Fun_People Archive
18 Aug
Ucbvax, formerly a major UUCP and news site...

Date: Thu, 18 Aug 94 19:28:10 PDT
To: Fun_People
Subject: Ucbvax, formerly a major UUCP and news site...

[With apologies to those of you who have no idea how a bunch of nerds could get
nostalgic over the passing of a piece of hardware... hmmm, that's not too hard
to imagine, is it?  Well, then, with apologies to those of you who never had a
relationship with ucbvax to get nostalgic about... -psl] 

Forwarded-by: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Newsgroups: ucb.net.announce,ba.internet,comp.mail.uucp
Distribution: world
From: eric@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Eric Allman)
Organization: UC Berkeley Mammoth Project
Subject: death of ucbvax

Venerable old ucbvax, once a cross-roads of the network, will be
turned off for the last time on Friday, 19 August at 2:00pm PST
(21:00 GMT).  Should you recall the glory days of ucbvax, you
might allow for a minute of net-silence as we shut it down.  (If
anyone happens to be in a position to monitor any backbones,
please let me know if usage dips.)  There will be a small, private
gathering as the circuit breaker is thrown.

To add insult to injury, the hardware will be salvaged by the
Police Department to run card-key systems -- after conversion
to VMS.  Sigh.

Ucbvax, formerly a major UUCP and news site, had fallen on hard
times as the world moved past MicroVAXen.  In recent years, it
had essentially no support, still running an out of date version
of BSD on very slow and small disks.  It valiantly continued in
its task even as the world moved on to SuperScalar RISCs.  The
Computer Science Division finally moved into a new building, leaving
ucbvax alone in a cold, dark machine room.  Ucbvax immediately
developed disk hiccups in the swap area.  We are keeping it on
life support until the ceremony.

Please feel free to redistribute this message to anyone who might
be interested.

			 UCBVAX
			  R.I.P.
		     August 19, 1994

© 1994 Peter Langston