SDF Public Access UNIX System

» go to sdf.org now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

on june 16, 1987, a texas teenager named ted uhlemann connected a 300 baud modem to the apple IIe in his room, on a phone line his mother had given him for his birthday. the board he ran was an anime fan SIG called SDF-1, after the spaceship in super dimension fortress macross. that BBS, through several decades of hardware and one name shortening, is sdf.org, a public access unix system that will still give you a shell account today.

a shell account means a login on a shared unix machine. email, a home directory, a place to host a small site or a gopher hole, a chat command called com where the other members are. this was a normal thing to want in 1990 and a strange thing to want now, which is roughly why the people who want it are still there.

~ from apple IIe to netbsd ~

in 1990 uhlemann, stephen jones, and daniel finster rebuilt the board as a unix system v BBS, because they hated the locked-down menus every other board forced on users. it ran on i386 hardware, then AT&T 3B2 machines. by 1993 it had ten phone lines and a live internet connection, with uucp still carrying the mail and usenet.

by 1997 there were around 15,000 users and the system had moved to linux, a period the members themselves call the dark age because of constant break-in attempts. between 2000 and 2001 everything migrated to netbsd on DEC alpha hardware and the servers moved from texas to seattle, where the operation still lives. the last linux box was switched off on august 17, 2001. sdf became a 501(c)(7) nonprofit, legally a social club, which is the correct paperwork for what it actually is.

~ what it offers now ~

the modern sdf is a stack of decades that all still run. unix shells and email, gopher hosting long after gopher lost to the web, com chat from the BBS days, and a mastodon instance from the fediverse days. there are vintage systems you can log into for the retrocomputing itch, TOPS-20 and symbolics genera among them, and there is a minecraft server, because members asked. by 2016 close to 48,000 people had accounts.

i knew sdf the way most engineers my age do, from it surfacing on hacker news every year or two, each time greeted like a rediscovered shipwreck. it is not a shipwreck. it has been continuously crewed the whole time.

~ what almost killed it ~

the dark age attacks of the late 90s were the closest technical call. the deeper threat was the web itself, which made shell accounts pointless for normal people. compuserve and prodigy, the giant paid services of the same dial-up era, died of exactly that. sdf survived because it never had their problem. no investors, no growth targets, just member dues and donations covering some machines in seattle.

a social club does not need the market's permission to continue. it needs a few thousand people who keep showing up, and sdf has never run out of those.

~ why it still matters ~

sdf turns 39 this year. it predates the web by four years, google by eleven, and every social network that has already died. when twitter fell apart in 2022 and people went looking for a mastodon instance run by someone trustworthy, one of the sane answers was a unix club founded during the reagan administration. that is a strange kind of vindication, and a well earned one.

mostly it matters as proof that the small internet never actually ended. the dial-up services are dead, the boards are dead, the portals are dead. and yet somewhere in seattle a machine full of home directories is quietly accepting logins, the way it has since a kid plugged a modem into his birthday phone line in 1987.

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