My first job out of college was at a company (1986ish) that did seismic and meteorological
modeling and monitoring. At college we were on csnet ( on our Vax, running BSD 4.2 ). At
work, I was deliriously happy to have my own Sun 3/110 to work on, vs having to fight to
share the Vax. However, I was having email and Usenet withdrawal... so after completing
a 6 month scheduled task In about a month ( thank you lex and yacc :-) ) I was looking for
things to fill the time and asked my boss about email. He said, well there is this
dedicated line up to Virginia that he used every once in a month and checked his email..
and sometimes helped the seismologists pull some data. He thought the folks on the other
end might be able to help. He gave me the name and phone number - it was Rick Adams. (
and yes, this was a dedicated circuit into seismo... well the Annex box physically right
next to it :-) ).
Shall we say, I called fairly quickly, and was working with David Comay who helped support
things there ( the center for seismic studies - css ) and got an early version of CSLIP...
Then excitedly ( though a tad nervously) learned how to rebuild a Sun 3/110 kernel and
get it installed.
The newsfeed and email speed, shall we say, didn’t suck 🙂
Oh, and btw, seismo wasn’t uunet. The original uunet was a sequent 8 processor box ( I
believe ). One of my trips to DC I got to visit with David and saw the box as it was there
at css with seismo. ( if memory serves me, it was in Ricks office ). Rick had gotten
permission to host it there to “see if there was a business model for providing internet
access”, which now I think we can definitely answer yes :-)
There still is a seismo, but obviously the box isn’t the sun 3/2xx series machine it was
then.
Earl
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 18, 2021, at 10:27 PM, Chris Torek
<torek(a)elf.torek.net> wrote:
We used to say: "Seismo bangs everybody"
(then they became uunet, then Worldcom bought them)