the original cs server....swatsun
I don't have a photo of the original swatsun. I got this off the web,
and I think it's a Sun 3/160. If anyone has a picture of swatsun, please
scan it and send me the image. Thanks!
In 1992 we retired swatsun, our department's first fileserver, in favor of a new Sun SPARC 2. The student sysadmins we had from 1986 to 1992 spent many hours hacking on swatsun. It was an exciting time -- the Swarthmore CS program was just starting, big things were happening in the world of computers (e.g., the growth of email and the internet, the Morris worm, the Free Software movement), and the student sysadmins were given a lot of room to experiment and a lot of responsibility to get things working. As we shutdown swatsun in 1992 for the last time, those early student sysadmins emailed us some of their swatsun memories. Below are some exceprts from those emails, including one from cfk...
Of course, swatsun's original name was Alexandria. We changed it for
uucp purposes; that was a shame, the original was better.
Most common comment from the CC people when they saw the new suns:
"Gee, that's a big screen." We had a fun time showing them off.
-- Scott Schwartz, '87
I remember when I first learned about how swatsun was connected to the
outside world via a modem and that I could send email to anywhere in the
world, I was stunned. Figuring out how all the various uucp programs worked
became my passion.
-- Eiji Hirai, '88
I also remember logging in via gandalf from Willets. I wandered up and
down the directory tree, amazed that so much nifty stuff was
world-readable. On the Prime, access to system-related stuff was
restricted to CC staff only.
One day Jeremy ordered the TeX distribution and we hacked until dawn to
install it, only going to breakfast after we got METAFONT to draw some
characters in a gfxtool window.
I lived in Wharton F so I could be at the Sun lab with a minute's notice
and often was.
It's sad to see Swatsun go, but every era must end...Sometimes when I log in I
run finger on some of the clients and I see names I don't know with .plan files
saying things like 'studying for honors exams.' I hope that they will carry
away memories of times as exciting as our own.
-- Dan Rice, '89
I remember using roff and those terrible line printers in Beardsley, and how
the system became unusable at finals time because of everybody roffing papers.
I think I finally became a "real" sysadmin junior year....I came to Charles
at the last minute and he took me on for the summer. I actually got paid to
learn to write C and administer the systems. The systems were down for a long
time at the beginning of the summer because we decided to upgrade to SunOS 4.0
(I learned never to install OS X.0 for ANYTHING). Scott helped us with the
upgrade and I remember going for cheesesteaks at Renato's while the Super Eagle
drive was formatting (it took hours).
-- Hal Pomeranz, '89
I started learning TeX after I worked on a project with Andrew Rieger and Doug
Shremp and saw the output after Doug's fingers made the cursor do all sorts of
funny things without even touching the mouse. (About this time, I was becoming
mouse-jaded, starting to get fed up with all the mouseing I had to do with the
mac.) I was _AMAZED_! Doug had typed in normal ascii characters (a few goofy
strings too, but still, basic character set), and out had come this document
that looked arguably better than anything that I could have done in MS Word.
So, I had to learn TeX.
-- AC Capehart, '92
I'll never forget the alumni weekend when Dan Rice and Scott and others tried
to "fix" the OS so that it would work with the Internet. No matter what they
changed (and they did change a lot), nothing seemed to work. Only later did we
find out that the CC router was down and so there was no way we could get to
the Internet. Fred and I spent a good 6 weeks working together to get the
sunlab onto the internet. I look back and smile. All of those nights sleeping
in the lab, waiting for the backup tape to finish so that the next could be
loaded. It took 22 hours to load the backup onto the system - only to find out
that it didn't really help that much. In any case, it was a great way to learn
Unix.
After that I was a Sun sysadmin. I still asked lots of questions and spent
lots of time sendng email to Hal and AG. Come to think of it, I still do. I
remember having philosophical talks with Garth as to the nature of balanced
trees. I remember having to get off of Tulum because Hal had entered the room
and wasn't going to use any other machine. It was a great lab for learning -
and by my senior year it was a great lab for showing the new people all of the
things that others had shown me. I remember the shouts of joy that Greg Keim
and I would unleash whenever we got a component of our compiler to do what it
was supposed to. That was some of the most fun programming I've ever done.
-- Andrew Rieger, '91
[in response to the above emails from his student sysadmins]
"What machines should we buy. Apollo was the biggest selling
'engineering workstation' at the time by far. They ran a proprietary
operating system called aegis. There was a relatively new company
called Sun which was arguing for open systems and used the Unix
operating system. Unix looked like the way to go for CS, but would
Sun be around in 3 years...Engin was having considerable
trouble getting their Apollos to run reliably with student sysadmins
and I was advised by many faculty that it would be a mistake to try and
have a student run CS lab. I felt like I was really sticking my neck
out when we ordered the Suns.
I GUESS YOU SHOWED THEM!!!"
-- Charles Kelemen, 1992