Back in the days before all you muggles got on the Internet, when it was primarily limited to connections between government sites (.gov), military sites (.mil), and colleges (.edu), a friend of mine was getting his PhD in Biology from Purdue University (purdue.edu) in West Lafayette, Indiana. He called me up one day to tell me that a band from Canada we really liked in high school, Rush, had something called a “mail reflector” on something called “the Internet.” Run by fellow Rush fans who were students at the University of Maryland (umd.edu) in College Park, Maryland, it was called “The National Midnight Star” and functioned like an electronic newsletter. Subscribers could send an electronic message to the server hosted on the Maryland campus, and that message would be broadcast, or “reflected,” to all other subscribers.
(you would be surprised how many Rush fans work in IT)
I asked what they talk about on this National Midnight Star, and my friend told me band trivia, upcoming concerts, and lyric analysis like who Prince By-Tor and the Snow Dog referred to on Rush’s second album, Fly By Night. I gotta get in on this!
But how? I didn’t have email; no one did outside government, military, and educational sites (this was circa 1992). Most of the computers/servers on the Internet at that time were running the Unix operating system, and I was in the early days of developing my OpsPro Facility Management System for the studio I was working at to run on an Oracle database atop Unix, so I knew that all Unix systems know how to “talk” to other Unix systems using a protocol called uucp which stood for “unix to unix copy protocol.” This was normally used to move file x from server a to server b, but it was also a rudimentary way of sending electronic messages, which we know today as email.
All I had to do was establish a route to and from umd.edu. Fortunately, I had a friend whose girlfriend, Karen, was a system administrator at the University of California at San Diego (ucsd.edu), and that friend, Carl, worked at a place called Production Software Limited (PSL), a software company specializing in custom solutions for the entertainment industry, and they had written the union-centric payroll software for a company called Cast and Crew (CC). I had been working with Production Software Limited on my own software and frequently stayed with Carl and Karen when I was in San Diego.
So first I convinced Karen to give me a “student account” at UCSD. Because the servers at ucsd.edu were running Unix, they would be able to contact a Vax running Unix at PSL where Carl worked, and the payroll company, CC, was running Production Software Limited’s accounting software PSLOne on a Unix server to which my studio transmitted employee timecard data to produce paychecks and direct-deposits. I could tell my Unix payroll server at Larson (where I worked at the time) to communicate with Cast and Crew’s Unix server, my friend would link Cast and Crew to Production Software Limited, and then Production Software Limited to UC San Diego, where ucsd.edu and umd.edu could talk to each other. And voila! Easy peasy.
Unix, and specifically a Unix protocol called sendmail, used the exclamation mark (called a “bang”) to jump from Unix server to Unix server via modem. Whenever sendmail encountered a bang, it would lookup the modem phone number of the target server, establish a uucp connection via phone lines, then copy the message/file or other data. This meant for me to get my National Midnight Star emailed to me in Burbank (where my office was), it had to be sent to my address at UC San Diego (130 miles away), and include the route to get from San Diego to Burbank I’d established through Carl and Karen. Thus the sendmail bangs were prepended onto my ucsd.edu address so I’d get the message via uucp. Therefore, my address was:
larson!cccom!pslvax!mattw@ucsd.edu
which says: send to user mattw at UCSD, once you get there, call a Vax at Production Software Limited (pslvax) and deliver the message to mattw there, and once at Production Software Limited call the communications server at Cast and Crew (cccom) and deliver the message to mattw there, and finally, because mattw works at Larson Sound Center which processes payroll through Cast and Crew, call a server he set up just to transmit timecards electronically (larson) and deliver the message to mattw there. Where I would read it. I think you’d agree that email is a lot simpler now! And yes, I was that into Rush.
You probably think all that was an elaborate April Fool’s Day joke disguised as a technologically esoteric but plausible bit of computergeekspeak and now I’m gonna say “just kidding.”
You’d be wrong. The above is all true. More to the point, did I benefit from receiving the National Midnight Star? You bet your bippy! As to who By-tor and the Snow Dog referred to, Rush’s road manager, Howard Ungerleider, came up with the names at a party and Neil Peart, the band’s lyricist, used them in the song. There were two dogs at this party, one was a German Shepherd and the other a tiny white, nervous, yap-yap dog. Howard named the German Shepherd By-Tor (biter) because he snapped at and then tried to bite anyone who walked into the house; the other dog, the tiny white dog, reminded him of a snowball being white and small, and so he named him the Snow Dog. Those National Midnight Stars were not wasted on me!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to prepare for lunch. I told my fellow residents I was bringing brownies for desert today.
