TimeLine1996

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

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.

This is the `dmesg` output of an early boot of Nurse.

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

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.

November

26th - First ever Intersocs event called "The First Fiddle" in the Mean Fiddler. Poster for the event is 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.