17 Jan
2019
17 Jan
'19
12:53 p.m.
Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Interesting. When I was in high school in central
Pennsylvania and begging,
borrowing (and yeah a little stealing) computer time from Penn State
systems, there was a CS professor who'd made his bones building something
called UREP: Unix RSCS Emulation Program. ...
What's notable about that, to me, was that he wrote UREP for DG/UX and was
known to be fond of Data General machines. This let him talk to the
university's mainframe, which was run by the computer center, ran VM, and
was the major compute engine on campus at the time outside of specially
purchased machines supporting research. There was a Cray somewhere on
campus, for example, but that was purchased out of research funds and
wasn't generally accessible. It also let Unix machines participate on
BITNET, which was a big deal locally at the time (probably because of the
close association with mainframes). ....
In the mid-1980s I was a sys admin at the Emory U Computing Center and
we ran UREP on our vaxen in order to be able to send and receive BITNET
mail. It was kind of cute to watch your messages traveling the world,
as you got an interactive message back for each site it traversed on
its way to its final destination.
BUT, the code was miserable. I had to make some changes to it (don't
remember why), but EVERY time I had to dive into it, I hated it. I
used to say that I felt like I needed a shower afterwards.
Arnold