We received a fantastic note from Clive Dawson this morning that we have to share right away. This explains and clarifies mysteries that have confused even those with decades of experience on campus!:)
From Clive Dawson
This is what I remember about the buildings that the Computer Sciences Dept. occupied over the years. When I arrived in the Fall of 1971, CS was housed in Waggener Hall together with Classics and Philosophy. Pearce Hall (Building) was to the south, across Inner Campus Drive, just west of the Business Building (BEB). It housed an RJE (Remote Job Entry) terminal which is where Dave Matuszek remembers going to submit card decks and retrieve printouts. These functions could also be performed in the Computation Center proper.
In the early ’80’s there was talk about constructing a new dedicated building for CS. A “slot” was even reserved in the UT construction schedule for this, but much to the dismay of many CS faculty, this slot was “stolen” by the new MCC building at Braker and Mopac around 1986-88.
The Taylor Hall Annex on the corner of 24th and Speedway housed another of the Comp. Center’s RJE sites, together with several CC user services (consulting) offices. It was torn down in the early ’90’s to make room for the ACES building. By then, the CS Department had moved from Painter into Taylor Hall proper.
The Taylor Hall Annex on the corner of 24th and Speedway housed another of the Comp. Center’s RJE sites, together with several CC user services (consulting) offices. It was torn down in the early ’90’s to make room for the ACES building. By then, the CS Department had moved from Painter into Taylor Hall proper.
Finally, in 2013, the GDC was completed. Some CS people who had a significant affiliation with ACES (now known as the O’Donnell Building) stayed there, but the bulk of the CS Department moved into GDC where it remains today.
Waggener
Pearce Hall (Old Law Building)
MCC
Painter was a very important building because lower-division Physics courses were taught there in the old lecture hall, where all the old demonstration gear had built up over the decades. Heavy fifties sixties vibe, Feynman Lectures etc. And then, this following curious note jotted down few years ago, will never forget that walk over to Painter!:)
ReplyDeleteIn 91 and 92, home computing meant a bare 386 motherboard dangling from a wire shelf on hooks through two of its corner mounting holes, with cables running down to a hard disk, monitor, keyboard, and mouse sitting on the shelf below. It was still running windows, but the idea was to get it onto unix. Work computers were DEC and SUN boxes running unix, and it was simply natural to have something similar at home.
From studying the situation on Usenet, the main options seemed to be IBM Xenix, or possibly the Minix ‘open spinoff’ from that. There were rumblings about BSD, but they were hard to interpret, let alone act on. Meanwhile, in an office in the Botany Building, there happened to be a seemingly complete Xenix package just sitting there...
Would it have been possible to install that Xenix distribution? Or focus on Minix and get it working?
Hard to say, because something new suddenly appeared in the Usenet discussions. This was spring or summer 92. The basic message was that yes indeed people were asking these same questions, and someone had done something decisive about it.
It was now possible to create two diskettes, a boot diskette, and a root filesystem diskette. then use a hex editor on the boot diskette to configure it for particular hardware.
And then boot the 386 into unix.
It all worked, first try. Used the hard 3.5 inch diskettes. The walk over to Painter Hall from Mrs Zively’s house north of campus was sunny, hot, and sweaty. But well worth it since there was a lab there with the necessary hex editor for the boot diskette. Will never forget that walk, and the feeling when that 386 booted unix for the first time...