What are SDF's origins and history?

While I never tried to join their community proper, several years ago I did send them $36 to get a lifetime "ARPA" membership. The service is, as you might expect, old fashioned: you get a grand total of 600MB of storage and access to a regular user account on their NetBSD servers. Meanwhile, for a few dollars per month from umpteen VPS providers I can get tons of storage and the ability to virtualize just about any operating system - and like many, I don't expect to get to a financial state where that would be a significant burden anytime soon, hopefully ever. But dealing with billing requires some level of active maintenance, however small, and in the long run providers come and go. SDF requires zero - I can have paid zero attention to the service for years, but if I suddenly need to do SSH forwarding to get past a firewall and don't have anything else handy, the shell is a few keystrokes away; if someone chances upon an old link to some basic web content I set up on it years ago, it will work. They've been around for close to three decades, and as a small enthusiasts' group (which survives despite having long had very uncompetitive prices for their higher-level services, which unlike ARPA have periodic fees), they're not as vulnerable as your average big company to going out of business when industry trends change. Personally, I'd have paid a lot more than $36 for that quality of guarantee!

I'm not a member but one thing that's kind of interesting is having a rootless, shell-based community. We have this at work on our jumphosts and it's generally a Good Thing. Sharing datasets and scripts is just a filesystem namespace operation. It's up to the system operators to keep the machine running well and influencing how it is used by i.e. setting up certain packages and services. It's incredibly productive to be in a tmux session with vim, mutt, tin, man pages, ssh, etc as your interface and minimal distraction.

As an old anime fan, I got excited seeing the magic letters SDF in the title. Well, it's not about the spacecraft - but this ancient BBS indeed took its name from the beloved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF-1_Macross

It’s pretty amusing that the first Unix clone they tried was made by a former soda company :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company

Wow, I got really sad reading about the idiot that left the borrowed 3B2/500 in his trunk and then on a porch in the elements.

I've been hunting for a late model 3B2 for a decade.

"(For related information on SDF and the history behind this public access UNIX system, read "The HACKER CRACKDOWN" by Bruce Sterling)" @ http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/hackcrac.pdf (use something like ePDFView and rotate the book)

I had an account on lonestar.sdf.org, but then I let it lapse and there was a change to the server name/login. I'm not sure I could reclaim lonestar, but I remember trying to make that my permanent account for a while. Between that and Riseup, the early 00's were a great time for staking your place with an email address that signaled your values.

I love the HTML source code of one of the linked MOO games:

view-source:http://thxmoo.org/

No HTML tags, very clean & compact. It's rare to see handwritten HTML these days.

There's also sdf-eu.org for users located in Europe (eu server is in Germany).

There aren't really that many shell providers. SDF (with SDF-EU) and devio.us are about the only ones that seem trustworthy (whatever that means) to me.

These kind of services should be more popular, I think. I'd definitely join a Plan9 (or 9front), just to play with the stuff and learn the system.

Check out 'profiles' on SDF. It's a CLI social network thingy. People don't really use it, but it brought a smile to my face.