Access to a Shared Unix Computer
tilde.club
tilde.club
This is cool, though. Gives people a taste of what it used to be like with everyone in the university logged into the big time-sharing machines all together.
I had an account on a 3B20, and it did not impress me in the least, but the 3B2/400 boxes in one lab were pretty reasonable for being small systems. What a shame that the WE32000 didn't get any traction.
Before I went down to UIUC, the junior college had a Prime 650, and all compile jobs were run through a queue precisely to avoid having the machine get crushed.
The 3B20 might have been slow, but it had a solid I/O subsystem so you could load it up with users, and was generally reliable (it was originally built as a telco switch control processor looking for 5-nines uptime). But by the later 80s the industry had moved on, and we were in the process of migrating those CS classes from the 3B20 to either a Sequent Symmetry (follow-on to the Balance with something like 16x i386) or a Pyramid 90x, depending on the class. The Symmetry was...not reliable. The 90x was worse. The wails of a lab full of undergrads realizing the shared machine had just taken a dirt-nap and all their work with it was a far too common sound. Good times.
We also had a bunch of 3b2s, most with an AT&T 5620 'windowing terminal' attached, which is a really fascinating 'what might have been' if bitmapped workstations and X11 hadn't taken over that niche. I ended up with a Sun 3/160 for most of that time, and the rest is history.
We only had a few of the 5620s in the 3B2 lab, and I remember a wacky mechanical mouse with a metal ball that I can't imagine would have held up in the long run. The PLATO touchscreens were optical, with a grid of infrared beams to pick up touches.
We could call it Multics!
But yeah, I remember those glory days of everybody on the school's Sun 3/280, when an accidental fork bomb would ruin everyone's homework.
I didn't learn much following the link itself other than it is supposed to be pronounced TIL-dee and that some people have more money to spare than others.