The start of PANIX, the NYC ISP

John Allain and others mentioned PANIX recently on the 90's Internet Boom thread. I got a response from my friend David Spector, who helped out with Panix. At the time he was working as a UNIX system manager and senior systems programmer at NYU's business school. David identified the systems used as the Mac IIfx, but the IIfx wasn't introduced until 1990. The IIx was introduced in late 1988. Since he pegs the time as early 1988, the machines in question must be a Mac II with PMMU; David still has the receipts somewhere and might verify this sometime. This period would correspond with the announcement of A/UX in February of 1998. (These introduction dates are taken from the book Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen Linzmayer.) Here's what David had to say: =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= With regard to PANIX... In a nutshell, I helped start PANIX, which was funded by my old friend Alexis Rosen, by supplying the developer discount that bought a couple of MacIIfx's. I provided the UNIX expertise to get everything up and running; they ran A/UX and we used nuBus-based serial cards (name escapes me at the moment... I'll surely remember it later). At the time I was the Senior Systems Programmer at NYU's Graduate School of Business (long before it was the "Stern School of Business." The original machines lived for a while on my dining room table in my 5th floor walkup on 18th St & 8th Ave in Chelsea and used my spare lines with a couple of Zyxcel 9600bps modems until we got the machines configured correctly and did all sorts of hacking on the serial drivers for those (at the time) very kool (now, they would be dreadful) serial boards. After the systems were set up we moved everything to Jim Baumbach's Brooklyn Height's basement where we had 16 phone lines brought in. The MacIIfx's lived on top of a hand-wired plexus UNIX machine that Jim had liberated from one of his past lives. At the time (late 80s) the only other interesting dial-up in NY was Echo (East Coast Hang Out) run by Stacey Horn; I mean there were lots of BBSes but nothing at all resembling either Echo or PANIX. Echo, by the way, was considered by most people to be the East Coast equiv. of TheWell. I had an account on echo for a zillion years... still have my panix account too, of course.. As an ex-Systems Programmer from Courant (the NYU Academic Computing Facility) I arranged for Panix to get mail and news from NYU via UUCP (Bill Russell, a great friend and mentor, was NYU's Network Manager); the path was ...ihnp4!{cmcl2,acf4}!panix. They didn't get a real Internet connection until the ARPAnet/NSFNet split happened and the rules loosened up which if I recall correctly was a UUNet connection in about 1990. ..ah! those were the days... feel free to pass on to whomever might be interested in such historical tidbits. David HM Spector =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=