gorn recollections

This is a growing (hopefully) collection of stories of people about gorn and what it meant to them back in the day.

From: spcman (John Dubois)

I remember...

Talking with Jon while he was working on something on gorn at Cypress back when it was a true-blue 4.77 MHz "piece-o-shit PC" (as the login screen said). Suddenly the console started lagging... everything slowed to a near halt... and Jon leaned over to look through his bedroom door, across the hallway, and into the other bedroom... "ah, Adam logged in". Poor little machine.

Jon asking me to drill a hole through the floor of his bedroom at Highlands so he could route some cables down to the living room.

Being shocked at the lack of job control and nice line discipline and certain other amenities, and wondering if one could really call this XENIX thing a flavor of UNIX...

Managing my first "real" mailing list on gorn, the pyrotechnics list, which eventually led to the creation of rec.pyrotechnics.

Jon semi-permanently mounting a 1.2MB floppy as extra temp space, because that was a non-trivial amount of space back then.

Spending the summer of 1989 looking for a job and working on my first curses program, a scrabble game (yet unfinished). I did the development using ncurses on my DOS XT, and periodically copied the source to gorn to keep it ported to UNIX where it was ultimately meant to run. Sometimes heading over to Cypress to work on it at faster-than-modem speeds. That was part of what got me my job at SCO.

Courting Irene via her email to her gorn account. She read my old b toe file on gorn (I had installed it as my finger file there, no toe!) Oh, and Jon complaining about the amount of disk space my finger file occupied. I think he ended up hacking finger to support compressed files.

Getting a great deal on 4 huMONgous 660MB ESDI drives (a bit less than a buck a meg, in 1991!), and selling one to Jon for gorn.

Back before I joined SCO, Jon offered me XENIX for my XT (8 MHz!), but I didn't feel quite ready to take it on at that point, and the OS would've sucked up too much of my 30MB hard drive. And I already had ksh, vi, uucp, & curses for DOS.

From: Daniel Jalkut (snozer)

I remember gorn being the first unix-like machine I ever had an account on. Of course, at the time I was about 12 or 13 and that meant I saw it as a strange "BBS" which had some games on it if you could figure out how to find them. I distinctly remember my first confusion with a shell prompt, where I furiously tried to get "help" or a "menu." I think I typed "?" and got a response like "?: Ambiguous". It might have been the first time I saw the word ambiguous. Eventually I figured out how to play some games, got into the e-mail connection with a few friends who also used *NIX, and eventually learned enough about it to make me understand, somehow, that I wanted a UCSCB account. gorn was probably the launching-pad for my interest in *NIX at all. After college I spent about 4 years doing nothing but Macintosh engineering. A year ago I switched to working on Mac OS X, a heavily Unix-oriented OS. Many of my co-workers are learning the UNIX oddities from the start, but I feel like I'm coming home :)

From: Dave Bedno (drseuss)

I don't remember much about the early days of Gorn, and in fact, never even saw it, but jon's system has been my system for quite some time, and was, in fact, my lifeline during that period after being laid-off from SCO way back when, since I didn't have an armory account. I've still got some of the old eniac-list mail from around that time.

And even afterwards, it was gorn that still had all the old sco games loaded on it, such as greed, jewel, and even planets.

From: Old Jack Falstaff (oracle)

i have a vague memory of when jon first set up gorn, and i got myself the account "oracle" which i used when i couldn't get into ucsc and was actually able to dial in to gorn.

i remember taking a ride with jon to fremont to get an extra memory board for gorn. i think it originally had 2 megs or something and we were going to pick up an 8 meg board.

i remember sometime after that hanging out at the highlands watching jon code on the console and being amazed at how long it took the cursor to stop moving after he stopped typing.

From: pallas

what i remember most about gorn was having lots and lots of email from mark.

wanna date?
when's our date?
where you thinking more about our date?
let's screw!

oh yeah, electronic flowers. email flowers? i haven't seen one in a long time but he used to mail me those, too. most of my gorn memories all revolve around mark. :)

Not Quite As Interesting Stories

From: shavlul

my senior year at UCSC, 1991-92, i finally bought myself a PC. even then, there were still quite a few CIS/CE majors who did all of our class assignments in the stat labs and AS215 since we didn't have machines. it was a 386/40 with 1MB RAM and 100MB HD and a (splurge!) 2400bps modem - the perfect machine for running WordPerfect 5.1, Quattro Pro, Turbo C, Telix, and some DOS games.

i'd heard from someone in the lab that there are these UNIX machines at Santa Cruz that anyone can get an account for, just for the asking. this sounded much too good to be true, but i took down the phone numbers and got accounts on both deeptht and gorn.

i logged into both machines a few times. since they were not connected directly to the internet, and the idea of programming on a machine via a modem didn't appeal to me, i didn't do very much with them other than e-mail and a few newsgroups.

after i graduated, i forgot my gorn password. at one point i asked jonl if he still had files from my account, but they were long gone by then. i somehow did not forget my deeptht password, so i still have that account.

that's my gorn story.

From: exene (izzy)

i had no computer so i only used gorn from the livingroom at jon/mike's

as a consequence i could never remember my password and jon always had to reset it or tell me

that's my gorn story ;]

From: kzin

So, after I transfered to Ga Tech, I came back to visit a couple times On one of those visits, I ran in to Jonl, and he says to me "Hey, do you want a Gorn account?"

And I says back "Can I telnet to it from Atlanta?"

And he says "No."

So I said "Then it probably wouldn't be too useful to me."

and he says "Probably not."

And that was the extent of my experience with Gorn. :-)

From: Evan (ethanol)

I had a gorn account (ethanol, I think) but hardly ever bothered to dial in; I just always used UCSC, and then after I graduated I always used SCO. I remember visiting Jon at, um, echo street I think it was, and asking him to unlock my account; it'd been so long since I'd been connected, the system had expired it. He did so, and I promptly let the same thing happen again.