[geeks] Tru64 licensing/availability...

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Kurt Mosiejczuk wrote:

> <pedantic>
> It was called OSF/1, not OFS.
> </pedantic>

Ah, my first Unix experience.  Back in 1995.

Teachers in Texas were offered nearly-free memberships in an educational
network called "TeNet".  You dialed up with a terminal or terminal
emulator, logged into to a ciscoSystem 7000-series, and then telnetted to
an hive of OSF/1 shell systems.  At first, everyone had to share dialup
banks on 1-800 numbers at UT Austin, UT Dallas, UT Houston, and somewhere
in San Antonio.  Since it was shared, there was a daily time limit of 45
minutes[1].

After a while, the project grew, and larger cities got dedicated dialup
banks, without the 45-minute time limit.  I was thrilled when Taylor got
one, since that's a local call for me.

How did this affect me?  Well, I was a good friend of a teacher at school
who only used her TeNet account every couple of months or so.  TeNet would
close accounts that were inactive for > 4 weeks, and you'd have to pay the
registration fee again to get the account reopened.  So, I got free 'net
access, and she didn't have to fork out $20 or so every month.

It was on this system that I because familiar with Unix.  It was on this
system in 1996 that I met my now-fiancee.  I should find what sort of
systems TeNet was running, and get one running OSF/1 or Tru64, for old
times' sake.

TeNet still exists, but the shell account system vanished in early 1998,
when they decided that affordable Internet access was available to Texas
educators already.  Now it's just a web-portal with web-mail and junk.
Sad.

--Jonathan
[1] Which could easily be extended into 1 hour and 40 minutes, since there
    was a 5 minute grace period, and crossing midnight would reset the
    counter without dipping into the next day's pool of time.