Simtel

» see simtel.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Every directory had a text file in it listing what was there. You read that first, because the filenames were eight characters long and told you nothing, and because the file underneath might be a four hundred kilobyte download you could not afford to guess wrong about. Simtel was thirty-four years of that, an index in plain text laid over a tree of files that could not be previewed.

It began in 1979, when Keith Petersen started collecting CP/M software while living in Royal Oak, Michigan, and got it hosted on a PDP-10 at MIT running the Incompatible Timesharing System. When that arrangement ended, Frank Wancho arranged in 1983 for the archive to move onto a DECSYSTEM-20 with ARPANET access at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. For a decade the civilian world's shareware library lived at simtel20.arpa, then at wsmr-simtel20.army.mil, on a machine belonging to a United States Army weapons range.

White Sands switched the machine off in 1993 over budget. By then Walnut Creek CDROM, founded in 1991 by Robert Bruce, had been pressing the archive onto discs and running a mirror, and its FTP server at cdrom.com became the center of gravity. The traffic numbers from that period still read strangely. In July 1998 the Simtel server moved 417 GB in a single day and set a record for itself. In May 1999 it moved 873 GB in a day and broke that one.

On a 33.6k line in Turkey in 1998 those figures describe somebody else's world entirely. What reached me was the other half of the design, which is that Simtel was never one server. It was a list of mirrors, and the skill was knowing which name on the list sat near you and which one sat on the far side of an ocean. Nobody called that a content delivery network. You worked it out by hand, and then you remembered the answer.

~ the record ~

~ how you got a file out of it ~

Anonymous FTP, with the word anonymous as the username and your email address typed into the password field on the honor system. There was no search box, only a tree that somebody had organized by hand and an index file sitting at every level of it. The whole interface was a convention rather than a product, which is why it worked identically from a terminal in 1985 and from a Windows FTP client in 1998.

What sat in those directories was shareware, which was a contract as much as a category. Download it and use it, and if you kept using it, post a check to the address in the readme. An enormous share of the software that made a DOS machine usable came out of that arrangement, written by one person, distributed by an archive that charged nothing, paid for occasionally and voluntarily by strangers.

~ the mirror list ~

The archive existed as dozens of copies at once, sitting on university servers and at internet providers across a lot of countries, synchronized on a schedule. This was not redundancy for its own sake. Bandwidth between continents in the early 1990s was scarce and expensive enough that the sane answer was to move the whole collection closer to the people rather than move files across an ocean one at a time.

It is a structure the modern web rebuilt from nothing and then sold back as a paid service. What is different is who ran the copies. A Simtel mirror was somebody's decision to give away disk and bandwidth for no return, listed by name in a text file, and the person doing it was usually findable by email.

~ who owned it at the end ~

In October 1999 Digital River bought Simtel from Walnut Creek CDROM for one million dollars plus 143,885 shares of stock. Digital River was an e-commerce and payments company, and what it had bought was a download destination with traffic attached to it. The archive kept running through the 2000s as one software download site among many, and an editorially organized index was by then competing against a search engine that indexed everything without asking anybody to categorize a thing.

The service shut down on 15 March 2013, thirty-four years after a hobbyist in Michigan started keeping copies of CP/M programs. Some of the old FTP mirrors still answer, run by universities that never got around to turning them off, and the CD-ROM pressings sit on the Internet Archive. What is gone is the middle of it, the single agreed tree with a name on it, which was how you knew where a file had come from before anybody thought to ask.

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