Hardware

All the early hardware was donated, along with power and advice from various bits of the university. Without the help of people like Tony Ollier, Kevin Daniels, Paul Matthews and the support of senior people in the various departments none of this would be possible. Thanks to their help Swansea was probably five years ahead of most universities in developing student run computing, and many of those who cut their teeth on the computer society sysape account went on to work in computing using these skills.

The number of connections being very limited, and also being open to the public, a very strict timeout system was being ran which ensured that there was always one line left open for society members to login, and would ruthelessly timeout anyone, and kick off anonymous "guest" users in order to achieve this. It was named 'wowbagger' for its rudeness. There were a maximum of three guests at any one time. It may be time now to admit that one or two Galaxy admins knew how to boot specific 'guest' users off at will using this program.

As time moved on the society inherited better hardware, firstly Sunacm  a sun3 (68020 series cpu) system, as was the later installed sunrise. Between the two, a sun4 was donated called supercomputer (one of the very early sun4 sparc machines). They were all in large tower cases. Supercomputer was in two - one held the disks and the other was the cpu. Supercomputer was a huge leap in the computing power available to the society, although the name proved unfortunate as it led to people all over the world trying to break into it. The sun systems ended up hosted in the main machine rooms. in part because of strong support by members of the computer centre and also because a certain amount of trust had been developed over the years.

The sun systems were attached to one of the last bits of thick ethernet on the campus and chaos thus ensued when this failed. It turned out that water had been leaking into the cable from the top of the tower block and slowly destroying it. When the end of the cable was removed in the machine room, a nine storey head of water in the cable was briefly unleashed.

When SUCS moved to the EE tower, sucs.sucs.swan.ac.uk became the router for the other sucs machines, until then all the machines had been directly connected to the University's network. That was the start of what is the current SUCS network and which in turn would eventually relocate from the tower to the current location in the bowels of the student union.

The first 100BaseTx Ethernet card (a Dlink card with a Via Rhine chipset) was donated by Steve Whitehouse (Rohan) and installed in Sucs circa 1998 after we were told that the 10Mbps uplink to the University's network would be upgraded to 100Mbps.  However, it wasn't until some time later (2000?) that uplink upgrade happened and by this time we had installed a gateway machine between Sucs and the University network.  Since the gateway only had ISA card slots it couldn't support the PCI 100Mbps card and was stuck with 10M cards until December 2003 when it was upgraded from a 486 SX33 to a K6 400.

The first gigE cards for SUCS were installed about 2005 along with a netgear gigE switch.

Accomodation for the systems was still a problem and being made worse year by year as the University adopted more and more ludicrous pseudo "free market" policies in line with the government thinking of the time. Instead of rooms being a shared resource they became something departments paid to use, and departments started dumping rooms as fast as they could, squashing hardware into small spaces and trying to maximise use of less locations. Fortunately the Electrical Engineering department offered the society a new home for a while, and except for an incident with a student trying to run a pirate music download site worked very well.

As time moved on the society inherited better hardware, firstly Sunacm  a sun3 (68020 series cpu) system, as was the later installed sunrise. Between the two, a sun4 was donated called supercomputer (one of the very early sun4 sparc machines). They were all in large tower cases. Supercomputer was in two - one held the disks and the other was the cpu. Supercomputer was a huge leap in the computing power available to the society, although the name proved unfortunate as it led to people all over the world trying to break into it. The sun systems ended up hosted in the main machine rooms. in part because of strong support by members of the computer centre and also because over time a certain amount of trust had been developed over the years.

development was done on the machine and Alan Cox came to be the Linux networking maintainer. The PC showed up another problem - the bullet software running the BBS and chat system was not easily converted to run on a little-endian system. As a result of this Justin Mitchell went on to write Milliways.

The very first computer was a donated [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCR_Corporation |NCR Tower 16/32]], the computer which we named galaxy was connected to the university's (and thus [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET|JANET]]) [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.25|X25]] network, through connections between its multiple serial ports and a Camtec PAD. Galaxy was accessible from anywhere on janet via the address 00006060180150. It lived in the "Core" room which was in the centre of the Comp Sci bit of the tower block on the third floor (this is now the Psychology Tower? Behind the duck pond). This room had to be kept locked, and only one postgrad had access to it (Robin). The machine would occasionally crash and need rebooting, and we couldn't always pester Robin. So there was a long piece of string tied around the reboot switch (which was a switch rather than a button) and this string ran out of the room through the keyhole. When a reboot was needed, we pulled the string. This honestly worked, although occasionally it came off in your hand, and there was a memorable occasion when someone inside the room cut the string. At some stage a replacement piece of string was billed to the union under a name of "Emergency manual reboot mechanism" or some such. This was the case until about 1991.

Whilst Galaxy was in the tower block, compsoc got a second machine, twice the specs of Galaxy. 8Mb RAM, 140Mb disc (00006060180180). Woo! This was a Tower and called Inferno (ho ho..). These machines were subsequently moved to the computer centre reception area. A third machine was added, turned on, and immediately turned off again as the reception staff objected to working with what sounded like a large washing machine in the background. This became Zanussi, but it was never used. A fourth machine (name?) was added to play with KA9Q software. This was also the initial email gateway for the compsoc, on TCP/IP as the university had begun to make heavier use of TCP/IP and the replacement of the X.25/X.29 network between universities with TCP/IP had begun. Around the time of the move, it became policy to prepend "su" to machine names to identify the nominal owners (the compsoc wasn't a departmental thing so couldn't be ee or cs and so had to be student union).  Inferno also had additional semi-official links to the TCP/IP network in computer science using a session multiplexing daemon living on a computer science
sun machine and translating multiple TCP/IP connections into a single serial link.

As time moved on the society inherited better hardware, firstly Sunacm  a sun3 (68020 series cpu) system, as was the later installed sunrise. Between the two, a sun4 was donated called supercomputer (one of the very early sun4 sparc machines). They were all in large tower cases. Supercomputer was in two - one held the disks and the other was the cpu. Supercomputer was a huge leap in the computing power available to the society, although the name proved unfortunate as it led to people all over the world trying to break into it.

Accomodation for the systems was still a problem and being made worse year by year as the University adopted more and more ludicrous pseudo "free market" policies in line with the government thinking of the time. Instead of rooms a shared resource they became something departments paid to use, and departments started dumping rooms as fast as they could, squashing hardware into small spaces and trying to maximise use of less locations. Fortunately the Electrical Engineering department offered the society a new home for a while, and except for an incident with a student trying to run a pirate music download site worked very well.

The number of connections being very limited, and also being open to the public, a very strict timeout system was being ran which ensured that there was always one line left open for society members to login, and would ruthelessly timeout anyone, and kick off anonymous "guest" users in order to achieve this. It was named 'wowbagger' for its rudeness. There were a maximum of three guests at any one time. It may be time now to admit that one or two Galaxy admins knew how to boot specific 'guest' users off at will using this program.

Whilst Galaxy was in the tower block, compsoc got a second machine, twice the specs of Galaxy. 8Mb RAM, 140Mb disc. Woo! This was a Tower and called Inferno (ho ho..). These machines were subsequently moved to the computer centre reception area. A third machine was added, turned on, and immediately turned off again as the reception staff objected to working with what sounded like a large washing machine in the background. This became Zanussi, but it was never used. A fourth machine (name?) was added to play with KA9Q software. This was also the initial email gateway for the compsoc, on TCP/IP. Around the time of the move, it became policy to prepend "su" to machine names to identify the nominal owners (the compsoc wasn't a departmental thing so couldn't be ee or cs and so had to be student union).

Around 1991/92 the university started to roll out a TCP/IP network to replace the X25 one, and joined the JANET JIPS service. An i386 PC was added to the collection in order to bridge email from smtp onto the NCR towers. This computer is the one on which Alan Cox did his famous work on the Linux TCP/IP stack.

The x.25 network login (two serial connections from a PAD) for sugalaxy (by 92/93 time it had been upgraded to a 386 running Linux) was 00006060180180 in addition to the number listed above.

Sunacm was a sun3 (68000 series cpu) as was the later installed sunrise. Between the two, a sun4 was donated called supercomputer (one of the very early, not quite sparc machines). They were all in large tower cases. Supercomputer was in two - one held the disks and the other was the cpu.

SUCS also had its own user area on the Pyramid, one of the two mainframes that the University ran. The Pyramid was used by computer science and engineering. Most other subject areas, if they got a mainframe account at all, got an account on the VAX.

When SUCS moved to the EE tower, sucs.sucs.swan.ac.uk became the router for the other sucs machines, until then all the machines had been directly connected to the University's network. That was the start of what is the current SUCS network.

The number of connections being very limited, and also being open to the public, a very strict timeout system was being ran which ensured that there was always one line left open for society members to login, and would ruthelessly timeout anyone, and kick off anonymous users in order to achieve this. It was named 'wowbagger' for its rudeness. It may be time now to admit that one or two Galaxy admins knew how to boot specific 'guest' users off at will using this program.

Once we had migrated from the computer science tower down to the computer centre reception area, a second NCR Tower was added, and named Inferno (obvious bad puns are intentional), this gave more processing power to spread the load a little more.

The very first computer was a donated [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCR_Corporation |NCR Tower 16/32]], the computer which we named galaxy was connected to the university's (and thus [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET|JANET]]) [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.25|X25]] network, through connections between its multiple serial ports and a Camtec PAD. Galaxy was accessible from anywhere on janet via the address 00006060180150.

The limited number of connections available could be used either to login to accounts on the machine, or for the public to connect to the [[http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~steve/bullet.html|Bullet]] BBS System that we ran under the name Milliways.

The number of connections being very limited, and also being open to the public, a very strict timeout system was being ran which ensured that there was always one line left open for society members to login, and would ruthelessly timeout anyone, and kick off anonymous users in order to achieve this. It was named 'wowbagger' for its rudeness.

Once we had migrated from the computer science tower down to the computer centre recption area a second NCR tower was added, and named Inferno (obvious bad puns are intentional), this gave more processing power to spread the load a little more.

When SUCS moved to the EE tower, sucs.sucs.swan.ac.uk became the router for the other sucs machines, until then
all the machines had been directly connected to the University's network. That was the start of what is the current SUCS network.

The first 100M Ethernet cards appeared in machines about the time that SUCS moved into the SU building, the external connection from this room which we'd been told had recently been upgraded to 100M, although it was some months later that we actually got moved to a 100M port on that switch. The gateway was stuck with 10M cards until December 2003 when it was upgraded from a 486 SX33 to a K6 400.

Around 1991/92 the university started to roll out a TCP/IP network to replace the X25 one, and joined the janet JIPS service. An i386 pc was added to the collection in order to bridge email from smtp onto the ncr towers. This computer is the one that Alan Cox did his famous work on the Linux TCP/IP stack.

When another PC was dontated to the society, it became sucs.sucs.swan.ac.uk which was probably about in the 93/94 time scale.

The first 100M Ethernet cards appeared in machines about the time that SUCS moved into the SU building, the external connection from this room which we'd been told had recently been upgraded to 100M, although it was some months later that we actually got moved to a 100M port on that switch. The gateway was stuck with 10M cards until December 2003 when it was upgraded from a 486 SX33 to a K6400.

The first 100M ethernet card was installed in gw.sucs.swan.ac.uk at about the time that SUCS moved into the SU building for the external connection which we'd been told has recently been upsgraded to 100M, although it was some months later that we actually got moved to a 100M port on that switch.