At 12:57 PM 3/29/01 -0600, you wrote:
At 10:24 pm +1200 3/29/01, dean(a)flatnet.gen.nz wrote:
Maybe Richard Naylor has an update on WCC's Kosmos =)
Last time I saw it (2 years ago), it was way up on the top level of a very high pallet rack at Encore Auctions warehouse in Wainuiomata.
Given that it's going to be destroyed in the next earthquake if it remains in that position, may I suggest that it is rescued and sent to a suitable museum urgently, as it is a very important part of NZ Internet history.
There were actually 3 Kosmos machines. The original was a VAX 750, then it became a micro-Vax II, then a cluster of Micro-VAX-IIs (3 I think), and finally a Micro-Vax 3900. I lost track of them all when I moved out of IT in 94, although I oversaw the direction of the public bits and its eventual closure in 96. The modems are probably still around somewhere. They were CASE Quatro modems in a rack. Of course CASE became Dowty, then Cray Comms, then Anite and now Logical. The modems were bought in 1988, but it took 2 years for me to pluck up courage and let the public in.. There were 24 of them, 8 public, 8 WCC and 8 IT staff. WCC usage was low so we used 12 for public use, 4 for wcc and 8 for IT. CityNet was actually started in 1986 and was teh name for the whole WCC network. When we allowed public access, we used to send public users copies of our in house newsletter and so people tend to think of CityNet as only the public bit. We ran our first fibers between MED and WCC in August 1988 with ethernet. We subsequently added another 4 or 5 buildings and then all the buildings of the new Civic Center. This then lead to what is now known as CityLink, although CityLink didn't start until 95/96. Once again it took a few years before I was brave enough to do it publicly. What none of the users knew was that during the rebuild of Civic Center, we kept the computer center in place while they gutted the building. We had a buldozer parked outside the door and had a special stair case from outside. During the "construction" we had 2 fires and 1 flood, but kept the service going, as well as servicing WCC, MED, Milk, Buses, etc some 1500 users. I still remember getting into work at 3am during one fire in under 10 minutes. As we had a contract with DECUS, CityNet at one stage had dial in modems in Auckland, Palmerston North, Levin/Otaki, Wn and Christchurch as well as via X25. We used to feed news out via UUCP to many places and via DECnet to Christchurch City Council. I think we were their email feed for many years. richard.naylor(a)citylink.co.nz --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog