WANCHO@WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL ("Frank J. Wancho") (02/22/90)
I'm curious about Simtel20... Where is it, how did it get started, what type of system, os, etc??? Electronic addresses don't lend themselves to maps. (That's why my disclamier is what it is.) Here is the short answer. If there's enough interest, I'll post a much longer version which explains the complete history. SIMTEL20 is located at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, about 40 miles north of El Paso, Texas. It was originally procured to do Scientific and Engineering work with access to net resources for the Hybrid Computer Facility in the Simulation and Teleprocessing Branch. The SIMTEL20 name is a contraction of that branch name and the fact that it is a DECSYSTEM-20 running the TOPS-20 operating system. It was installed seven years ago, in February, 1983, and was finally connected to the net in August 1983. When the Macsyma Consortium was dissolved in September 1983, SIMTEL20 inherited the CP/M collection we started on the MIT-MC host in 1979. To that has since been added several large collections, including the canned SIG/M, CP/MUG, and PC/Blue collections as well as our own MSDOS, Ada, Unix/C, and Macintosh collections, plus the mail archives for 22 mailing lists. The primary purpose of SIMTEL20 is to provide network mailbox service to scattered users in DoD, Federal agencies, and their contractors for an annual flat fee. For those users, we provide a stop-gap service until they obtain their own local network host. Until about a year and a half ago, those fees were the primary source of income which made SIMTEL20 self-sustaining, including the maintenance of the collections. Except for the funding of a disk drive to hold the Unix/C collection from another Army agency, LSSA, in 1985, and the partial funding of the Ada collection maintenance in the past by the STARS Project office, the collections are unfunded. The maintenance of the collections is operated under one of the charters of the DARCOM Microcomputer Software Sharing System proposed in 1982 and initially funded by several DARCOM (now AMC, Army Materiel Command) organizations. We are seeking other sources of funding to keep this operation alive. --Frank