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Comment by cubes | Hacker News Reader

True. Is soda still a thing? IIRC, soda also allowed non-root users to use the wall utility?

I don't think it's been a thing for years and if you ask me, it stopped being a thing when the old Sequent Symmetry went. Not only non-root users could wall, remote users could wall. A smaller, sillier internet.

I respectfully disagree. There was a vibrant community on soda well into the early aughts, even if it was running FreeBSD on x86 vs. some older more esoteric hardware architecture.

It's good to see that the CSUA encyclopedia still exists somewhere, even if it's not hosted on soda anymore: https://www.erzo.org/shannon/writing/csua/encyclopedia.html I had the good fortune to meet and work with the primary author at a small games company called Skotos Tech during my later undergraduate years.

I mean, I'm not being entirely serious but it was kind of the beginning of the end as shell accounts became increasingly pointless. Although maybe my mental timeline is a bit off, I remember a lottery scheduler getting implemented on the FreeBSD soda and those writeups seem to be from the late 90s not early 00s as I thought.

The t-shirts used to be a good way to run into strangers IRL who would inform you that they too partied with Nick Weaver.

Yes, I partied with Nick Weaver. The lottery scheduler was implemented in the late 90’s, but soda’s kernel ran with the lottery schedule well into the aughts.

I agree that shell accounts weren’t as important by the aughts, but the culture was still going strong in the early aughts.

Patched to say "Boredcast message", as I recall!

Yes, that is correct.

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