mta
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A bit of GREX History
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Oct 8 18:01 UTC 1995 |
A Bit of History
GREX was conceived in 1990 by a dozen people with little more in common than
a love for computer conferencing. Over the course of several months, they
met once a week to discuss their ideas about how the ideal system might be
run, and to work out a common vision. The process wasnt always smooth; each
founder had very clear ideas and there were sometimes differences that were
very hard to resolve. They persevered and finally arrived at a consensus.
Once their vision for GREX was formed, they spent the next several months
working to pull the system together. Once they had collected the money and
equipment their new system would need just to open to the public, they agreed
amongst themselved that they would finance the systems operations out of their
own pockets for the first year.
On July 18, 1991, GREX opened its lines to the public.
GREX got its start running on a donated SUN-2/170, with 5 phone lines, 4 Meg
of RAM, and 2 ancient 80 Meg hard drives. It was housed in the warehouse of
a generous local business owner, Ken Ascher, for just the cost of the
electricity and telephones. NetMeg, owned and operated by Meg Geddes,
supplied the mail feed.
Things have changes some since then. GREX is now living in its own apartment,"
a 7 by 14 basement room in a lovely old house near downtown Ann Arbor. Were
running on a SUN-3/260 with 96 M of RAM, 2700 Megs of disk and 11 phone lines.
Most important, GREX is now attached to the Internet by a dedicate 28.8 kbps
dedicated connection via ICNet (#13) 998-0090!
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