Maybe you've never heard of Indiana University or Bloomington, Indiana, so I should start this story there. IU is a big university that's been dropped down in the middle of nowhere. About a 45 minute drive south of Indianapolis, the 40,000-some student campus is beautiful, with limestone buildings and beautiful scenery across the city-sized area. Indiana is world-renowned for many of its facilities and achievements. It's home to what is arguably the world's best music program, and also has top-notch programs in business, computer science, astronomy, linguistics, and many foreign languages. Kinzey's research in human sexuality was conducted there; one of the first cyclotrons was installed there; the use of fluoride in toothpaste was patented there. But aside from being an innovator, Bloomington was a melting pot of students. People from California or the east coast came there because their dollars went farther; tens of thousands of Indiana residents went there every year because of the cheap in-state tuition. And the entire campus was one of the few pockets of culture in an otherwise mediocre state. There were bands, festivals, arts, music, and tons of other people. Bloomington was the perfect place to become lost among the masses, and an even better place to be found.
I arrived in Bloomington in the fall of 1989 as a freshman, so I'm not fully qualified to give a lecture on its computing facilities before then. But, I heard stories, read old issues of The Monitor, the campus computer magazine, and saw many vestigial references to the old and changing technology.
First, 1989 was a year of sweeping changes for computing at IU, all of which paved the way for the utilities. 1989 was the first year that students were charged a technology fee. It started at a few bucks, and over the years got incremented up to about a hundred or so dollars a semester. The one big product of this fee was the PSA, or Permanent Student Account. Before technology fees, you had to work for the university, take a class, or maybe beg someone with some research forms before you got time on the central computer. Now, anyone who could produce a student ID would immediately get an account on the VAX cluster. And this wasn't a time-sharing account, or credit toward usage or anything - these were full-blown, unlimited-use accounts on the VAXes.
Shortly before I got there, University Computing Service, was formed. It was a merger between Bloomington Access Computing Services (or something - I only remember the BACS acronym) and another organization. UCS served the IU community in general, with central systems, computing labs, support, and staff for faculty, staff, and students. They ran the networks that were appearing across campus to link together machines, and they ran a huge machine room at the Wrubel Computing Center. Their workers were in the labs, in offices at the Indiana Memorial Union, and in other office buildings, programming and administering and doing everything else to keep things running. The BACS acronym lived on in odd places, showing up on equipment tags, old manuals, and various places in the system. And on the bitnet network, all of the UCS machines were known as IUBACS for years to come.
Another peripheral change I'll mention briefly: IU got a brand new (analog) phone system right before the Fall of 1989. I was there in the summer of '89 for student registration, and saw the last pieces of the puzzle falling into place. The prefix changed from 335 to 855 for business numbers and 857 for dorm numbers. Each dorm room had a brand new box with two plugs: one was for the new touchtone phone, and one was unused, but we were promised it would someday be ethernet. This was a big change for the dorms, which used to have one rotary phone per two rooms. Each pair of rooms had a wooden box between them, containing the phone. The boxes got nailed shut and later removed, but until 1993 or so, it wasn't hard to find a room with a vestigal box jutting from the wall. After the phone transformation, using a modem in a dorm became much easier. In this timeframe, UCS maintained a decent number of modems, all of them 1200/2400bps. A 9600bps line was also there, for those who had several hundred bucks to throw down for a modem. It wasn't until late 1993 when new Xyplex servers were tested and implemented, with 14.4Kbps modems and full PPP support. Much of the campus used sytek terminal servers, moving slowly to actual ethernet.
They weren't the only ones providing computing to the campus, though. Halls of Residence, the folks who ran the dorms and provided awful cafeteria food, also had their own branch of the net.police. In 1989, they were ill-funded, and almost nonexistent. There was a pair of old VAXes named Cream and Crimson, which worked on a pay-per-use system and went largely unnoticed. Half of the dorms, like Teter and Eigenmann, had UCS-operated clusters, with UCS consultants and equipment and software that was only a half-step back from the stuff around campus. Other dorms, like Collins and Forest, had Halls of Residence work-study consultants who typically didn't know how to use a computer, and equipment so ancient that you couldn't give it away on alt.folklore.computers. In Collins, there were two VT102 terminals hard-wired into Cream and Crimson, a TeleVideo TVI-920 with a 1200 bps modem that couldn't run VAX mail, and three Zenith EZ-PCs, which were floppy-only 8088 clones with attached black and white monitors. Halls later got its act together and bought many more new machines, but they were a joke until 1992 or so. Also, Computer Science had a huge crop of machines, mostly Sun workstations, which were off-limits to anyone but grad students or people in classes. The foreign language labs in Ballentine hall maintained about a half-dozen labs of reasonable hardware. Because UCS also maintained labs in the Building, most people didn't know the difference. And individual departments owned their own machines; I heard stories about how the Cyclotron had dozens and dozens of VAXes, mad at work on atom-splitting equations.
At the beginning of my freshman year, computing was fairly frustrating, because of a lack of good labs and equipment. There were only a couple of Mac labs on campus, and they always had wait lists an hour long. PC labs weren't bad - I could usually catch a computer on campus during the day, but that didn't leave me with any time later at night. Eventually, I found out that the HPER building across the street from Collins had a whole cluster of VT240 terminals wired up serially to a terminal server. Since they couldn't run WordPerfect or Lotus or any other programs, they were always vacant. And I had a new home. Later, with the tech fee money, more new equipment started to show up, including laser printers. But I stuck to the terminals for a while.
As I've mentioned in other essays, UCS's grand idea for VMS ease-of-use was a menu program called the Academic Information Environment, or AIE. I started with this monstrosity, but tried to learn enough VMS to get by. Eventually, I turned it off and went straight to the VMS prompt at login. Someone else told me that I needed to modify my LOGIN.COM file. The LOGIN.COM is basically a DCL script that contained stuff like this:
$ ROSE :== SET HOST ROSE $ C*LEAR :== @[.COMS]CLEAR.COM $ CD :== SET DEFAULTI took my friend's copy, modified it, and added some of my own commands and abbreviations. I also set my process name, and invented my own moniker. A process name is a 16-character tag that's associated with your current login or process. When someone shows all the users on the system (or uses the horrible AIE program that does the same), the procname is next to it. Since I was listening to a lot of Queensryche back then, I chose the name Doctor X, which was the evil villain from their album Operation: Mindcrime. It stuck, and that was next to my process name for years to come.
Several tools existed to talk to others. There was, of course, email. The VAX Phone was an interactive chat program which divided the screen into two or more windows, with people typing away in each window. And there was bitnet, which allowed you to send line-at-a-time messages to others in a strange, delayed way, like the delay on a CB radio. But the biggest public forum was FORUM, a BBS program marginally supported by UCS for the VAX users. FORUM was simple: there were Topics, which contained Notes, which contained Responses. Anyone could create a topic, add notes to a topic, or respond to notes with responses. There were no expiration dates like usenet, but the whole thing got wiped clean every semester. FORUM was slower than hell, but had a regular cast of characters who rattled on about enough insane nonsense to make it really entertaining. People would talk about themselves, sex, movies, recipes, history, humor, or anything else they could think of. There were even sporadic meetings at various restaurants, where anyone could stop in and see the regulars face-to-face. I met a lot of people from FORUM, and kept up with it almost on a daily basis.
There was a generation of VMS hackers before Sowder that weren't into FORUM or utilities programs, but rather into hacking games on VMS. Monster, a multi-player strategy game, was installed, modified, and/or frequently inhabited by a group of hackers including people like Grover Browning, Dave Breece, and Bill Perry. If you ran Monster, you were suddenly in a Zork-like text-based game where you typed stuff like GET SWORD and GO NORTH to wander through a dungeon. The thing was, you could see and talk to anyone else playing the game at the same time. An entire Monster clique formed, both from the programmers and the players. Many of them hacked at the 24-hour terminal lab at SPEA, although some players practically lived in the HPER lab. Monster also really pegged CPU and memory usage on the VAX cluster; early versions of the game noticed events by scanning a central shared event file ten times a second. UCS had a strict no-games policy that threatened the game and kept people on their toes. They did stuff like rename the binary to MAIL or AIE to make it look like they were simply doing their schoolwork. I didn't play monster much, and although I knew many of the perpetrators, I couldn't give much more of a history than this. By the end of the school year, most of the Monster programmers and players flunked out, and although there was a schism and another copy briefly ran, Monster was dead by the end of the spring semester of 1990.
(Aside: I finally found out more about Monster! It was written by Rich Skrenta at Northwestern. He has a page about it, including source code and a port to C at http://www.skrenta.com/monster/.
In a fit of stupidity, I left Bloomington in May of '90 and moved into my parents' basement in Elkhart. The plan was to go to IU at South Bend and save all of my money. But I wasn't completely stranded from the scene - my accounts at Bloomington still lived, and IUSB was wired downstate via Sytek. I could still get a slow connection, read FORUM, and keep up with my friends at IU.
That summer, I noticed two utility programs running, and checked both of them out. One was written by Todd Green, a former monster player and now Mac programmer for UCS. His utils were just a single menu of commands, where you could hit a-z and execute them. Some commands were neat, but it wasn't anything I didn't already have in my LOGIN.COM. The other was written by Scott Hutton, and it was slightly more comprehensive. He used abbreviations and aliases, just like most peoples' LOGIN.COMs. He also had a few other unique programs, like a LAST command that destroyed the batch job queues by logging who was logged in or not every few seconds. Although I liked checking when someone was last logged in, I didn't have much use for the rest of his utils (and the LAST command had to be disabled, anyway.)
Going into the fall, I got a job as a computer consultant at IUSB. This gave me access to their only computer, a piece of shit Prime 9955. But it also gave me time to hack. I started learning pascal for C201, but I also learned it to write a game called Nuke'em. And my then-girlfriend Becky Shaw got a job as a VAX programmer, which got me all kinds of cool tips and tricks. My LOGIN.COM got more complex, and I thought about what project I'd do next.
Last Updated 3/2/99
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