the name gorn was pulled from the name of the race (and homeworld) of
the lizard-like creatures in star trek (the old series). back in 1987
i was into that sort of stuff and wrote a multiplayer star combat game
with a friend of mine, tim wisseman, called s&mtrek (which is
actually still available via telnet to smtrek.chime.com, port 1701).
gorn, the first generation
but i digress. in 1988 i was the proud owner of a nice and slow
(4.77 MhZ) ibm pc and started working at the
santa cruz operation (sco). at the time, sco was one of the only
places you could get a unix (then called xenix) variant for the pc and
i happily used my free copy to install on this old pc, added a modem,
and started giving away accounts to friends. at this time, gorn's
email address was a uucp-based one, typically notated as:
...!{uunet,ihnp4}!sco!gorn!user
gorn, the second generation
shortly thereafter, i splurged and picked up a brand new 386
computer (wow!) and upgraded gorn to that, and added another modem.
this was henceforth known as "gorn, the second generation"
in fact, i still have a box of old business cards i got as a gift
which proudly have "the second generation" emblazened across them.
this machine provided an email and usenet news gateway (via
uucp into sco) for people with accounts. now, it's worth noting
that at this time, getting access to the internet from anywhere
other than school or work was basically unheard of, and for
younger-than-college (or non) students, getting access to a
unix machine was nigh impossible. i was motivated to get people
who were interested in this stuff a (free) way to do so and
learn about email, usenet news as well as programming (a basic
c compiler). in truth, a whole lot of bulletin board (the santa
cruz unix variant known as forum)
messages were posted and games were played. over time, gorn also served
as a hub in the santa cruz sysops community-- one where i
helped the other open access unix systems connect together,
eventually via a uucp machine we placed on the uc santa cruz
computer network. by this time, the
"us domain" had begun and gorn
become one of the first to reside in the local domain, and email
addresses became user@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us.
gorn, the third generation
time passed, i moved a couple of times, moving gorn (and the phone lines)
with me. some faster computers came out. i went to work at another
company, and then went on to form my own companies. in that time,
gorn got upgraded to a 486, got a T1 connection, dropped it's modems,
and fell into a state of neglect as local folks ran their own open
access unix machines (john dubois ran deeptht.armory.com)
and started businesses to help get folks online (chris neklason started
cruzio and
housemates from echo started up scruz-net). gorn was known as
gorn.echo.com (at home at the 111 echo
geekhouse),
gorn.iuma.com (my first internet startup, IUMA), gorn.evolve.com (my own
consulting company) and finally gorn.chime.com (the new name for my
consulting company).
gorn, the end
i stopped using gorn myself around 1994 and that's probably about
the time it started to get outdated. as free unix operating systems
became easily available (netbsd, freebsd, linux, and even sco), internet
access became ubiquitous (at least in this area), the original purpose
of gorn became a bit irrelevent. people started using it as a way to
hop off to their other shell accounts when modems were busy, etc.
around 1998 i finally retired gorn, turning it into just an ftp-able
location for old users to retrieve their files and forward old email
on to new locations. most of the community mindset behind gorn and
the type of services it ran have been migrated over to and folded into
another project of mine, www.geek.org.
interestingly enough, that is now probably at around the same state
as gorn was around 1994. we'll see whether it regains interest or
slowly becomes like a time capsule of internet community from the '80s
and '90s.