Skip Navigation and Search to Content

Search Public Access UNIX - Blog - This Old Micro

Main Content

Public Access UNIX

Chesapeake, VA
Tom Manos photo

Here's an invitation to anyone interested in helping to build a retro-computing enthusast network:

I want to build a private or "dark" network for retro-computing enthusiasts. It has to be dark because the old hardware and software was full of bugs and not very secure. Exposing it to the public network would be suicide, so I was thinking about a UUCP network, only instead of using dialup, we could use tcp/ip.

The model would be each participant keeping one machine on a public ip address, and the retro network on a private network behind the public machine, which would also be connected to the private network. We would use the old UUCP mapping project software (pathalias) to build a set of UUCP maps that would route UUCP across the public to private bridge.

This arrangement would allow us to do email, USENET, and basic file transfer in a reasonably secure way. It would not be as fast as the net, but it should work just fine.

So who wants to play?

Tom Manos photo

I've been building an old style UNIX (not Linux!) system that is very similar to one I owned and operated in the late 1980's to early 1990's, before the Internet got to be a big business.

Read on for some details...

» Continue reading

Categories

Archives