On Sat, 25 Aug 2018 at 19:45, Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com> wrote:

Back in the early 90s before the FSF withdrew the service due to misuse it was possible to write off to them to get a free shell account on "hal" as I did. I recall having to telnet through one of three gateway systems so assume it was on its own little subnet.

But I can't remember what sort of system (hardware or OS) it was now however and wondered if anyone else did?

https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/finger-1.37/html_node/finger_17.html mentions "spiff" (which rings a bell as one of the systems) as a "Sony" which must have been a NEWS-OS (BSD) system.
 
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Steve Mynott <steve.mynott@gmail.com>
cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5