IT Folklore from the University of Arizona

In the late 80s¹ the University of Arizona had a satellite link to the John von Neumann Center for our internet connectivity. The link itself was a 57Kbit satellite connection using that giant roof mounted antenna on top of the computer center.

One morning the VitaLink Corp Satellite NOC called us to see if we had lost power as they had lost signal from us.

In 1993, UA hired the company I was working for (The Robinson Group) to replace the Vocom/Dialogic-based telephone registration system (RSVP or ““Registration System Via Phone”) with an IBM DirectTalk/6000-based system running on IBM RS/6000 hardware.

Back in 1986 the University registration process was based on stacks of punch cards. Each punch card was a seat in a class. You gather a card for each class and turn them in to registration under your name…

Continuous Organizational Renewal was the Intel internal process they used to operate Intel.

Just in case someone needs to know what the value of decimal (75) is in Hexadecimal (4B) or Binary (0100 1011).

This was something you needed to know to manage the IDX-3000 x.25 Packet switch. 3000 was the number of Async. ports a single IDX processor could support. Later IDX created a way to link two IDX-3000 processors together.

We used the IDX-3000 to distribute Asynchronous based terminals across the campus. This was parallel to the Engineering Sytek and replacing the Computer Center PAC-X packet switch.

A few people have mentioned CoSy which was an early “computer conferencing / communication system” implemented by CCIT (now UITS) back in 1987. It later branched out into Instructional CoSy which was used by students and their professors for communication. I found a scan of an old white paper on the first phase of the CoSy project that Roger Caldwell, Mely Tynan, Bob Leach, and I put together. It’s got miscellaneous references to history / environment back in those days (30 years ago!

There used be a very large Aleppo pine tree in a grassy area between the northeast side of the Computer Center and Speedway Boulevard. Then around 1990 work began on a major Speedway widening project which would expand the roadway from four lanes to six lanes and create the three UofA pedestrian underpasses. The 95 year old, 65 foot tall tree was in the way and had to go. To save it, the UofA dug it up and relocated it to a large circular planter just west of the Warren Avenue underpass over by where Eric’s Ice Cream was (now 1702) where it happily lives today.