From dsandler@stardot.com Fri Nov 10 22:10:19 2000 Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 14:54:23 -0800 From: dan sandler To: Kevin Doherty , James Dang Cc: Justin Osborn , fogies@mbhs.edu Subject: Re: Calling all (former) Sysops! At 4:56 PM -0500 11/10/00, Kevin Doherty wrote: > > I was a sysop after Mr. Yee, and before Mr. Hammond. The core sysops were >> dgould, dsandler, dpeck, jdang. Other notables were ncook, erosenbl, and >> hhui. hhui wasn't really a sysop, he just kinda wrecked havoc, and hacked >> into the DecStation when we didn't know the root password. Man, I was there that day. I e-mailed him at Princeton (where he was busy getting a degree in comparative literature, only to decline a teaching position when offered a few years later to go Pursue Technological Wizardry on the evil Left Coast) to get him to hack in (as I recall, he used an lpr exploit). The *reason*, however, was not that we didn't know the root password. I was creating a whole *mess* of users all at once for BEKS (the Blair/Einstein/Kennedy/Springbrook consortium, which was the primary focus of the first Community Architectures team) and unfortunately b0rked the totally evil Ultrix auth database (which is, by the way, totally evil). With no auth database, the root password was 100% useless ... and another method had to be found. > A few notes on Elie [...] Yeah, Elie Rosenblum was another of the not-quite-sysops syndicate. Another XTank veteran to be sure. > [...] Hui Hui submitting an essay to SYNC, Blair's short-lived Web > 'Zine (back when they were new and cool! Well, new at least.) which > I'll attach. Yeah. I still have some of the original Sync artwork. It was actually a reprint (which we edited a little bit for ... er, propriety; there was more about 'visualising anatomically-correct pictures' in the original). > > so binx was ours (the students) to play with. we (dsandler, ncook, with a >> teeny bit of help from me) created the first version of Hello that you all >> love. Oh yeah, that was a blast. We also had a "grpahical" (i.e. the same kind of home-grown shell-script ncurses) configurator for your shell, including aliases and the like. n8 did a bang-up job on those. > We got xtank working seperately as well (the version that fixed the bug > where Carapace armor was invincible :) Much fun was had running Panzys > into walls but flipping around immediately beforehand to ram into one's > pursuer. I believe we even had bots running because the UGLY threading > using setjmp and longjmp worked under AIX. TINK! TINK! I'll give a quick personal timeline here: 1993: (some might be '92) * dsandler finagles his way onto goober.mbhs.edu for a SuperQuest (remember that?) project. learns the incantation "tar -xvf". becomes awed of the original sysop team (class of '93 and '94 mostly), whose names I forget. this is actually the group of people that got hhui banned from the lab, IIRC. I can't remember if these were '93 or '94: * I resurrect "rt.mbhs.edu" (not an RT) and "cyber910.mbhs.edu" (not a Cyber 910) and rename them "calvin" and "hobbes". Calvin continues to have about 16MB of RAM, use YP (precursor to NIS+), and is therefore completely useless. Hobbes becomes my daily terminal. * We start using Netscape 0.9N, which allows Captain Jim (www.stardot.com/cj) to have JPEGs inline. 1994: (some of this might be '93, who knows) * ViBES was started (a MUSH running on CapAccess (capaccess.org) for Blair folk). * I think this was when we upgraded our network from a 56k line to 128k (it was never 9600 in the four years I was there). * the lab admin leaves (I forget his name); we have a replacement, and he leaves too * The first Community Architectures team is constructed: Dan Sandler, Dave Peck, Nate Cook, Pat Toole, Jessica Heacock, Manish Butani. did I forget anyone? Maybe Manish only joined in 1995 when it became our SRP. * mvhs1.mbhs.edu is constructed; our first Linux machine (a Gateway). Ms. Verona steals it for (surprise!) MVHS stuff, but not before we play a lot of linuxdoom on it. * binx.mbhs.edu is constructed * we rebuild the entire Lab 2 (the original lab area looked like this, from left to right: mini-meeting-room, classroom, lab 1, lab 2, software-room (with stairs to the balcony)); it's full of PowerPC 601 machines, Ethernet, TCP/IP -- and everyone loves it * we pick up Hammond at some point; I'll admit, the lab admins (all students by this point) were pretty trepidated, since we didn't really get a say in the process, but he turned out to really exceed all of our expectations in many, many ways 1995: * a lot of other crazy stuff happens with CA; we make Dale Ewing (on the school board at the time) cry (in a good way) with the success BEKS program * dsandler/dgould/dpeck/ncook all graduate * dsandler and dpeck never end up finishing the sequel to the hit Mac game "Infotron" (the sequel: "Murphy's Revenge" -- I still have the code) --*-- Wow. There's so much more, but I've gotta go back to working on BeIA. I used to have a .plan file that was about 4 pages of Monty-Python-style credits for my entire time as a sysop at MBHS. But I think it's gone -- maybe when they rebuilt goober (and neglected to restore my account :) ). -d -- dan sandler . designer, user experience group, be inc.