Networks

In the summer of 1978, Serial Dialin lines were made public to use the Honeywell mainframe at the University of Houston. Prior to this time dialins were available for in house use only.

741-9840 at 300 baud.

741-9680 at 300 buad.

In the spring of 1979, another Serial Dialin phone number was made public to use the Honeywell mainframe.

741-9490 at 300 baud.

In the spring of 1981, This Serial Dialin phone number was moved to the new DEC 11/780 named UHVAX1.

741-9680 at 300 baud.

In February of 1982, another Serial Dialin phone number was made public to use the NAS/9000 mainframe.

741-7220 at 300 baud.

In the spring of 1983, another Serial Dialin phone number was made public to use the NAS/9000 mainframe.

741-9875 at 300 baud.

In January, 1984, BITNET came to the University of Houston.

It was a point to point network.

UH was downstream from RICE and upstream from A&M.

In the spring of 1984 UH started a broadband computer network based on Sytek Corp.'s Sytek boxes. This replaced the previously used point to point wiring.

This allowed many serial line connections to be established between computers using the same coax cable system.

A few months later a compliment system was added that was developed by AgelNet. It was compatable with Sytek but used flat ribbon cable instead of coax. This made for easier installations especially inside the DEC Vax computers.

In October of 1985, DEC servers and ethernet began to replace the Sytek network.

In the spring of 1986, other Serial Dialin phone numbers were made public to use the Sytek Network.

790-9717 at 1200 baud.

796-3800 at 1200 baud.

In July of 1986, a USENET connection was made to the 3B20s. This made the Usenet News available.

In 1986 TexNet came to UH. It is a DECnet based network

It's name was changed to THENet which stands for Texas Higher Education Network

It was started by UT. UH & A&M joined as well as other Texas Universities

In March of 1987, the 300 baud Serial Dialins using phone number 741-7220 was discontinued.

In July of 1987, SesquiNet became operational

It was started in the spring of 1987 by Rice University. It was named after Texas's sesquicentinial anniversary. A grant from the National Science Foundation allowed the project to get started.

The original members were Rice, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston Area Research Center, Texas A&M, Texas Southern University and the University of Houston.

It brought full blown internet to UH. Previously you had to use a gateway from one of the other networks to access internet.

In Summer of 1988, Kinetics boxes and Gater boxes were used to bridge localTalk (Apple's appleTalk protocol) to the ethernet. This allowed campus wide Macintosh communications including:

remote laserWriter printing

remote file sharing

remote talking via Broadcast

In Fall of 1988, AlisaTalk was installed on the Jetson Vax cluster. It allows appleTalk between users of the Jetson Cluster and Macs on the network.

In the fall of 1988, I started a Macintosh File server on the Jetson cluster using AlisaTalk so that Macs on the network could easily download Software by simply mounting the remote public disk with appleShare and dragging the files that they needed to a local disk. They could also, if they had an account on Jetson, use part of their Jetson file space as a remote disk from their Mac to store mac files. It also made it easy up/download files to/from the Jetson cluster.

In August of 1989, Usenet News was installed on the Jetson Vax cluster.

In the spring of 1990, I started a Macintosh File server on a unix machine named "lavaca" that used Columbia University's CAPS Package (Columbia AppleTalk Protocol System for unix) which started the ethernet zone "Twilight" for etherneted Macs. Lavaca was a DEC machine that ran ULTRIX.

Prior to the fall of 1991, Serial dialin lines were:

749-7700 to 7715 at 1200 baud were Sytek ports

749-7716 to 7759 at 1200 baud were DECserver 200 ports

741-7220 to 7229 at 2400 baud were DECserver 200 ports

In the fall of 1991, Serial dialin lines were changed to:

749-7700 to 7739 at 1200 baud were DECserver 200 ports

749-7740 to 7749 at 2400 baud were DECserver 200 ports

749-7750 to 7797 at 19.2 K baud were Xyplex LAT & TCP/IP ports

In the spring of 1993 I installed the ARNS (A Remote Network System) written by the University of Melbourne on menudo. This software allowed a user to use the AppleTalk Protocol over a serial line (dialin) or over an IP protocol connection. This allowed a home user to mount an appleShare volume on a Mac at work at home over a dialin. You could also print to networked printers here a work from home. You could also run MacTCP on top of ARNS over a serial line so you could also run any of the IP services (internet) at home over a dialin. A great step forward in Mac remote use.

On March 30, 1994, BITNET was discontinued at the University of Houston.

In the spring of 1994, UH began a CWIS (Campus Wide Information Service) using the University of Minnesota's Gopher software. This included links to the x.500 staff & faculty directory that previously was accessed using the WHOIS command on main frames or x.500 application software on workstations.

In the spring of 1994, Serial dialin lines were changed to:

749-7700 to 7749 at 14,400 baud were Xyplex LAT & Telnet

749-7750 to 7797 at 9600 baud were Xyplex LAT & Telnet

In the fall of 1994, UH began a WWW (World Wide Web) root server which has links to UH's Gopher Server. This included links to the x.500 staff & faculty directory that previously was accessed using the WHOIS command on main frames or x.500 application software on workstations. Workstations using NCSA's Mosaic or freeware Netscape clients could now use graphics and sound as well as hypertext to browse information.

In the spring of 1995, UH started a project to have dialin PPP (Point to Point Protocol) service available to all Faculty, Staff and Students by the fall. I headed up a network subcommittee to study this project. During the summer I wrote a Mac timer application that used applescript to interface with MacPPP and freePPP to allow a user to time his PPP session and warn him when the time is up. This was needed especially for the express pool which has a 30 minute connect limit.

In the fall of 1995, Serial dialin lines were changed to:

749-7700 to 7749 at 14,400 baud were Xyplex LAT & Telnet

749-7750 to 7797 at 9600 baud were Xyplex LAT & Telnet

749-1200 at 28,800 were Xyplex LAT, Telnet and PPP with 8 hour timeout, userid required

749-7973 at 28,800 were Xyplex LAT, Telnet and PPP with 30 minute timeout, userid required