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Oct. 23rd, 2016
Maybe the best thing I've ever done
Oct. 23rd, 2016 08:58 pmI left university in 1990. I'd grown used to email, so I hunted around for something cheap.
I found "tharr BBS", run by Chris Allen. This was a unix server that you could login to; it had UUCP access to the rest of the world.
Tharr had to shut down soon after I found it, but Jamie Allen took up the torch and run Spuddy from his house in Coventry. Axion fed it. "spuddy.uucp" was my real address for many years. I became friends with Jamie (I was a Unix geek and was able to help him improve the service). We'd also set up UUCP feeds for people so they could have "user.theirmachine" be sent to them as a UUCP feed.
Jamie had to stop doing Spuddy around 1993 or 1994, so I took it over. I spent a lot of money (for me,at the time) to get a Sparc 2 plus serial ports plus modems plus phone lines plus disks...
Originally we were being fed by Axion, a BT server. I don't know how Chris/Jamie arranged this but they called my modem (a Telebit compatible, great for UUCP!) and transferred data. This meant phone bills were kept real cheap.
Unfortunately Axion went away and I had to go direct to EUnet... but at this point I was working for a company with a real internet connection (2Mbit/s "fat pipe"; that was a lot in those days). So I had spuddy gatewayed to those servers and I created UUCP feeds on the servers I ran. Similarly for Usenet. Each evening I would create a DAT tape with the daily Usenet feed and take it home and process it. Email was sent over the ISDN connection the company paid for (*shushhhh*).
I even put together a minimal web page(originally hosted at my employer) which was based on internal content.
This worked with various iterations until 2001 when I moved to the US. At that point I closed Spuddy down. The people who still wanted an email address I set up with a mail forwarder on my own internet based machines (linode at that time). Eventually I migrated the spuddy.mew.co.uk domain to google apps for the few people who still used it. It still works!
What makes me happy is when I see comments from random people saying "Hey, I used spuddy!". I've even had famous people such as Charlie Stross (hugo winning author) say they used Spuddy in the past.
Most recently a random twitter conversation came up with https://twitter.com/UXXV/status/790332808237572096 I had a spuddy mew email address back in 96!. This makes me really happy.
Spuddy definitely had reached end of life. Real cheap internet access was common by the time I moved to America. But it had created a wonderful community of users (chat systems, bulletin boards) and provided a resource many people couldn't afford commercially. People even wrote software to work with spuddy's unique menu system.
I don't think I've done anything more community oriented ever since.
I'm proud that I could take Jamie's setup and keep it running and (hopefully) make it better. Definitely it was better technically :-) But community is what made the system, and I hope I kept that part alive.
I found "tharr BBS", run by Chris Allen. This was a unix server that you could login to; it had UUCP access to the rest of the world.
Tharr had to shut down soon after I found it, but Jamie Allen took up the torch and run Spuddy from his house in Coventry. Axion fed it. "spuddy.uucp" was my real address for many years. I became friends with Jamie (I was a Unix geek and was able to help him improve the service). We'd also set up UUCP feeds for people so they could have "user.theirmachine" be sent to them as a UUCP feed.
Jamie had to stop doing Spuddy around 1993 or 1994, so I took it over. I spent a lot of money (for me,at the time) to get a Sparc 2 plus serial ports plus modems plus phone lines plus disks...
Originally we were being fed by Axion, a BT server. I don't know how Chris/Jamie arranged this but they called my modem (a Telebit compatible, great for UUCP!) and transferred data. This meant phone bills were kept real cheap.
Unfortunately Axion went away and I had to go direct to EUnet... but at this point I was working for a company with a real internet connection (2Mbit/s "fat pipe"; that was a lot in those days). So I had spuddy gatewayed to those servers and I created UUCP feeds on the servers I ran. Similarly for Usenet. Each evening I would create a DAT tape with the daily Usenet feed and take it home and process it. Email was sent over the ISDN connection the company paid for (*shushhhh*).
I even put together a minimal web page(originally hosted at my employer) which was based on internal content.
This worked with various iterations until 2001 when I moved to the US. At that point I closed Spuddy down. The people who still wanted an email address I set up with a mail forwarder on my own internet based machines (linode at that time). Eventually I migrated the spuddy.mew.co.uk domain to google apps for the few people who still used it. It still works!
What makes me happy is when I see comments from random people saying "Hey, I used spuddy!". I've even had famous people such as Charlie Stross (hugo winning author) say they used Spuddy in the past.
Most recently a random twitter conversation came up with https://twitter.com/UXXV/status/790332808237572096 I had a spuddy mew email address back in 96!. This makes me really happy.
Spuddy definitely had reached end of life. Real cheap internet access was common by the time I moved to America. But it had created a wonderful community of users (chat systems, bulletin boards) and provided a resource many people couldn't afford commercially. People even wrote software to work with spuddy's unique menu system.
I don't think I've done anything more community oriented ever since.
I'm proud that I could take Jamie's setup and keep it running and (hopefully) make it better. Definitely it was better technically :-) But community is what made the system, and I hope I kept that part alive.