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Phred started out as the my personal machine in 1992, my sophomore year in college. I originally set it up because I wanted to mess around with 386bsd, a now-defunct Unix system for x86 processors, and so that I could set up a bulletin board system based on some software that I had been working on called yabbs. The system came online sometime in early September 1992 as phred.pc.cc.cmu.edu. The name "Phred" came from the character "Phred the Terrorist" who appeared in some Doonesbury strips in the 1970s. At the time the hardware consisted of a Mitsubishi 386dx/16 with a 120 meg IDE hard drive, 6 megabytes of memory, and an Ethernet connection to the rest of the world. Yabbs went up soon after that and I started announcing the site to the world.
At the time yabbs was fairly buggy, as was 386bsd, so crashes were frequent and the system didn't get a whole lot of use. By the time winter break rolled around there were normally 3 or 4 people on yabbs and I was using the system to do most of my personal and school work on. I decided that I wanted to keep the system up over the break so it was temporarily moved into a friends office and transferred to a 486dx/33 system with 8 megs of memory and a 120 meg IDE drive. It turned out that 386bsd was really buggy on this system, so yabbs was down even more. However yabbs was getting a little better, so when the system was alive yabbs usually was as well.
At the end of the break phred was returned to its previous 386dx/16, which had been upgraded to have 8 megs of memory. Nothing much changed until the summer of 1993. The system was fairly popular at this point, usually having about 7 or 8 people on it during its peak hours.
At that time I decided that I wanted to bring phred home with me, so phred and yabbs went down for the summer. Over the summer I wrote a new version of yabbs (which was based on the current client/server architecture) and upgraded phred to a 486sx/25. The machine also got more memory (16 megs) and more hard drive space (another 250 megs). In addition I purchased a new monitor because I was interested in using X-Windows, something which I couldn't do on the old system. When I returned to school in the fall phred consisted of: a 486sx/25, 16 megs of memory, and 370 megs of disk. Quite a nice improvement.
So in the fall of 1993 phred returned once again as phred.pc.cc.cmu.edu and yabbs went back online. The new version of yabbs turned out to be a nice improvement over the old version. Where the old system could only handle about 8 people in talk and frequently crashed, the new system could handle 15 or 20 people and was a lot more stable. Actually, originally it had quite a few bugs, but those got worked out over time. The speed of the system was also improved, to the point where it could handle 30 or 40 people quite well on phred's 486sx/25. The operating system was replaced with NetBSD 0.9 at this time as well, which made the system a lot more stable.
That semester word quickly hit of yabbs as a popular talk system (I'm not sure how, I did not do very much advertising). A lot of it probably had to do with putting phred up on gopher and having a link to yabbs from there. By that winter break yabbs often had 15 people on it, and there was just about no time when there were no users on the system at all.
I took down the system again over the winter break. Not much happened then except quite a few more yabbs bugs were worked out.
The next spring was a very busy time for yabbs and phred. It became common to see 30+ users on the system, so many that I had to put a limit so that I could continue to use the system for my own work. Halfway through the semester phred's 120 meg IDE drive died as well, so I had to get a replacement one. In addition I chose to replace NetBSD 0.9 with FreeBSD 1.1 about halfway through the semester. This caused some problems initially (my new 120 meg drive, my old 250, and FreeBSD didn't seem to like talking to each other). I also found that I didn't have quite as much time for yabbs, so the system sometimes ended up with problems that were not immediately resolved. The system also picked up another 340 meg drive sometime during the semester.
That summer I decided to keep yabbs and phred online for the summer, since I was going to be working at Microsoft and didn't need the machine in Redmond with me. With a lot of help from Kelly DeYoe and Erikas Napjus we got phred (and nine, Kelly's machine) installed in a network operations closet on campus.
Yabbs usage was higher than ever, with the system constantly being full (there were a maximum of 20 telnet connections, but client connections were not limited, so it was common to see about 30 people on the system). Phred got a new address during the middle of the summer as well, phred.org.
When I returned to school I put phred in my new apartment. Phred also lost its old name of phred.pc.cc.cmu.edu and because phred.ws.cc.cmu.edu instead (the phred.org name was not changed). It also got a lot of new hardware: a 1 gig SCSI hard drive, a 150 meg tape drive, and a CD-ROM. It lost two of its drives (the 120 meg and 340 meg drives) because I decided it wasn't necessary to have 1700 megs online and the machine didn't have the physical room for 4 hard drives, a floppy, a tape, and a cdrom (its just a mini-tower PC).
At this time I also made the difficult decision that I couldn't run yabbs anymore. It was taking up too much of time my time, time which I should have been spending on school, at work, or working on the yabbs software itself. Yabbs was taken down on Sept 4th, 1994 (to a disgrunted but understanding public).
At this time phred is being used as my personal machine and by some of my friends for email, irc, and other net fun. The only public services being run on the machine are this WWW server, the gopher server, and the ftp server.
Phred switched operating systems (once again) to NetBSD 1.0 on November 11th, 1994. This switch was made so that phred could access AFS, the distributed file system used at Carnegie Mellon (and many other universities).
There is also a document on the history of yabbs if you are interested in reading that.
- alex wetmore
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alex@phred.org