Re: BSDCon 2003 (fwd)

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>]

On Sun, 2003-02-23 at 19:44, Jay Link wrote:
> Ah, yes. I'd forgotten about the NCSA. Of course, they're kinda like
> white-collar pimps, so I don't know if they count 100%.  :-)
> 
> Explanation: not only do they not pay diddly (unless you're comparing them
> to fast food jobs, or the ubiquitous residence hall cafeteria jobs that
> everyone seems to have at college), but things like Mosaic were done
> without the knowledge of management, who of course immediately turned
> around & tried to take full credit when it became popular.

Hmm... I have no idea what they pay, but they've done some cool things
in the past.  If Larry Smarr had had a little vision, the W3C might be
based in Urbana instead of Cambridge, MA.

I know of some brilliant people there, and used to work with someone who
might still be there.  Wendy Edwards - if intellectual power shone with
visible light, you'd go blind looking at her.  Steve can back me up on
that one.

> On the other hand, they did offer the predecessor to Apache for free
> (right?), and didn't that free Mac FTP client -- fetch -- come from the
> NSCA as well?

Yes; the predecessor to Apache was "NCSA httpd", which was a modified
copy of "CERN httpd", which was the first Web server.  I'm sure Apache
still has references to Rob McCool and NCSA in its credits.

They also did NCSA Telnet, the first TCP/IP stack and utilities for
MS-DOS.  Very cool - indeed, invaluable - in its time.

UIUC (although not NCSA, as I recall) is also the original home of
Eudora.  The original O'Reilly book on the Internet was written by a
UIUC sysadmin, and it was way ahead of its time.  More recently, the PDQ
printing system started at UIUC as a reaction to the terrible printing
situation on Unix; it's still going, despite the onrushing tide of
enthusiasm surrounding CUPS.

OTOH, NCSA was also the group trying to make Windows NT into a viable
computational cluster platform.  That didn't get far. :-)

> So I suppose there's good & bad. They definitely foster the "MicroSerf"
> culture, but they've spawned some good stuff, too.

That's probably true of most universities these days.  Not everyone can
be MIT. (ducks)

> I have to admit, though, that I hate Champaign/Urbana with a passion --
> everyone is so arrogant, and they don't have much to back that up with! I
> mean, Christ, you'd think the place was heaven on earth the way some of
> those people behave. East Central IL sucks, and that includes Danville &
> Charleston/Mattoon, too. They've got the same climate of oppression that
> most of the Chicago suburbs have, and I think that right there explains
> another aspect of why "we're not California" -- not only does California
> has a huge population base, but as a whole, they're not afraid to try new
> things. None of this, "you'd better not rock the boat" b.s.

Heh.  You think Cali-funny doesn't have an ego problem?  Right now, the
collective California ego is only muffled because they're too busy
getting their heads smacked by the dot-com bust.

Any area with large populations is going to have more going on that's
cutting-edge.  That's as true for Chicago as it is for LA or San
Francisco.  Add to that the presence of really forward-thinking academic
institutions, and you've got a tech hotbed: Berkeley for California, MIT
for Boston, Georgia Tech for Atlanta, and so on.

That's what is really wrong with Illinois and Indiana both.  UIUC isn't
really a slouch, and Purdue is really hot in certain areas.  But take
the distance from, say, Champaign and Chicago, and compare that to the
distance from Cambridge to Boston, or Berkeley to San Francisco.  The
big-city resources are right there next to the think tanks.  That's what
breeds success, in my book.

> Springpatch may not be wonderful, but it beats the sh*t out of UIUC!  :-)

Unfortunately, from my experience, they're both not that great.  That's
why I'm in Indy.
-- 
Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>

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