[VoiceOps] Off-topic: nether.net

[Alex Balashov]

This is profoundly unrelated to anything voice, but thought I'd share a brief anecdote that I regret not taking the time to put into words earlier. I'm sorry if it's inappropriate for this list, but it's not very busy nowadays, so hopefully it won't be skin off anyone's nose.

I'm pushing 40 now, but I spent much of my 1990s childhood at [the University of] Notre Dame, where my parents were poor graduate students. We couldn't afford any nontrivial computer hardware or home Internet access; I believe we had a 386SX/40 with 8 MB of RAM and MS-DOS 6.22/Win 3.1 as late as 1997, no connectivity. However, Notre Dame is a wealthy private institution and I certainly had proximity to impressive hardware and connectivity. 

The old-timers on this list won't be impressed that I was on the web (and Gopher, and Usenet) in 1994, but considering I was 8 and had just arrived to the US two years prior, from the USSR, it was quite a precocious start.

Spurred on by an interest in the C programming language and multi-user chat servers, I wormed my way to some atmospheric awareness of UNIX, and even Linux, by 9 or 10, but had neither the skills, nor hardware, nor the mandate to take over our paltry family PC with it. I knew I needed to learn something called the UNIX shell, which I understood to be akin to the by-now familiar DOS commands, but, aside from some not-entirely-licit but limited tinkering with Solaris and AIX on campus (abetted by sympathetic CS graduate students), I didn't have a straightforward path to doing that.

I remember being sat in the Hesburgh Library reference room at an NT4 workstation, aged maybe 10, when I ecstatically stumbled upon one of the vanishingly few places that offered Linux/UNIX shell accounts to... well, anyone: nether.net <http://nether.net/>, run by one Jared Mauch, based in Ypsilanti, MI in those days I think. The other was sdf.lonestar.org <http://sdf.lonestar.org/>, which I think was *BSD, and in any case, quite overloaded. 

Nobody was more uplifted and grateful than ~10 year-old me to his own Linux shell account at puck.nether.net <http://puck.nether.net/>. I could even host a site out of ~/public_html! My first few baby steps with 'ls', 'cd', 'mkdir' and the rest were taken there, and, while I don't want to get too grandiose and lyrical, I think it's safe to say that was instrumental and central to every aspect of my professional future. Within a year or two, I was running RedHat 4.0 / kernel 2.0.29 at home on a donated 486, and the rest is history. 

All to say, I found it quite heartwarming when I saw that this list was hosted here when it spun out of NANOG. 

Thank you, Jared, for nether.net <http://nether.net/>, for hosting this list, your service to the community, and to giving a know-it-all munchkin an invaluable learning tool. 

-- 
Alex Balashov
Principal Consultant
Evariste Systems LLC
Web: https://evaristesys.com
Tel: +1-706-510-6800