UIUC (Was: Re: Gopher for Firefox 3)

[Jim Brain]

Jason T wrote:
> Installed the plugin, haven't had a chance to test it thoroughly but
> it seems to work fine.  Very cool project, though!  My first contact
> with the Internet was in 1991 at UIUC (jht56010 at uxa.cso.uiuc.edu!) and
> while I was probably using IRC, FTP and telnet more frequently, I do
> remember gopher and definitely ph!  Wish I still had a copy of my ph
> record...  (Person-Name!)
>   
UIUC used to use gopher to schedule interviews and describe the 
companies coming on campus.  *Everyone* in their senior year knew their 
way around gopher.

jlb31348 at uxa.cso.uiuc.edu here.

> Ahh, fond memories of the dorm labs with the PS/2s and Mac SE/30s
> (some of which ran the networked multiplayer Sceptre game) and the
> lovely rows of even then very outdated terminals in the basement of
> the English building.  Wish I knew what kind they were (tho I believe
> uxa.cso was a Sequent mini.  Anyone on the list there back then?)
>   
It was a Sequent.  The machine ran in the basement of the Illini Union, 
where there were some nice Xterminals to use.  The Sequent was a slow 
machine (due to all the student accounts being used on it), so those of 
us with connections got accounts on the Sparcs in the CS labs 
(jbrain at cs.uiuc.edu) as they were much faster.

Also, concerning trivia, the UIUC shared machines were managed by two 
separate entities.  The dorm labs were managed by some small group in 
the housing area, while the rest of the lab machines (not specific class 
labs, but general use labs) were manage by CSO, which became CCSO in 
1991 or so. (I don't know the expansion). 

I knew friends that adminstrered labs at CCSO.  I took a job 
administering the dorm lab at Allen Hall, and was backup for the Lincoln 
Area Residence Hall lab.  The dorm labs had come up on 3COM servers 
running some mutant of DOS that allowed more memory, but they moved to 
OS/2 1.3 for the servers in 1991, right before I took over the lab (much 
easier to fix print queues and such).  They also started the process of 
upgrading the PS/2 Model 30s to no name 486s, as I recall, right before 
I left in 1993.  The Mac SE/30s were the beginning of many stories.

Concerning UIUC Plato machines:
By the time, the Plato machines were on their way out, though Physics 
students still used them for labs, and they were also available at the 
University High School, just North East of campus.  Most of the 
machines, though, were old and outdated.  There was a neat Commodore 64 
emulator for the PLATO system, and I think an IBM emulator.  You could 
access all the systems via the magic terminal server number, 333-1100 or 
something.

My fondest memory of the labs was the SE/30s.  They had no hard drive, 
so they required a boot disk to startup.  But, the SE ejects both disks 
on shutdown, as I recall, and some students would take both disks, or 
did not know the push the boot disk in when starting the machine up.  
Thus, all the MAC SEs had this metal "bra" on them.  A sleeve that fit 
around the body of the unit around where the drives were, it had a 
stretched part of the metal that formed a bubble of the boot disk 
drive.  It had a small piece of foam inside the bubble.  Thus, when the 
disk was ejected, it hit the foam and then rebounded back into the 
drive.  Still, be 1992, the foam was getting a bit weak, so the disks 
would not always rebound.  In that case, the machine would not boot, 
displaying a question mark in a Mac icon on the screen.  Thus, the bra 
solved one problem and created another, as students could not fix this 
issue, so they had to call a lab monitor, who had to call the admin 
(me).  The solution was to unlock the bra, slide it up a bit (usually 
requiring force, which is why a hammer was standard issue in the supply 
cabinet), which would jar the disk and push it back into the drive.  
That took quite a bit of time, so I found out that if you just smacked 
the side of the SE/30 with an open palm, the resulting vibration would 
reseat the disk and all would be well.  Thus, when I visited the lab, I 
took to "spanking" all of the errant SEs.  The look on lab user's faces 
when I did that was/is priceless.  Yes, it was no doubt hard on the 
machines, but were talking SE/30s here, many years past their prime.

Jim