In the spring '92 school year, I finished with a 0.0 grade average, and Sid didn't do much better. I planned on going back to Elkhart, working the factories, taking summer classes at IUSB, and hoping to get the GPA and bank account back to reasonable levels. But during finals week, I went through a catastrophic breakup with a very close girlfriend, I lost my factory job before I got it, and I couldn't sublet my apartment. I decided life was too short, and I stayed in Bloomington for the summer. I had almost no work, since UCS consulting dries up to almost nothing during the summer, but I had a full load of classes picked to straighten out my grades. I spent the summer hacking, chasing women, DJing at WQAX with Sid, and slacking.
One of my main events of slack during the summer was Showalter Fountain. The year before, a FORUMite named Jenn Kimble invented a daily gathering at the Showalter Fountain at midnight. It would be a no-context social event, where all of the summer people on the computer and otherwise would come down, shoot the shit, take a swim if the cops weren't looking, and maybe later go to Denny's or the bar. It happened every day, which meant there were dead days, but it also meant that there was always something to do. In 1991, this whole thing went over well, and I used to go on the weekends I was in town visiting my then-girlfriend Jo. But this year Jenn would be gone, so we would have to carry the flame for her. And we did; myself, Chris Hagen, Joe McKenna, and others I can't remember were there often. Aaron Renn made many appearances. So did Mindy McKaig - she and Sid were no longer an item, but we were still good friends. Many others outside of the VAX showed up too; I used to bring my roommates all the time, and so did others.
Sid was around that summer, although I never saw him at the fountain. He was living with a new girlfriend, and worked with me at WQAX. We talked about new things, but no real changes were made to the utils over the summer. I worked on a new version of XINFO that was 99% done and then failed to work. I had no idea what happened, and I had to give up on it and go back to the first version.
Mid-way through the summer, Aaron announced his departure. He finished a finance degree, but the fear of working in a bank made him look for something computer-oriented. He got a spot at Andersen Consulting in Chicago, bought a brand new Saturn, and left us.
Sid wasn't taking classes in the fall of '92, which meant we had to scramble to do something with the utils. I had plenty of space, so we moved everything there, and started to get it set up. This was also risky business, as I was working for UCS. We made the switch briefly, but then Sid got a job with IU, which extended his account indefinitely. We kept everything there, although I put a backdoor in the startup script. Whenever the util ran, it ran an empty COM file in my directory. If Sid's account ever got locked again like it did in the spring of '91, I would be able to put commands in the COM file to direct people to a re-installer that would automatically point their stuff at a new util, instead of having to tell 2500 people to reinstall everything.
By the fall, I was too busy with other things to continue, and I sent a mail to all of the util users, bidding them farewell. Although I got the usual confused "take me off your list" messages, I also got some very touching and supportive messages from users of the util who thanked me for my contributions and understood my conflict. Also, my last words in the message were the same last words of the Beatles, and I'm glad more than one person caught that. :)
Although I left the util, I still maintained XINFO. This didn't mean much more than a sacrifice of disk space. But in December there was a catastrophic crash involving the database that seriously screwed up both utils. I don't remember this well, except that it happened. Sid alleges that I simply backed out of the disaster, but it was probably something like a file locking problem where I simply couldn't do anything. Jeff mentions that I came up with a new version of XINFO at this point, but I may have simply purged the old database or recompiled a new version to get around the bug. Either way, it was ugly.
Sid brought on Jeff Morris to work on the utils a couple of months after I offically left. While I was busy programming in Motif for C490, I'd see Jeff logged into the VAX continually, working on the util. Through most of early 1993, Jeff did the programming and Sid did the email questions and problems.
In the spring of 93, my boss at UCS gave me a friendly heads-up about my involvement with the utils. I told her that I didn't work on them anymore, but my little XINFO tag was still appearing on screens all over campus, printing my name. I got Jeff to take out that line of code, and eventually got him to take over the whole database. I kept copies of the stuff, and I ran my own copy of the util. It was chopped down considerably, and ran without a title screen or any other discernable marking, just in case some UCS net.nazi was snooping over my shoulder at work.
In the fall, I lost a job at a better position solely because of my involvement in the Ssowder utilities. My current boss went to bat for me, and I managed to get the job, but I worked for the person who didn't want me there, which was more than uncomfortable. She continually accused me of helping people with the util programs, running the util programs, and one time almost fired me for a piece of mail I forwarded to someone five years before. I tried to appear as neutral as possible when helping people with util problems while on the job, but it was tough.
Jeff got a job with UCS, and kept working on things. He moved the utils over to his account in October, renaming them the Sowder Utils. He continued the refinements, and numbers kept strong for most of the 93-94 school year.
At the end of 1993, Brian Hostetler announced that his utils would also transfer ownership, and he would split. This happened, and the new maintainer was nowhere near as adept as Jeff was with the Sowder utils. I have no idea what eventually happened to Tigger - it must've gained some momentum before crashing with everything else about a year later. Here's what Brian had to say about it:
"When I got rid of Tigger, I just wanted it out of my life. I feel bad now that I didn't let Jeff have it. The two guys that took it, hell I didn't even know them at all. The last I remember, it had over 5,500 users and that was way weird. I remember going into UCS for something and was shocked to find out they knew who I was. I really had no idea what an impact the utils where having at IU."
Although we all fought the good fight, by 1994, the end was near. UCS was getting away from those clunky DEC machines and moving to more disposable unix boxes. In the fall of 1994, EZmail made its premiere, and every new freshman got an account there instead of the VAX. It was an HP-9000 which only ran a copy of pine for email. Many people tried to leave EZmail and move to the VAX cluster, but UCS made it difficult. In the spring of 1995, applications were phased out from the cluster, and VMS mail was disabled. The FORUM died in late summer of 1994. Eventually, bitnet was gone, and it was almost impossible for a student to get a new VMS account. The machines were slowly rotated out of the cluster, until only one was left, with almost no applications.
Today, I'm told that the Sowder utilities still run on Teach, the last remaining VAX. Almost nobody can get an account to it anymore, and there are many commands that no longer work. Many of the old terminal-room hangouts now house braindead Windows NT machines. (I still have one of the terminals from Spea in my office, though.) The era of the VAX is long, but not forgotten. Sid still lives!
Last Updated 3/2/99
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