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In 1995 Mike Dolan of Lucent arranged to have a 3B2/500 as part of a recycle program that AT&T initiated in the late 1980s into the 1990s. The program allowed non-profit and academic organizations to receive free AT&T 3B2 equipment that had been taken off lease or returned in the 3B2 upgrade program. During this time the Southwestern Bell Surplus store in Desoto Texas as also selling many 3B2 systems and terminals including TTY 5620 DMD BLIT terminals for $25-$50 a piece. In 1994 SDF received a few 3B2/400 systems, software, manuals and additional hardware from the University of South Carolina. The 3B2 hardware, while slower in some cases, had great advantages to x86 at the time in that it could directly handle significantly more terminal I/O as well as ESDI/SCSI storage.

The 3B2 systems ran at 4 locations beginning with the apartment on Sojuorn Lane, Addison and McCallum Blvd, Richardson and later, and very briefly, at a failed Cyber Cafe then for the remainder at the MALR office in Lewisville, Texas. During the attempt at the Cyber Cafe two Pentium server towers were purchased and as part of the dissolution agreement, SDF paid the partner company for the equipment.

The AT&T 3B2/500 was permanently retired in 1998 and SDF moved from System V3.2.3 UNIX to Slackware Linux on i386. In the left hand upper shelf, you can see two USR Sporster 33.6kbps modems, the 3COM NT1/TA ISDN modem and the Fujitec/Adtran DSL (1.5mbps/768kbps). On the lower shelf is a UPS, an ethernet switch and two power strips. On the right hand side is the host “sdf” in the taller cabinet with the Exabyte drive and “sdf-2” (later renamed “otaku”) in the shorter case. These systems are likely Intel Pentium MMX 233MHz which came from a failed attempt to start a “Cyber Cafe” in Dallas Texas. NetBSD 1.2 was attempted to run on this setup, as well as GNU Hurd (believe it or not).

SDF’s first two DEC Alpha Servers AS1200. These were dual 21164 @533MHz which took over the role of the x86 machines from the Cyber Cafe and soley ran NetBSD beginning with version 1.4 This this time SMP support was limited. The Livingston Portmaster PM25e handled dialup modem terminal service and an internet was over SDSL in Bellevue WA. Later these machines would be joined by others and installed at the NWLink datacenter just down the road.

SDFeu in 2003 prior to being shipped to London.

Eric Schnoebelen was a long time supporter of SDF and decided to expand his home built computer room to accommodate not just the clients of Telereality Associates but also SDF. He experimented with a multi-homed T1 setup with 3 different providers routing both SDF’s and CIRR’s Class C IPv4 networks. The main systems used in this setup were DEC Alpha DS10Ls of which Eric had an endless stack. They were cheap, fast and mostly reliable with a common failure being the CPU fan. It was easier to just swap disks with a spare and replace the fan later.

During this time all of the SDF hosts were Alphas. Alpha Processor Incorporated was a group of former DEC employees after the Compaq acquisition of DEC that built a “Super Computing” class dual processor 1U server using 21264 CPUs at 833MHz. They were designed to run Linux and in fact, have Linux in ROM which can be used for failure recovery, but also run NetBSD quite well. Though, in those days SMP wasn’t very reliable and usually one processor would cause a deadlock making it difficult to debug and not ready for production.

Eric had a stash of Alphas in Plano, but these are the ones that were retired in Seattle. They were going to be recycled, but not quite yet.

Eric Schnoebelen was one of the many caretakers and supporters of not just the SDF Public Access UNIX System, but of the Texas Lunch Bunch / lonestar.org, USENIX and many others. In the DFW area Eric was known was the “News Kitty” and would gladly provide USENET news feeds and uplink posting via UUCP and later NNTP. He was an early supporter of NetBSD and pkgsrc and contributed directly to the hp300 port. The host name ‘egsner’, which was his main server for a number of years, got its name from the label on a VAX backup tape from college. While many were using dialup UUCP in the late 80s and early 90s, Eric had convinced Southwestern Bell to terminate a 56K frame relay (and later full T1) in his apartment.

NetBSD 9.0 is dedicated to the memory of Matthias Drochner, who passed away in August 2018 and Eric Schnoebelen, who passed away in March 2019.

Ultimately SDF isn’t about the computers it runs on, but the people that shape its community. Over the years, many people have cited SDF has the place where they first developed their UNIX skills, formed bands, shared interests and developed long lasting friendships. More SDFers can be found at https://sdf.org/?sdfers

1985 – Apple ][e purchased from ComputerCraft in Dallas TX

1987 – SDF-1 launched Magic City MicroBBS

1989 – Coherent UNIX / Citadel BBS on an IBM XT Turbo

1990 – attctc.dallas.tx.us ‘killer’ shutdown during Operation Sundevil.

1990 – Kodak Interactive UNIX SVR3 on i386

1991 – lonestar.org and gets a UUCP connection from smu.edu

1992 – Texas MetroNET forms and grows quickly

1993 – SDF hosts Telecom Standards Review on a 386BSD box

1994 – Receives 3B2/400 hardware from University of South Carolina

1994 – A Linux host called ‘kickme’ serves as SDF’s internet gateway

1994 – SDF gets a BLIT, Plan9 is tried and a KS10 at UW is discussed

1995 – Lucent donates a 3B2/500 and SCSI XM to SDF.

1995 – SDF hosts saomai.org and sevcom.com on NetBSD 1.0 i386

1996 – Expands to 10 dialups, ISDN provided by KESHER.NET

1996 – Joins a CyberNET Cafe project in Dallas running Linux

1996 – Telereality Associates is formed focusing on NetBSD solutions

1996 – Colocation at MALR in Lewisville Texas

1998 – Attempts a move to NetBSD from System V Unix, runs Linux

1999 – freeshell.org registered to move off of lonestar.org

1999 – Texas MetroNET sells, iczer starts Trancell

2001 – Migrates to NetBSD 1.4 on two DEC Alpha Servers AS1200

2001 – SDF Public Access TWENEX – twenex.org

2002 – SDF co-locates at NWlink in Bellevue WA

2002 – Expands to a mix of NetBSD 1.6 on DEC Alpha and Sun Sparc

2002 – SDF-EU begins in London, moves to Falkenstein Germany

2003 – Migrates to DS10Ls and is hosted by CIRR.COM in Plano TX

2003 – SDF-JP is started, though hosted in the Seattle (now Tokyo)

2010 – Migrates to x86_64 with some Alpha in Tukwila WA

2010 – Plan9 Boot Camp under NetBSD XEN pae domus

2011 – NetBSD 5.x

2012 – DEC Alpha shell servers are shutdown

2022 – Last DEC Alpha DS10L is shutdown and leaves the building

Today – NetBSD 9.x mostly in WA, TX and Germany with VMs elsewhere

Thanks to: chuq, christos, hrs, msaitoh, ryo, ebijun, eric, aaron, sp, srl, roy, cchang, jhutto, franka, mboyer, thoerpj, manu, NetBSD foundation and the community and the various SDFers over the years.