SDF Public Access Unix System
sdf.org
sdf.org
Sadly, Polarhome has thrown in the towel. Does anyone know of something comparable, i.e. not only a public access Unix system, but one that offers a range of Unices?
"The system will be up from time to time to help open source development - but it is closed to the public."
I've been meaning to write a tremendous header for compiler & compiler version identification.
> I've been meaning to write a tremendous header for compiler & compiler version identification.
I doubt whether a "OS zoo" would be of great help for this - many old OSes can run a modern gcc; it is the system calls and terminal/pty/streams behaviours that can be very different (QNX is a great example of this)
Moreover (cf. the great musl preprocessor debate (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31067059) - for me as a "portable programmer" this kind of macro is rather less useful (though sometimes useful as a quick fix) than testing for individual features, as that will make the program compile and work on future, or unknown ancient architectures/compilers (at least in theory....)
I've had e-mail and a web presence since 2000 because of sdf.org. Long before I would have understood anything about setting up my own server.
And I learned much of my core unix knowledge there.
One time my website was running rather slowly - I checked it out with top and found another user had runaway python processes using tens of gigs of RAM and pegging the CPUs. The solution was straightforward: I emailed them on the local mailer. A couple of hours later I received an apologetic reply and everything was working nicely again. :)
When I was at university someone logged into the Sun workstation I was on to run a remote X session. Whatever they were doing kept puking all over the framebuffer console in the middle of my Cadence session. I send an actual polite email asking them to stop as it was making it difficult for me to draw gates. Got no reply.
Two days later I got hauled in front of my tutor, accused of hacking and being rude to the guy. I suspect I was just logged into the X session on the box and the person I complained about was doing what was supposed to have gone on. I defended this religiously but had to deal with a written warning from the university anyway and the tutor actively tried to compromise my course afterwards.
That’s the day I learned about politics. And unix. Digging into the forensics and causality of this led to a long career as a sysadmin and programmer and not designing chips. And not a decade of poor pay or unemployment like my course peers. So no regrets.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System
It’s basically a Swiss army knife. You get email, webspace, you can use it as an anonymizing SSH hop, IRC, they have a little proprietary chat system, and all kinds of other tools and systems.
The lifetime membership is so cheap it’s hard to believe it’s real.
SDF spawned a handful of commercial internet service providers in Texas although SDF remained independent of them. MetroNET was the first one and lasted up until the dot bomb when it was acquired by Internet America. SDF likely survived the dot bomb due to its community rather than being commercial with customers. By 2004 once facebook really started to take off, using the shell to do anything, specially to new folks, seemed antiquated and 'retro' or even criminal, but it still clicked with folks that there was an immediacy of access to text and the UNIX toolkit that kept it fast and simple. internet community wise, I suppose it was the height of phpforums and cheap (though banner laden) webhosting and the rise of more centralized social networking honeypots. While USENET may be the original fediverse (and we still have USENET) the interface that facebook/myspace/twitter offered was something folks wanted on SDF too. And because we're just a platform, we can build on it. StatusNET/GNU Social/Diaspora/Elgg were things we could try without negatively affecting the community: no one was forced to "upgrade" to Diaspora, it was just another feature. If social networking wasn't your thing (or still isn't) then its not required to use SDF. However, I'll say I'm really happy that Mastodon, Pixelfed and Peertube have really gotten a foot hold. Federated platforms like those allow us to use the internet in its most natural way. I believe they'll continue to make strides, though there are likely always going to be brief phenomenon like "vine" or "tik-tok" that take advantage of people.
So in using SDF, you may run into cool subsystems, friendly users, grumpy users, fun programs, user contributed tutorials and various corpses of tried projects (oh, there are nethack bones files going back into the 1990s btw), but hopefully you'll find that there is a unique and authentic spirit in its community that seems to endure and continues to be built upon.
Have fun!
SMJ
https://ia600903.us.archive.org/22/items/bsdtalk021/bsdtalk0...
Systems like SDF have an enormous rich history of implementing technology but the what, how, and why seems lost.
In a corporate environment, this knowledge is often passed down (or later inferred) because it must be but unavailable to the masses.
I couldn’t technically recreate SDF if I wanted to. I can build something functionally similar but the components would be very different.
(That being said, today I'd probably opt for Discourse and a nice TUI client)
Incognito shows me the actual page, regular mode Rickrolls me.
EDIT: Oh, later in the thread they're talking about this.
On a side note- interesting to see the copyright: ©1987-2065
SDF Public Access TWENEX
TWENEX.ORG
In 1994 we contacted Texas Women University to try to resurrect their DECSYSTEM-2065
SDF is just great, thanks for anyone involved!!
A total immersion of the “outside world” has begun.
It was probably closer to 1986 and Windows 3.0.