I have nothing particularly useful to add to the history here, but just wanted to say how
much I appreciate hearing about the MIT ITS machines.
Around 1982, I was a 16-year old hacker living in suburban Maryland, running a CP/M BBS. I
came across a text file titled something like ?interesting phone numbers.? One of those
numbers I tried dialing up to was a local DOD TAC, which then led me to connect (over NCP)
to MIT-MC. Playing around at the login prompt, I got a message like ?That user doesn?t
exist; would you like an account??? and of course said yes! I was HNIJ at MIT-MC, if I
recall. A little later, RMS sponsored me (without ever meeting or knowing me) as
rms.g.hnij at mit-ai. I also used mit-ccc, which was v6 Unix, for my first foray into both
Unix and Usenet.
Anyway, it?s really fun to read about these machines that I spent so much time with and
learned so much from, yet were so abstract in their existence to me. ;-)
?John