[Shop-talk] Quick question on garage floors and garage lifts

[Chris Kantarjiev]

Randall wrote:
>> No e-mail then either, though.
> 
> You didn't hang out in the right places.  The UNIX system with ARPANET
> access was over in the EE building.  Some heated discussions as I recall,
> over the EE department having it instead of the Math dept.

Hmm. Not quite right. It's true that the EE department had an ARPANET IMP in one 
of the labs (it was the signal processing prof ... can't recall his name) but 
they balked at buying the interface required to connect it to a PDP-11, thinking 
they should build their own. That went on for two years until the ARPA folks 
decided that there was no point in having an IMP there if it wasn't connected.

The CS department got an IMP in 1981 as part of the CSNET project, and that 
finally got Purdue onto the ARPANET (I was in charge of it.)

>> When I returned for grad school a few years later (1973), there were 
>> remote terminals to directly input FORTRAN programs at a few campus
>> locations.
> 
> Ah yes, the Purdue Remote Online Computing SYstem, aka PROCSY.  I spent
> many, many hours using it; that might have been better spent studying,
> sleeping, etc.

First there was PROCSY, then there were VAXen that supplanted/replaced PROCSY 
but did much the same sort of remote job entry to the CDC 6000 machines. 
Ultimately, the PUCC folks decided that it was acceptable to have people do 
their computing directly on the VAXen! What a concept.