UCBVAX - R.I.P. August 19, 1994

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Thu, 18 Aug 94 19:28:12 -0700
From: Peter Langston <pud!psl () bellcore bellcore com>


[With apologies to those of you who have no idea how a bunch of nerds
could get nostalgic over the passing of a piece of hardware... hmmm,
that's not too hard to imagine, is it?  Well, then, with apologies to
those of you who never had a relationship with ucbvax to get nostalgic
about... -psl]


Forwarded-by: bostic () CS Berkeley EDU (Keith Bostic)
Newsgroups: ucb.net.announce,ba.internet,comp.mail.uucp
From: eric () CS Berkeley EDU (Eric Allman)
Subject: death of ucbvax


Venerable old ucbvax, once a cross-roads of the network, will be
turned off for the last time on Friday, 19 August at 2:00pm PST (21:00
GMT).  Should you recall the glory days of ucbvax, you might allow for
a minute of net-silence as we shut it down.  (If anyone happens to be
in a position to monitor any backbones, please let me know if usage
dips.)  There will be a small, private gathering as the circuit
breaker is thrown.


To add insult to injury, the hardware will be salvaged by the Police
Department to run card-key systems -- after conversion to VMS.  Sigh.


Ucbvax, formerly a major UUCP and news site, had fallen on hard times
as the world moved past MicroVAXen.  In recent years, it had
essentially no support, still running an out of date version of BSD on
very slow and small disks.  It valiantly continued in its task even as
the world moved on to SuperScalar RISCs.  The Computer Science
Division finally moved into a new building, leaving ucbvax alone in a
cold, dark machine room.  Ucbvax immediately developed disk hiccups in
the swap area.  We are keeping it on life support until the ceremony.


Please feel free to redistribute this message to anyone who might be
interested.


                         UCBVAX
                          R.I.P.
                     August 19, 1994