| Group Information |
Public Access UNIX
Back in the the mid ’80s to early ’90s, before its commercialization, only universities, the military, and some large corporations were connected to the Internet. There was no broadband to the home, no SL/IP, or WWW. Instead, there were computer bulletin boards and Public Access UNIX (Pubnix) systems with terminal-based modem connections at anything from 300 to 33600bps. Bulletin board systems were mainly MS-DOS based systems that had scant power, and little capability, although theydid improve astime went by. UNIX on the other hand was a mature Operating System that already was multi-user and multi-tasking, and came out of the box with a variety of communications protocols and applications built in. It did email, and it was relatively simple to build the software to allowit todoUSENET. Before the days of universal broadband TCP/IP connectivity, it did UUCP. And perhaps most importantly, there was a huge group of developers creating high-quality,free networking, utility,and game software for the platform.
If you had a modem and terminal emulation software running on your MS-DOS desktop, you could connect to a Pubnix system and read and send email, read and post to the USENET, upload and download files, play games, talk to other users, and do other fun stuff that we takefor granted today. These were the ultimate computer bulletin board systems. A single system could play host to as many users as the modem pool would allow. Some were small, one or two modem systems, and others were quite large, with dozens of dialup lines.
The system I designed, built and managed, Wyvern Technologies, started with a single 2400bps modem on a single Intel 286 machine running Microport System V/AT (the first SVR2 UNIX for Intel processors). It ran in my spare bedroom starting in 1988.
Wyvern grew to two servers and four modems (now 9600bps) in that same spare bedroom over the next few years. We had a full USENET news feed from Old Dominion University, and fed email and news for a number of other systems, both personal and corporate, around SE Virginia.