
What are SDF's origins and history? - erikschoster
http://sdf.org/?faq?BASICS?02
======
comex
While I never tried to join their community proper, several years ago I did
send them $36 to get a lifetime "ARPA" membership. The service is, as you
might expect, old fashioned: you get a grand total of 600MB of storage and
access to a regular user account on their NetBSD servers. Meanwhile, for a few
dollars per month from umpteen VPS providers I can get tons of storage and the
ability to virtualize just about any operating system - and like many, I don't
expect to get to a financial state where that would be a significant burden
anytime soon, hopefully ever. But dealing with billing requires some level of
active maintenance, however small, and in the long run providers come and go.
SDF requires zero - I can have paid zero attention to the service for years,
but if I suddenly need to do SSH forwarding to get past a firewall and don't
have anything else handy, the shell is a few keystrokes away; if someone
chances upon an old link to some basic web content I set up on it years ago,
it will work. They've been around for close to three decades, and as a small
enthusiasts' group (which survives despite having long had very uncompetitive
prices for their higher-level services, which unlike ARPA have periodic fees),
they're not as vulnerable as your average big company to going out of business
when industry trends change. Personally, I'd have paid a lot more than $36 for
that quality of guarantee!

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kev009
I'm not a member but one thing that's kind of interesting is having a
rootless, shell-based community. We have this at work on our jumphosts and
it's generally a Good Thing. Sharing datasets and scripts is just a filesystem
namespace operation. It's up to the system operators to keep the machine
running well and influencing how it is used by i.e. setting up certain
packages and services. It's incredibly productive to be in a tmux session with
vim, mutt, tin, man pages, ssh, etc as your interface and minimal distraction.

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sho
As an old anime fan, I got excited seeing the magic letters SDF in the title.
Well, it's not about the spacecraft - but this ancient BBS indeed took its
name from the beloved
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF-1_Macross](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF-1_Macross)

~~~
snogglethorpe
Don't even have to go as far as fiction.... SDF is a common abbreviation for
the Japanese Self-Defense Force.

~~~
dalke
Or the "Structure Data File" format I often deal with in computational
chemistry. Or the other items at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF) .

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cpach
It’s pretty amusing that the first Unix clone they tried was made by a former
soda company :)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company)

~~~
erikschoster
Oh interesting: Aaron Swartz's father was the founder

~~~
EvanAnderson
You might be interested in this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8970380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8970380)

~~~
cpach
Fascinating! I had no idea that he was father to Aaron.

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kev009
Wow, I got really sad reading about the idiot that left the borrowed 3B2/500
in his trunk and then on a porch in the elements.

I've been hunting for a late model 3B2 for a decade.

~~~
Aloha
I've found a couple of them, but have never been in a place to
move/haul/store. The Seattle Museum of Communications has a couple 3b2
machines - I have an account on one of them, its old, but neat.

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tux
"(For related information on SDF and the history behind this public access
UNIX system, read "The HACKER CRACKDOWN" by Bruce Sterling)" @
[http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/hackcrac.pdf](http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/hackcrac.pdf)
(use something like ePDFView and rotate the book)

~~~
cbd1984
> "(For related information on SDF and the history behind this public access
> UNIX system, read "The HACKER CRACKDOWN" by Bruce Sterling)" @
> [http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/hackcrac.pdf](http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/hackcrac.pdf)
> (use something like ePDFView and rotate the book)

This text is available so many places online it isn't even worthwhile to go to
_that_ much trouble to read it.

Project Gutenberg:

[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101)

MIT:

[http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html](http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html)

Cory Doctorow reading it (link to first episode):

[https://archive.org/details/CoryDoctorowPodcast86](https://archive.org/details/CoryDoctorowPodcast86)

Podcast feed with all episodes:

[http://xiph.org/~giles/2008/hackercrackdown-
ogg.xml](http://xiph.org/~giles/2008/hackercrackdown-ogg.xml)

[http://xiph.org/~giles/2008/hackercrackdown.xml](http://xiph.org/~giles/2008/hackercrackdown.xml)

Boing boing boing boing:

[http://boingboing.net/2008/01/13/podcast-of-bruce-
ste.html](http://boingboing.net/2008/01/13/podcast-of-bruce-ste.html)

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LeonardSmalls
I had an account on lonestar.sdf.org, but then I let it lapse and there was a
change to the server name/login. I'm not sure I could reclaim lonestar, but I
remember trying to make that my permanent account for a while. Between that
and Riseup, the early 00's were a great time for staking your place with an
email address that signaled your values.

~~~
jboynyc
Inactive accounts are in fact purged from time to time, but the domain you are
thinking of is sdf.lonestar.org. The sdf.org domain was only added a few years
ago, and for a while the admin was also using freeshell.org for marketing
purposes. lonestar.org is the UUCP network that SDF has long been connected
with.

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dmix
I love the HTML source code of one of the linked MOO games:

view-source:[http://thxmoo.org/](http://thxmoo.org/)

No HTML tags, very clean & compact. It's rare to see handwritten HTML these
days.

------
morb
There's also sdf-eu.org for users located in Europe (eu server is in Germany).

There aren't really that many shell providers. SDF (with SDF-EU) and devio.us
are about the only ones that seem trustworthy (whatever that means) to me.

These kind of services should be more popular, I think. I'd definitely join a
Plan9 (or 9front), just to play with the stuff and learn the system.

Check out 'profiles' on SDF. It's a CLI social network thingy. People don't
really use it, but it brought a smile to my face.

