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The resources below are additional free pubnixes and public access systems
with various offerings and services. They mostly focus on FOSS and community
support as collaborative and loosely based social networking and learning in
a character based environment.
Super Dimension Fortress - Established 1987
The great great grandpappy of public access UNIX systems. This is actually
where the notion of what a tilde community actually has come from - the "~"
character is used to provide shorthand in UNIX for a user's home directory
and refers to virtually hosted gopher and web based publicly facing sites.
SDF began life as the Magic City Micro-BBS running on an Apple IIe in 1987.
The name Super Dimension Fortress was an homage to a Japanese anime series
and derived from the 'SIG' (Special Interest Group) called SDF-1 that the
BBS was centered around, in the Dallas Texas vicinity, and within three years
the system was migrated to the i386 platform running under SVR4 UNIX and SDF
joined the lonestar.org UUCP network, eventually annexing the domain - ergo,
sdf.lonestar.org.
Physical operations were moved to Seattle, Washington in 2001 along with the
adoption and migration to NetBSD, where it primarily has its focus to this
day. In 2016 SDF user accounts numbered over 47,000 people, and although not
all members are very active, the covetted ARPA membership is often sought out
even by those who know they're not going to be active due to such membership
being considered a badge of honor in the world of geekdom.
SDF's stewardship in the arena of retro computing, the restoration of vintage
mainframes, minis, and microcomputers is legendary, and its efforts to bring
and maintain this machinery and the respective operating sytems in a publicly
accessable museam environment is ongoing, and rivalled only perhaps, by the
similar efforts of Dr. Bernd Ulmann, AKA, the Vaxman, and his museam in
Germany.
A nod to the term, 'tilde' still exists on the official website, from which
the origin of the community name stems, although the link no longer provides
the directory listing of users, and sdf.lonestar.org still redirects to the
main sdf.org webpage where new users can sign up.
SDF-EU Public Access UNIX System
SDF-EU, based in Falkenstein, Germany, is an independant subsidiary of the
Super Dimensional Fortress (SDF.org). A networked community of free software
authors, teachers, students, researchers, hobbyists, enthusiasts and the blind
Its mission is to provide remotely accessible computing facilities for the
advancement of public education, cultural enrichment, scientific research and
recreation - including the recreational exchange of information concerning the
Liberal and Fine Arts.
Members have UNIX shell access to games, email, usenet, chat, bboard, webspace
gopherspace, programming utilities, archivers, browsers, and more.
The Tildeverse - social, learning, creating
The Tildeverse, not to be confused, neccesarily with the Fediverse, is a loose
association of like-minded tilde communities, although it does maintain a few
facilities in the Fediverse.
To describe these communities, tildes are pubnixes in the spirit of tilde.club
which was created in 2014 by paul ford.
Member status in the tildeverse mainly involves some level of engagement or
presence on irc. All of the other tilde pubnix systems are independent of
each other.
The Deathrow OpenVMS Cluster free public access system, based in
Jacksonville, Florida and now defunct, was a network of machines centered
around the naming convention of mass serial killers. Machine names such as
Gein, Manson, and Dahmer, were a tongue in cheek reference theme for hostnames
and the cluster of hardware available to those accessing the network to study
and learn operations and programming under the OpenVMS Operating system.
DeathRow was a popular service up until its decommisioning and subequent
mothballing and storage of the machines by founder Champ, "Da Beave", Clark.