

  • 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 [sitereview.org] of assuming that Technocrat.net [technocrat.net] was based on an early version of slash. I later learned that it was based on squishdot [squishdot.org]. Heck, lots of stuff looks like slash nowadays. (I have since corrected the error, as is suggested by the "updated" date ;).
  • The php version of slash has been available for a while.. same one i use.. and I tend to think it superior.

    ----------------------------
  • lots of vax machines for sale here.. Vancouver Bc canada.. $100.00 a pop at the local computer bargain bin place.. from big huge ones.. to ones that resemble standard desktop pc's..

    ----------------------------
  • As you mention below, it was kuro5hin who ran this story, not advogato. And thanks for pointing us out. :-) But regardless, we *all* stole this story from rootprompt.org, where it was originally posted. My readers just liked it enough to post a link to it, before /.'s "editors" sifted through enough repeat submissions to get wind of it. Whatever. My point is, it doesn't really matter who gets what story from where. The reason people go to my site instead of slashdot, or to advogato instead of kuro5hin, is all about the community. The content is likely to be very similar, but people tend to post on one site, and just lurk on others, because they feel the community reflects their interests, and consists of people they want to talk to.

    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 [kuro5hin.org]"

    --

  • Re:Grex (Score:1)

    by Zurk ( 37028 )
    nice to see M-Net staff on /. ..its kewl that m-net has survived this long which most of the others died. i've been on m-net for a while myself.
  • of course theres :
    lambda.moo.mud.org - lambdamoo the granddaddy of all moos.
  • 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.
    "Public access" in this context means accounts are free to any member of the public with a modem. Corporate and academic systems require (well, back then they did) you to have some association with the organization to get access to their equipment; M-Net didn't even have a separate class of financially-supporting users until 1984 or 1985, you could just call in.
    --
  • If chinet started on a compaq lunchbox, it was proably after 82, and almost certainly wasn't running Unix.

    In 1983 and 1984, Les Kent was running a public unix system called "proper" on a Dual Systems 68000 in San Leandro CA. It ran one of the early Unisoft UNIX variants, and he gave accounts to anyone who heard about it and asked. If I recall correctly, about 15 of us came to a get-together at a Lyons in Hayward or Fremont. He had a Usenet feed, and one could read the entirety of the day's articles in about an hour on a 1200 baud connection. It was up at the time of the "hello from Chernenko" hoax on April 1st '94, with the message routed through "kgbvax!kremvax".

    I suspect there were at most a handful of similar systems up in that timeframe world wide.

    -dB

  • UUNET was the gateway for plenty of mail.
    At that advanced age, it predates UUNET and goes back into the era of bang-paths and ihnp4.
    --
  • I was on Chinet (from France, using X25 to access a public dialout in the area) back in these days. I even had a custom script to pull news out of its spool and batch them to my system for later perusal. I'm not sure if it was Unix in '82, but it certainly was in '85 when I was on.
  • Check this out from the motd at nyx.net

    Password:
    Nyx, The Spirit Of The Night

    The Oldest Free Public Internet Service

    modems: 303-871-3324 voice: 303-473-0565 telnet: nyx.net
    Send donations to: Nyx Net, P.O. Box 21586, Boulder, CO 80308 </pre>
  • Actually, the system is running freeBSD on a... can't remember what type of system but is a pentium something with lots of extras i beleve about 128 meg ram and plenty of disk space. I have been on there for some time...i think we first checked it out calling in from an amiga 2000 at 2400 baud after a long night of mudding and bbsing. Kind of strange lately. There seems to be a resurgance of people using the system and appearing in my life. Some of the folks i work with and know have been part of the core group of folks for a while. Every time i go out i run into someone from m-net. Very strange.
  • I was on M-Net near the begining. Yes, Usenet predates it, but Usenet never gave out free unix shell accounts.

    I think it very possible that there was an earlier system - Chinet or one of its predecessors may have been first, but not by much. I don't think there are other serious contenders.

    It's kind of dumb arguing over who is first. Things weren't as connected back then. Lots of people worked on things like this independently in different parts of the country, with very little communication between them. They were all doing things that hadn't much been done before so far as they knew.

    More history of M-Net and spinoffs is here [wwnet.net]

    The Well can reasonably be considered an M-Net spinoff.

  • Not sure what you are talking about. In 1983, M-Net was running Bell System III Unix. Much later it changed to BSDI.
  • I remember things a bit differently. Firstness is a fuzzy concept, and not a very meaningful one, since the people setting up M-Net knew nothing about Chinet and the people who set up a thousand later systems knew nothing about M-Net. But for what it is worth, I think Chinet/CBBS have uncommonly good bragging rights for many forms of firstness. Randy Suess does claim to have run a public Unix a bit before M-Net came up.

    When Byte was considering creating their own conferencing system (later BIX), a flock of editors and writers visited M-Net and hung around in the 'byte' conference several months. I remember Jerry Pournelle being just ahead of that wave, definately already a columnist there. I remember finding it odd that this well-know computer columnist had so much more trouble with Picospan than the average 13-year-old. It wasn't that hard to use.

  • The machine was an Altos 6800 - Altos's only foray into Motorola chips, never well supported by the manufacturer. It was a big rectagular box about the size of a modern full tower, but on its side. It had no keyboard or monitor, so it certainly isn't being used as a dumb terminal anywhere. You needed a separate dumb terminal to use as a console.

    The top of the box hinged up. The circuit board was in the hinged top - it was a single-board computer, not designed for add-on cards of any kind, though by the end we had all sorts of third-party daughterboards piggy backed on it. The bottom part of the box held drives (8 inch hard drives and floppy drives) and power supplies and such. It ran for many years with the top up, because RF interference from the drives would crash the computer if you hinged the board down. Its main nice feature was that it had 16 serial ports. Perfect. Its main obnoxious feature was that the C compiler defaulted the 'int' type to 16 bits. This made porting software to it intensely painful.

    Mike had about five or six of these things at peak. He'd gather them from various sources, pass them along to people who wanted to start systems like M-Net. Parts and machines got swapped in and out. I'm not sure that even Mike could have identified 'the original' by the end. But there was so much switching around and so few of these machines were ever made in the first place, I figure any Altos 6800 that you find has a decent chance of having been M-Net at some point. :)

  • Yes, Grex started in 1991.

    Note that the people who started it pretty much represented the "old guard" at M-Net. If you want to know about the early history of M-Net, you pretty much have to go to Grex to ask, because that's where all the M-Net old-timers are.

    Grex and M-Net are still pretty similar, but differ in a few obvious ways. Grex culture is not particularly flame prone. Grex has more users. Grex actually manages to bring in enough donations to support its operations and is financially stable. Grex has weirder hardware.

    Jan Wolter
    M-Net Staff, 1984 to 1988
    Grex Staff, 1995 to present

  • Grex wasn't down because it was slashdotted. It was down because I was formatting and testing a new disk.
  • Beside full unix shell access, M-Net had both a fully functional bbs and a live-chat area from the beginning. But the most interesting piece of custom software was the 'newuser' program.

    At the unix login prompt, you'd type 'newuser'. Instead of asking for a password, it would ask you for various information, and then instantly create a new unix account for you. So to get on M-Net you didn't need to know the right person to ask for an account, you just needed to know the phone number. You weren't required to tell the truth when asked for your name, so it was easy to be essentially anonymous. There exist all sorts of shades and degrees to "public access," but M-Net always pushed it almost as far as you can go, from the very beginning (surely someone, somewhere has tried setting up a system that gives away free root accounts (on purpose, I mean) - that'd go further).

    One of the consequences of an unrestricted newuser program is that you can't really boot people off the system. They just create new accounts and come back. This means that you have to deal with "problem users" by social means rather than technical means. You have to either convince them to stop being a problem, or you have to learn to deal with them as they are. This is difficult, but ultimately healthy.

    By 1991, M-Net had made difficult transition from being a privately-owned system run by a benevolent dictator, to a communally-owned, non-profit corporation, where the users write the rules for how the system is run. Management is elected by the users who care enough about the system to donate money to its upkeep.

    I think M-Net (and even more so its splinter sister system, Grex) represent something close to the best that can be done in terms of offering cost-free, advertisement-free, censorship-free, public access shell and conferencing systems on the net. And it isn't something they just started doing recently. They've been doing it for the full 17 years of there history.

    I believe Chinet is a bit older, but it has never during all its history been as open as M-Net, and has often been pretty nearly closed. Firstness is not the cool thing about M-Net. Openness is.

  • I think it is unfair to suggest that M-Net cannot support itself.

    James Howard
    M-Net [arbornet.org] staff
  • All of this well predates UUNET (founded by Rick Adams when seismo, a crushingly overloaded mail and news gateway, was about to go the way of ihnp4 [as in, shut down as having no justifiable business purpose]. Nice way to fall into a massive fortune!).

    At the risk of self-plugging, I wrote up a bit about my experiences with our public-access Unix effort in NYC (Big Electric Cat) during the mid-80s, here [rsie.com]. By the time our site was operating, public-access Unix wasn't all that uncommon anymore - Chinet, the Soup Kitchen, and others had been around for a bit, but I think we were among the earlier sites to make more of an effort to acclimate the general public (rather than hackers) to the net.

    This thread has been a neat bit of history. Thanks to everyone..

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