stuff.mit.edu:students' portal
[BETA]
Once upon a time ...
www.mit.edu:8001 was first started in the summer of 1993 (probably July); it may be among the first 100 WWW servers in the world. The original webmasters were:
8/8/2004
MIT Information Services and Technology takes over www.mit.edu from
SIPB. SIPB's services moved to stuff.mit.edu. Where else would you put
all your stuff for the world wide web?
8/19/1999
The top-level page from web.mit.edu was moved onto the www.mit.edu
server, to assist users who start from http://www.mit.edu/ in an
attempt to navigate the MIT official web site.
11/5/1997
The web pages were redesigned and the web server was changed from a
SPARCstation 5 running SunOS 4.1.4 and Apache 1.1.1 to a SPARCstation
20 running Solaris 2.5.1 and Apache 1.2.4.
3/20/1997
URLs of the format http://www.mit.edu/~username/ work now. See documentation for more details.
An MIT events calendar is now available. Enter your groups events.
8/14/1996
We finally made documents on the comment
and counter scripts.
7/20/1996
The SIPB Weather Gateway is now back online
after being on an extended sabbatical.
5/15/1996
Attention 1996 graduates - learn about
services
and activities available to MIT alumni, including new Email Forwarding for
Life (EFL) now under development.
2/17/1996
www.mit.edu is now running the Apache web server. We hope this
will alleviate some recent performance problems.
Additionally, we are now serving on both port 80 and 8001.
2/8/1996
Mikael Sheikh has created an
online book
exchange for MIT students.
12/5/1995
Toby
Elliott has provided us with an on-line, searchable version of the
IAP Guide. (Plus, here's a list of SIPB IAP
courses (plug, plug))
11/24/1995
Whoa! A short period of silence was held for the moment that the webmaster queue went to zero! Doh,
another home page request :-)
11/9/1995
The original SIPB webpage is back because of nostalgia
and popular demand.
10/13/1995
The original, full-color graphics are back! The colors were originally reduced
some time ago to save on server load.
8/1/1995
ClariNet put more comics into news, so we have them here now. Check out the
new pages off of our comics page.
7/24/1995
Rei got sick of there not being any stats. So there are now some stats,
generated by a modified wwwstat. Here. So it's a little
flaky....
4/29/1995
Digitized copies of your MIT Card photo are now available; to get a copy, bring
a blank, PC-formatted 3.5" floppy disk to the MIT Card Office (E32-200).
There is a charge of $3.00 (an additional $3.00 will be charged if you do not
provide a disk) and a turnaround of 3 days. Pictures are saved as JPEGs
(usually between 6kb and 12kb) and have resolutions and color depths of either
341x363x256 or 512x400x256, depending on when your card was issued. You will
be required to sign a release form authorizing the MIT Card Office to copy your
photo onto disk.
Student URL's are now shown in the mitdir directory. The directory is updated from the lists on web.mit.edu and www.mit.edu. For more information, finger help_url@mit.edu.
3/20/1995
Some time (months) ago, Eric set up an imagemap facility which lets people put
clickable imagemaps in web pages provided via www.mit.edu . He wrote some documentation for
setting up imagemaps on www.mit.edu, but only just remembered to mention it
here.
2/24/1995
Up until very recently, the master copy of the root directory of our web server
was stored on the local hard disk of our web server. This made regular
maintainence of these files a hassle, as it required the webmasters to log in
to our already heavily loaded server and modify them there using puny unix
editors like vi,
instead of using emacs
or other more bloated text editors (which would make the system load even
higher than it already is.
Recently, Eric set up our web server so the master copy of the root directory lives in AFS (a network-distributed filesystem), where the webmasters can edit it directly, from any Athena or SIPB workstation. Changes to the master files are copied onto the local disk of our web server every night around 4 AM.
2/23/1995
Rei was silly and
wrote something to let you see how hosed the webmasters are.
1/30/1995
Eric got bored of people sending him mail asking for an image
transparentization package for every random operating system known to man, so
he wrote TransWeb. It allows virtually anyone on
the web to create transparent images. It's pretty cool, though using it causes
our web server to do a whole lot of work, and raises our already high server load.
11/21/1994
We've just finished setting up a new comics page: Bizarro, by Dan Piraro.
This complements our Dilbert
page. You can find links to both pages from our new comic strip page. If we set up
any new comics, you will be able to find them on this page.
11/14/1994
Last calculated, we were getting roughly 500,000 connections a week. In
closely related news, the Decstation 5000/25 which was www.mit.edu was falling
over (i.e., crashing) a lot. We swapped it with a SparcStation, and its
performance has been much improved. The old Decstation (no longer a web server)
has been moved back into the SIPB office and reinstalled as an ordinary Athena
workstation, and has been renamed bill-the-cat. :-) (later note: The decstation
has since been reclaimed by IS, who lent it to us in the first place;
bill-the-cat is now the sparc/classic it was 6 months ago.)
10/27/1994
What fun. A listing of some of the more frequently asked policy questions pertaining to
our server.
10/24/1994
New listing, the Commercial Sites Founded by MIT
Community Members! Just what we needed, a new list to maintain and more
requests to handle....
The server machine is very hosed. As always, donations of service-contracted spiffy machines are very welcome. :-)
9/20/1994
To reduce the load on the server, the graphics have been altered to have fewer
colors. Let us know what you think. You can still view the originals in rei's homepage.
Web fever is at an all time high! We get tons of homepage addition requests, plus over 200,000 connections a week! Wow!
Oh, and please don't use the comment gateway to send forged email. We might just have to hunt you down and make you add homepages for 29 hours in a row.
7/16/1994
More silly and occasionally useful CGI scripts than you know what to do with!
All of the silly things that Matthew has been doing
for the past few months have been CGI scripts, and therefore not integrated
into plexus. But now, you can experience them too.
More stuff to come!
7/15/1994
Hey! We actually got around to updating to NCSA HTTPD. It's
here, it works, it's faster and it's harder to pronounce than 'Plexus'. Thanks
to Eric for actually finishing this.
7/10/1994
Maps of MIT
Workstation Clusters, with hyperlinks from each workstation to a query about that workstation.
5/22/1994
A cybermystic novella, vh485,
written by Nic Kelman, maintained by Richard Lachman.
5/15/1994
Matthew and Jake's Adventures! With new installments!
5/13/1994
The MIT What's Cool list. (MIT people, please add stuff you provide to this list)
5/13/1994
Matthew and Jake Fly a Kite
5/11/1994
New Hardware!!! We upgraded to a dedicated DS5000/25(Maxine) named anxiety-closet. (of course all URLs
should still be via www.mit.edu) The server should be less
hosed, at least for a little while. :-)
5/9/1994 5/6/1994 4/29/1994 4/21/1994 4/7/1994
Yipee! Classes are over. Finals have begun. Some of the
Hey, we may have lost a couple webmasters, but we just got a new one, too! Mike Bauer (mjbauer@lcs.mit.edu) is
our newest webmaster. Be nice to him.
Matthew has written a zwrite gateway that lets you send zephyr messages to MIT
students.
A pair of new services, not fully polished, but functional: a finger gateway and a machine information gateway. If you
think that this is just another finger gateway, then you should try fingering
at athena.dialup.mit.edu
or any other hostname which resolves to more than one IP physical machine.
A fun new toy ... StoryFun. Code by
mkgray, stories by various people ... and you, of course. (Still being
polished).