Retirement of the CTRVAX
So the first internet connected computer system I ever used has been
retired. "CTRVAX" was a VAX6000
series machine that served as one of the primary computing resources for
Vanderbilt University in the late 80's and early 90's. I think the year
that I used it was 1992 or 1993, I don't quite remember. My mom, a
teacher, was taking a computer training course at Vanderbilt/Peabody. I
tagged along with my mom as the little kid that was super into
computers. After asking me a few basic computer questions, a kind admin
saw it fit to grant me an account as well...'hubbarn' was the username.
My mom's was 'hubbarf'.
I don't remember a lot about the class...I was too busy playing around with stuff they weren't teaching. I think they were teaching e-mail...which I had of course already mastered on my local BBS. At the time however, I didn't have real internet access at home, instead relying on AOL and 'The Nashville Exchange', a local internet connected BBS...so this was a new and exciting world for me. I immediatly found the 'Remote Hosts' and 'Internet' menus and started playing with NNTP and remote BBS's. I tried to get onto other servers but couldn't really figure out what was going on and ended up looking for files with Archie. I remember using 'Gopher' and 'FTP', which I thought was pretty neat. This was before the 'web' so that was about as close to you could get to what most people today think of when they hear 'internet'. I remember downloading the Anarchists Cookbook, which I already had downloaded from a local BBS at home, but it was neat to do it over the 'Net. I think it was stored in my CTRVAX account...hopefully for a suprized admin to find when they cleaned my account. After the few hours were over, we left and I was hooked. I convinced my parents that the internet was the future.
Anyway, kinda sad to see the CRTVAX go...but quite remarkable that it was rendering services up until a month ago.
/nostalgia