LAST EDITED ON Mar-14-14 AT 08:58 PM (EDT)
 
><2> I remember having to explain to the vice principle that I wasn't
>"hacking" when they saw those.

Ha, you just reminded me of a thing.

In the summer of 1993, I was back in Podunk waiting for the school year to start at the University of Maine for what would end up being my second false start at college. I had an account on the IBM mainframe the University used for student computing in those days (imaginatively called maine.maine.edu, in much the same way that the Encore at WPI was called wpi.wpi.edu - this was apparently a Thing in the early '90s), and an email address generated by an automatic user addition script they ran every enrollment period (which started with "io" and then had a five-digit number starting with 3 - username customization was not a Thing in the early '90s), but I didn't have any way of using it until school started. Everything was dial-up in those days, and the University only had local dialing numbers in Orono - it would've been a toll call from the Podunk Valley, and that was plainly not on.

Except one day I was at my local library, and I noticed that they had a computer set up to talk to URSUS, the UMaine library's online card catalog, so that people could make inter-library loan requests from the various libraries on the URSUS network (which at the time were the ones on all the University of Maine System campuses and, I think, the Maine State Library in Augusta). A cursory inspection proved that this, too, worked by dialing up a modem somewhere. Operating on the assumption that there was no way the Podunk public library was going to be paying long-distance rates for catalog lookups, I figured the URSUS network must have a point-of-presence that was a local call from there.

I didn't particularly want to access URSUS from home or anywhere else, but on the other hand, I assumed the URSUS server was at the Fogler Library at UMaine, and if it was, well, maybe a person could get to the whole UMaine campus network from there. I asked the librarian on duty if he knew the phone number it was dialing in order to connect, and he eyed me narrowly and asked me why I wanted to know. I said I was interested, as a student of computer science (which, in technical fact, I no longer was) and an in-going transfer student, in how the University went about provisioning such services as compared to my old school.

"Uh-huh," he said, then shook his head. "Nope. You look like one'a them, whaddaya call 'em, whackers. I'm afraid I can't be the one responsible for giving you that kind of power."

He really said that.

I said something like well, suit yourself, and went back to the URSUS terminal to examine it further... and found, taped to the back of the case (it was one of those big honking PC XTs with the full-height hard drives), a file folder containing a sheet of instructions about what to do if the link went down or the computer crashed or what have you and you had to re-establish the connection. This did not actually contain the telephone number of the local URSUS POP...

... but the script on the PC that initialized the dialer did.

So I did what any self-respecting whacker would do, wrote it down, went home, waited for the library to close (figuring there was probably only the one phone line at the other end), and investigated further. At the time, the only computer I owned that had a modem was an AT&T PC7300 Unix PC, so I fired that up and plugged in the number.

I forget the exact details of how the resulting connection worked, but whatever was at the other end of the phone line was just a simple widget designed to relay the connection to Orono, where it went into the system that they were using to aggregate all the remote URSUS POPs onto the campus network... which happened to be a Xylogics Annex II serial comm server, the same thing WPI used for its dial-up pool when I was a student there. I knew how to talk to those (within a couple-three years I would in fact be working for Xylogics, but that's a different story), so I ignored the MOTD telling me how to connect to URSUS and asked it what else it could see. The list that came back was a long one and included a lot of stuff I neither knew nor cared about, but it also included all the Sun SPARCstations the CS department operated (which were all named after dwarves from The Hobbit) and maine.maine.edu.

I didn't have an account on the CS SPARCs at the time (that wouldn't happen until school actually started and I was able to go and prove to their operators that I wasn't going to wreck anything with my humanities-major hamfists), but I was able to spend an idyllic(?) summer basking (whenever the local library was closed, which in practical terms was most of the time) in the glories of CP/CMS and IRC via BITNET on the University's ancient-even-then IBM System/360 mainframe.

At 1200 baud.

Yessirree, they never should have given me that kind of power.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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