Progress Notes

7/1/08 Power is restored. Cyber1 is back online.

6/30/08 5:00 PM A quote from Mike: Cyber1 could be down for a while. I drove home on my bike to see a fire truck in front of my house, which is NEVER a good sign. I was pleasantly relieved to find out it was the transformer on the pole behind my house and fortunately behind the creek, but the firemen didn't realize they couldn't get across the barrier, so they had to drive around. But the upshot of it is: there is a pole there that had a transformer on it. The transformer is gone, the pole is smoking, and I hear from the neighbors that after this one went, another one down the street went. So this could be... cyber1 could be down for a while. Power's out at my house. From my experience, this could take up to a day.

10/29/06 The equipment is in its new Mountain View home and the main server, Monster, is up and running cyber1 successfully. Neither DSL line is functional yet, so cyber1 is still not available.

10/26/06 Cyber1 is moving to Mountain View and will be off-line for a few days. The hope is to have it up and running again Nov 1 or earlier.

10/20/06 Posted 4 homespun TrueType fonts, two created by Adam Baum, and two created by Paul Koning. They are available as downloads in the Installation section of the website.

7/31/06 9:10 PM. System is back up. PS was fine; it was the UPS. Monster has been running 24/7 for over 2 years, under non-server room (sometimes downright hot) conditions. To make conditions even tougher, the mainframe emulator runs cpu-bound, i.e. one cpu is always pegged at 100%. As controlfreak Gerard van der Grinten put it, "If you can't stand the heat, don't play dtcyber." In any case we have a good backup machine on hand.

7/31/06 7:45 AM. Awoke this morning to a quiet server. It turned off some time between midnight and now, and will not power on. Best guess is a bum power supply. Regardless of etiology, two things are clear: 1 This problem will not be fixed until I get off work this evening; 2 All likely scenarios result in having the system back up in some fashion tonight (e.g. borrowing a PS from the other machine while I obtain a replacement). So look to the system being back up around 9 pm tonight.

7/23/06 Pterm 4.06 available for all. It adds delay support in ascii mode. We passed 900 registered users today.

7/4/06 Pterm 4.01 available. It has ascii support, and can talk to Aaron's custom-built keyboards.

4/1/06 Registration page has been working fine. Paul sent pterm 3.02 for mac, which adds page up and page down and a couple other minor keyboard fixes.

3/15/06 Fixed 1/2 of a problem with the registration page; now people can at least register. Also added pterm for windows 3.02.

3/14/06 Today we moved the webserver back to its home in the rack. While the physical system changed location, cyber1.org had been hosted elsewhere (thanks to Gilbert Coville for hosting the website while cyber1 was moving). Cyberserv. org is now running fine under two new static ip's, 70.232.147.67 (SBC) and 69.17.54.41 (Speakeasy), and cyber1.org is at 70.232.147.68.

1/8/06 Fixed address for Paul's cvs server. Now anyone can have the source to build the most current version of pterm.

1/2/06 System was down for a good portion of Saturday and for a short time on Sunday due to very long power outtages here in Redwood City due to severe weather.

8/21/05 System was unavailable for a couple hours last night due to boisterous group s activities while Mike was cooking. Some pictures are available here.

8/20/05 Our production system is exactly one year old today. Party in Redwood City.

8/17/05 Pterm v 2.37 for everything is available. Fixed problems with Gooch Box.

7/705 Pterm v 2.34 for everything is available. Big fix to cut and paste, making it much easier for the user to have the system interact with the rest of their computer.

7/5/05 Pterm v 2.32 for everything is available. It adds a nice help screen that shows the various keyboard combinations needed for PLATO.

5/21/05 Pterm v 2.26 for mac is available as a disk image file. It fixes numerous keyboard problems with shifted keys, the numeric keypad, etc.

5/13/05 Pterm v 2.24, which adds cut-and-paste support, available for unix, mac, and windows.

5/1/05 Pterm v2.20 available. It adds Gooch Box support.

4/20/05 Pterm v2.10 betas with ppt support available for windows and linux.

4/17/05 Spring cleaning and numerous upgrades performed.

4/16/05 Rather than work on taxes, Paul has continued refining the betas of pterm v2.03 for windows or linux, adding the ability to open multiple windows from the 'file' menu, the ability to turn on '1200 baud emulation' (fun), and fixes for a variety of keyboard issues. Bill Galcher and Paul Resch are helping work on the mac version, which should be ready soon.

4/13/05 Pterm for Windows v2.01 beta and pterm 2.01 for linux et al are available. Paul fixed the F10 problem and removed -delay- support which was potentially causing problems in avatar.

4/10/05 Pterm for Windows v2.00 beta is available for testing. It is windows-native, so just unzip and put on your desktop (no more command line!) It does not work well in avatar. Post bug reports in fixlist.

3/27/05 Pterm 1.23 for windows, mac, and unix now available. Main change is easier support for characters like '@' while on the system. We passed 500 users this week. It is now normal to login at night to find yourself on with another 30-50 users. Added a new picture in 'screenshots' showing the final version of nos running on dtcyber, with our system, cyber1, loaded.

3/3/05 Last week Paul finished the fix for the dropped characters by greatly increasing the size of the input buffer. We also upgraded from NOS 2.1 to the final version of NOS, 2.8.7. Up to 454 registered users.

2/16/05 Lost data, had to restore from backup from 2/12 11 AM; any users created since then will have to be re-created. 434 users.

12/9/04 Pterm 1.21 for mac, windows, and unix available.

12/8/04 Some probs with one of the wans. If you are lagging tonight, try pterm 67.126.103.80 5004.

12/7/04 Some probs with pterm 1.20. The unix version should be fixed, now v 1.21. Rolled back windows to 1.14 until it too is fixed.

12/4/04 Pterm 1.20 for both unix and Windows available. 346 registered users.

11/29/04 Pterm 1.16 for linux/mac available. 334 registered users.

11/18/04 Pterm 1.14 for mac available. 316 registered users.

11/3/04 Pterm 1.14 for Windows and 1.13 for unix (functionally the same) available. 263 registered users.

10/20/04 Pterm 1.12 for Windows and Linux/OS X is out. Paul solved some timing issues caused by the server being so much faster than an original cyber. 218 users.

10/10/04 Installed dual-wan router. Pretty experimental, but then again so is our opteron/linux platform. So far so good. About 180 users.

9/28/04 Pterm v1.10 is out. Full portal keymappings plus arrow keys.

9/27/04 All is well. 150 users. Pterm v1.04 now supports portal keymappings.

9/21/04 Network has been OK now for 24 hours.

9/19/04 Now having some network problems x ~3 days characterized by increasingly poor performance until the network goes down completely. ISP is working on it. Circuit was rebuilt tonight, maybe that will do the trick.

9/12/04 The screen refresh problem appears greatly improved. Only complex screens take more than one drawing. The system is FAST now. Screen erase problem in pterm for windows is fixed; new file is pterm version 1.02.

9/9/04 Up to 102 users. Current groups include cerl, minna, amesrad, wright, uofdel, pdev, zbrat, shire, progeny, cdcper, cfreaks, nova, fsu. System is pretty stable. Empire is happening. Soon will reinitialize avatar. Lots of stories being told.

9/4/04 Paul added touchpanel support to the system at the cyber emulator level. He's still working on a more permanent fix to the dropped characters problem, although the system is working quite well now. Added version numbers to pterm, and posted the latest pterms for both windows and linux on the website. Both are UTD as of today and are equal in features. We're up to 89 registered users.

9/2/04 The new website is up. A friend, Wil Voss, did it for fun. Thanks Wil! Paul may have fixed the dropped characters problem with a simple, tiny adjustment to the timing of the mainframe emulator. I made the adjustment tonight, we'll see how things go. The system seems faster to me, too.

8/31/04 The pterm client for X is fixed (until we find the next bug that is). This version supports the touch screen. Our windows version is lagging behind with this latest enhancement. We have 66 registered users.

8/27/04 All sorts of good stuff is happening. We have source code for pterm for unix, and it doesn't require a fonts install. That means OS X users have a client, too, although we're looking forward to a native mac client. Still having dropped characters on the system. Made announce/pad/empirenote. Ray Ozzie and Chuck Miller logged in. Made a signon for Brian Dear.

8/26/04 A good portion of the erase abort screen problem is fixed. Some more signons given out to a test group of people. I hit "U" today and there were 7 users. Empire and avatar authors gave permissions to use their wonderful old games. A whole bunch of old PLATO people found out about the project in the process.

8/22/04 Gave out the first signons to a small group of controlfreaks who can mess around on the system and generate errors. Probably still a month away from general users

8/20/04 Paul got the portal key mappings added to both the X and the windows clients. The clients are now usable by adventurous general users. We still need to add features. The dual cpu production machine is online and the production incarnation of the system is working.

8/15/04 Screen refresh problem remains, and the client isn't finished either. Accounts for the user groups cerl, minna, and nova made. What used to be entire systems are now groups on cyber1. Given the number of people who have already registered even though the system is not up, cerl may end up being broken into a couple constituent groups if there are some natural break points. Have yet to make group zbrat as we haven't had anyone claim that heritage yet. Paul sped the system up considerably. The dual cpu production machine is almost...almost... ready to be brought on line. Archived the existing notesfiles and cleaned them up for cyber1 use.

8/5/04 Paul is still working on the screen refresh problem, and Steve is cranking on Paul's linux/unix pterm client, adding portal key mappings. Mike got email up and running very easily tonight using Jim Hickstein's Mirapoint imapserver—it has a simple, wonderful interface. Lots of fun and good feelings from emailing various old PLATO authors and telling them about cyber1.

7/31/04 Paul has made big progress on the system, and it is running much more smoothly, although we are still having 'graphics' difficulties. The cgi backend for the registration form is now working. Screenshots added to main page.

7/25/04 This progress page added to the website. Although the website has not been announced yet, the logs show that entities other than our little team are accessing it, which is obviously fine, and rather amazing given that it has been up for only two days. But someone at 64.8.171.6 has been trying to break into the webserver. It's pretty blatant hacking, trying accounts like root, guest, test, user, admin, etc. Whoever you are, why don't you just email me instead. We put up this page to help satisfy curiosity.

7/24/04 System can now be accessed via our homespun terminal client, a vast UI improvement. Local access only.

7/21/04 Cyber1 runs for the first time, from the console only. It is a very cool and strange feeling to bring up the ancient system. It feels a little like a time capsule. Navigating the system from the console is tedious. Much of the system is not working. Notes is not working. Response is moderately slow.