TimeLine1996

2006-01-07T22:49:04Z

Drjolt: /* Pre-History */

{{Timeline Years}}

==Pre-History==

In October of 1995 a group of friends started the ball rolling on the idea of a computer network in DCU, run by students for the students. Starting out with a battered 386 PC with 8 MB of RAM(dubbed Nurse), bits of borrowed memory, their own cash, and a lot of luck, they went about organising the D.C.U Networking society. The initial build of the Nurse was performed on an 800MB hard drive (the first RB disk) in DrJolt's home computer on February 4th, 1996. Once recognised as a society, they were allowed to setup a temporary home for the server in the Computer Applications facility, going online in the postgrad area on March 5th, 1996 as dcuns.compapp.dcu.ie. Later, the society received its own subnet and subdomain of dcu.ie from the Computer Services Department.

Having decided to try for an alternative to 'dcuns' as the domain name, 'RedBrick' was selected, [[Rbwiki_DrJolt]]'s suggestion being inspired by the diverse and exciting architecture of DCU (at that time, most permanent structures in DCU were built of red brick). They were also able to find physical accomodation (the CA department being unwilling to extend the temporary arrangements) in which to store Nurse, under a desk in QG07. Nurse went online as Nurse.RedBrick.dcu.ie on April 9th, 1996.

==April==

The DCU Networking Society is founded.

9th - nurse.redbrick.dcu.ie goes officially online<br />

The primary application on Redbrick for members was the BBS (Bulletin Board System(. The BBS ran on top of a shell and featured chat and newsgroups. The BBS software Redbrick used was called Eagle BBS. The Babble newsgroup was created this month.

<p> This is the `dmesg` output of an early boot of Nurse.
<pre>
FreeBSD 2.1.0-RELEASE #0: Fri Apr 26 10:54:02 BST 1996
root@Nurse.RedBrick.DCU.IE:/usr/src/sys/compile/NURSEP5
CPU: 60-MHz Pentium 510\60 (Pentium-class CPU)
Origin = "GenuineIntel" Id = 0x517 Stepping=7
Features=0x1bf<FPU,VME,PSE,MCE,CX8,APIC>
real memory = 67108864 (65536K bytes)
avail memory = 63287296 (61804K bytes)
Probing for devices on the ISA bus:
scprobe: keyboard RESET failed fe
sc0 at 0x60-0x6f irq 1 on motherboard
sc0: VGA color <12 virtual consoles, flags=0x0>
ed0 at 0x300-0x31f irq 5 on isa
ed0: address 00:c0:df:47:63:d2, type NE2000 (16 bit)
psm0 not found at 0x60
sio0 at 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 on isa
sio0: type 16550A
pca0 on motherboard
pca0: PC speaker audio driver
wdc0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7 irq 14 flags 0x80ff80ff on isa
wdc0: unit 0 (wd0): <QUANTUM TRB850A>, multi-block-8
wd0: 810MB (1660176 sectors), 1647 cyls, 16 heads, 63 S/T, 512 B/S
wdc0: unit 1 (wd1): <ST32140A>, multi-block-32
wd1: 2015MB (4127760 sectors), 4095 cyls, 16 heads, 63 S/T, 512 B/S
wdc1 not found at 0x170
fdc0 at 0x3f0-0x3f7 irq 6 drq 2 on isa
npx0 on motherboard
npx0: INT 16 interface
Probing for devices on the PCI bus:
chip0 <Intel 82434LX (Mercury) PCI cache memory controller> rev 3 on pci0:0
chip1 <Intel 82378ZB PCI-ISA bridge> rev 3 on pci0:2
changing root device to wd0a
WARNING: / was not properly dismounted.
in_rtqtimo: adjusted rtq_reallyold to 2400
in_rtqtimo: adjusted rtq_reallyold to 1600
in_rtqtimo: adjusted rtq_reallyold to 1066
in_rtqtimo: adjusted rtq_reallyold to 710
pid 23316: cgiemail.cgi: uid 65534: exited on signal 11
pid 23581: cgiemail.cgi: uid 65534: exited on signal 11
</pre>
</p>

==May==
==June==
==July==
==August==
==September==

The second generation of brickies appeared. The BBS was still available.

===Founding committee===

* Chair: Hyper
* Secretary: Wibble
* Treasurer: Swipe
* PRO/Ents: Sandman
* Systems Administrators: Drjolt and Fergus

Two 4.6 gig disks added to Nurse to replace burned out disks. After a "misunderstanding" with CSD, Redbrick's full external access was removed.

==October==
==November==

26th - First ever Intersocs event called "The First Fiddle" in the Mean Fiddler. Poster for the event is [http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~awol/phtml/timeline/docs/fiddler.doc here].

==December==

Christmas Party in the Jolly Beggarman pub in Artane.
Thayl had to go to hospital after falling off a telephone box after closing time.

User:Drjolt

2006-01-07T22:32:25Z

Drjolt:

One of the founders of RedBrick.

TimeLine2002

2006-01-07T22:31:38Z

Drjolt: /* November */

{{Timeline Years}}

==January==

1st - Euro currency comes into circulation in Ireland.

==February==

9th - Irish currency no longer legal tender.

18th - AIB moves from standalone building in front of the Physics building to a unit in the "Street" in the Henry Gratten building.

18th - Rag Week.
19th - Redbrick alt.Rag Ball in Mono.
Damien Rice and Kid Icarus play.

21st - Redbrick Radio mailing list setup to discuss having a streaming radio station on redbrick.

26th - Redbrick disables accounts which haven't been renewed.
There is debate over some of the accounts as they are believed to have been used by people who were neither past or present students or staff of DCU.

27th - Prodigy goes down due to hard SCSI errors generated apparently by the cdrom drive.

27th - Redbrick Radio begins test broadcast.

28th - CSD grants Redbrick permission to keep existing accounts which had been used by people who, ordinarily, would not be entitled to redbrick accounts.

==March==

13th/14th - Students Union elections.

14th - The Xbox is launched in Europe.

15th - Sean Scally is elected President of DCU SU for the coming year.
Michael Moriarty is elected Vice President.

15th - redbrick.news.urls board created.

15th - My last day of lectures!!!

17th - redbrick.news.urls board deleted.
redbrick.agm board created.

22nd - Singer creates a new Yahoo group for when redbrick is offline.

29th - Redbrick is taken offline over Easter weekend for admin work.

==April==

DCU plans to let go part-time lecturers in the School of Communications because of the budget cuts. However these lecturers taught 90% of the Multimedia course, thus DCU has massively restructured the course ("butchered" was a word used).

2nd - Redbrick is back online.

3rd - Students' Union holds a referendum on disaffiliating from USI. Students vote in favour of disaffiliation.

4th - Comment posted to the message board in the MUD by wishkah@rb.

5th - The Archery Club is co-founded by halenger@rb and holds its first training session.

16th - Helpdesk candidates' test.

17th - Admin candidates' test.

18th - Webmaster candidates' test.

18th - 207 users logged on simultaneously.

22th - c-hey 2.0 released by Colmmacc.

23rd - AGM.
Kamili is elected as chair. Colmmacc also ran and Azrael was also nominated.
Montoya is elected as secretary. Azrael was also nominated.
Marvin is elected as treasurer. Anakin also ran.
Angel is elected as ents officer. Egg also ran.
Del_boy is elected as PRO. Azrael and Magluby also ran.
Pixies, Dizer, and Cns are elected as admins. Trevj also ran.
Emperor is elected as webmaster. Nero and Entropy also ran.
Cambo, Skyhawk, and Mark are elected to helpdesk. A drunk Dec also ran.
There was a close vote in both ents and chair elections and recounts were done.
Cns was given an award for his work on committee over the year.
Some ammendments were passed, including one removing the entry which said that founder members should have free membership for life.
Shadow video-ed the AGM.
The post AGM bash was held in Pravda.

==May==

2nd - Colmmacc coins the phrase "Onionisms" to describe emperor's use of phrases which read like headlines from theonion.com

3rd - Shadow calculates the longest running threads that have occurred since March 2000. "FREE THE ODYSSEY ONE" is the longest thread with over 1000 posts.

3rd - The Gamecube is launched in Europe.

16th - redbrick.sex.minority.perversions is created after a suggestion by werewulf.

17th - Irish general election. First election to use electronic voting in some constituencies. Fianna Fail wins enough to form the next government.

19th - redbrick.sports.soccer.worldcup created.

20th - East Timor becomes the first new nation of the 21st century.

31st - World Cup in Japan and South Korea begins. Brazil won.

==June==

6th - Ireland.com becomes a subscription service immediately reducing the number of posts to .news

11th - Marvin resigns from the Redbrick committee.

16th - An official web interface for reading some of the boards is put up on the website. However some members object to their posts being readable by anyone on the web.

==July==

5th - colmmacc writes the Tardis which is designed to make long urls which are sometimes posted to the boards more presentable.

14th - Colmmacc mails the admin-discuss list to talk about implementing webmail on Redbrick. He has made it possible, but the solution required setting up various files which I for one (cokane) was too lazy to do.

19th - Competition is announced to design HTTP error pages for the Redbrick web server.

30th - USI organises a capitation march in the city centre in protest at the 69% rise in capitation fees.

==August==

1st - Due to communication problems and a 3 month old "at" job, ents.dcu.ie is deleted.

13th - Redbrick.test has become a sort of extra .babble board. Jaydee and Deebee open their new "club" called t:Est on redbrick.test.

30th - Trip to London organised by Redbrick to see some computer game museum and get pissed. 11 people go in the end: Angel, Moridin, Montoya, Magluby, Vendetta, Belial, Thor, Sheila, Kamili, Goratrix, and Colmmacc.

31st - Google automatically redirects users to google.ie now.

==September==

3rd - Cns sets up Redbrick fortune. The first quotes in it are from Pixies' Laws.

4th - Brickie Slack is arrested at 5am at Shannon airport with another man for painting anti-war slogans on an American military plane.

4th - The news server is down a lot because it is hosted on enigma and the RAID array is being setup on enigma causing a lot of downtime for it. Colmmacc sets up a temporary news server on prodigy late in the day.

11th - redbrick.committee newsgroup is setup for correspondance with the Redbrick committee.

14th - Eoin Dubsky(slack) has his picture on the front page of the Irish Times. There is an article inside about how a High Court judge supported his case against the government in court yesterday (Friday) the 13th.

15th - redbrick.egm is created for discussing the upcoming EGM.

23rd - New rules posted to the board in MUD

25th - lists.bugtraq is setup by bobb after a post to .suggestions.

26th - lists.bugtraq made read-only so ppl can't post to it and end up spamming the list.

==October==

1st - Redbrick EGM in CG12 to elect a new treasurer. Dimples was elected treasurer.
An amendment to remove an amendment from the previous AGM about full minutes was passed after much discussion, as was an amendment about releasing minutes which was stricter than the removed one.

9th - Clubs and Socs day in DCU.
Redbrick has a higher ratio of renewals to new memberships this year. The main Redbrick stand is in the seminar room upstairs in the Hub.

11th - imurphy@rb is apparently the first 8th gen redbrick member to log on. Good for them!

11th - The admins change the slrn, mutt, and zsh setups slightly to make them more appealing to freshers.

15th - redbrick.computing.apple is setup after thayl gets an iBook.

16th - Redbrick Freshers' Event in Da2 on Wicklow St.
DJ [[Rbwiki_HomerJ|HomerJ]] plays downstairs while Pugwash and Veto Caul play upstairs.

19th - Second Nice referendum. The result is a Yes vote.

22nd - First Redbrick tutorial of the year in LG25 about the basics of using Redbrick.

==November==

6th - intersocs.news, intersocs.suggestions, and intersocs.help created by Colmmacc.
These newsgroups are hosted by HEAnet (which has a number of brickies working there) as opposed to the old intersocs board(s) which was hosted by various netsocs at different times.

7th - [[Rbwiki_DrJolt|DrJolt]] asks Pooka to delete his account and he obliges. DrJolt returned to RedBrick a year later.

7th - Post-Halloween event in [[Rbwiki_SoSuMe|SoSuMe]].

10th - Montoya resigns as secretary of Redbrick.

13th - Angel resigns as ents officer of Redbrick.

13th - Trinity netsoc members start posting to the intersocs boards.

20th - intersocs.general, intersocs.sex, intersocs.social, intersocs.computing.windows, intersocs.computing.unix, intersocs.tv, intersocs.music, intersocs.movies created.

21st - Mark resigns from Redbrick helpdesk.

27th - Intersocs event between Trinity and Redbrick in Da2. The Chalets, Capratone and Skylight play.

==December==

2nd - Consumer boycott about price rises since the introduction of the Euro.

5th - Limerick netsoc, Skynet, start posting to intersocs boards.

5th - Redbrick EGM
gouki elected to secretary with one vote difference to trevj so a new EGM is called after alegations of voting slips of people who had left the room being used.
Purdy elected to ents.
Dec elected to helpdesk.

11th - Redbrick Christmas event Held in Down Under at Major Tom's in association with Filmsoc, Dance Soc, Archery, Clubbers and DCUMac.

16th - redbrick.puns newsgroup is created after a suggestion by del_boy.

17th - Redbrick EGM
Trevj was elected secretary. No one else ran.

Redbrick Wiki - User contributions [en]

TimeLine1996

User:Drjolt

TimeLine2002