A Love Letter to the Super Dimension Fortress

The more I learn about the web, the more appreciative I become of what came before. We truly are standing on the shoulders of giants. In the past week, I've had the pleasure of (finally) becoming an ARPA member on SDF, a non-profit public-access UNIX system and online community that has been in continuous operation since 1987. But what is SDF? Well, to answer that, we need to go back four decades and talk about the BBS era. Bulletin Board Systems It's June 16, 1987. Ted Uhlemann ("iczer") plugs an Apple IIe's 300-baud[1] modem into a phone line his mother had just given him for his birthday, running Magic City Micro-BBS (written in Applesoft BASIC). He names it SDF-1 after his favorite anime, hoping to attract fans of "anime, industrial music and the Church of the SubGenius," per a 30th-anniversary retrospective by Stephen Jones. The original hardware is one 1200bps modem and two floppy drives holding 280 kilobytes each. This was the very beginning of SDF. SDF is self-described as "a community platform for inspiring, facilitating and implementing new ideas". It's a multi-user NetBSD machine, funded solely by its members as a 501(c)(7) nonprofit, where tens of thousands of people hold accounts. The name comes from the anime Super Dimension Fortress Macross (known in the West as part of Robotech), and the system began as a BBS for Japanese anime fans. The BBS-era of SDF was can be witnessed in the eight-part 2004 documentary on YouTube titled BBS: The Documentary, which includes a recorded interview with Stephen Jones, SDF's longtime sysadmin. Bulletin board systems predate the modern Internet, and arguably turned personal computers from expensive novelty kits into far more popular machines. BBSes were what changed PCs into essential gateways for global and local communication during the 1980s and early 1990s. They were proof the computer was for connecting with other people. There were no search engines at the time, so you had to look through computer magazines or text files from other boards to find a BBS. A "website address" was a local 7-digit phone number. You opened a terminal program on your computer and typed a command to make your modem dial the BBS phone number.

Because it used your home phone line, nobody in your house could use the phone while you were online. You would listen to the computer physically dial the number, followed by the iconic, harsh screeching and static hiss of two modems talking to each other.

At its peak of popularity, there were over 150,000 BBSes operating in North America. By 2005, there were only a few hundred. In a 2006 bsdtalk interview, one longtime member summed up what makes the place stick around: "SDF is more than a shell account, it's a community of people who communicate with one another via the various methods that SDF provides... What makes SDF special is that it is run like a computing environment in the early days of the Internet. It's not corporate at all." A university researcher's 2019 survey of public-access UNIX systems, History, Evolution and Future of Public Access UNIX, hosted on SDF itself, describes the modern system as "a fully articulated social community," and adds that SDF supports special interest groups for ham radio (SDFARC), Python, Gopher enthusiasts, and Minecraft players alongside "digital artists, computer historians, web developers, gamers, and of course many, many programmers."

SDF's own pictorial tour documents the hardware year by year back to 1985, including a stint at a telephone museum and the machines running today.

Today the network includes NetBSD servers on DEC Alpha and AMD Opteron hardware, plus live retrocomputing environments: a TOPS-20 system (twenex.org, running Panda Distribution TOPS-20 on two XKL TOAD-2s), a Symbolics Genera machine, and an ITS system.

Free accounts are available on all of them.

In the past four decades, SDF has survived hardware failures, countless DDoSes, a termination by its own ISP, and multiple relocations across the United States. It has never gone commerical, nor lost its userbase in that time. Jones, still running SDF decades in, wrote in his 30th-anniversary letter: "Some people today may come here and see us as outdated and 'retro.' But if you get involved, you'll see it is quite alive with new ideas." Services Offered by SDF SDF has come a long way since its BBS days, though it's still one of the last places offering free dial-up access. When you become a member on SDF, you get a lot of services—rather similar to getting a Tildeverse or omg.lol account, and predating both. You begin in the shell. Running the command ssh [email protected] puts you in NetBSD with typical stuff like bash, ksh, tcsh, rc, and zsh; editors from ed to emacs. And ping, traceroute, dig, whois, and finger, etc. You get your own web page, running mkhomepg on the shell will create a ~/html folder, and asks which URL you want. You add your files in ~/html and the site is live immediately at you.sdf.org. ARPA members can pick a vanity domain from ~60 choices (pdp10.org, twenex.org, chaosnet.org, freak.net, multics.org...). See wiki.sdf.org for the list.

CGI works out of the box.

Shell/awk/sed for everyone, and full php/perl/python/ruby for ARPA members. The Gopher and Gemini protocols are typically more used by SDF users. Run mkgopher in the shell and choose setup. It'll create ~/gopher (a symlink into /ftp/pub/users/you) served as both gopher://sdf.org/1/users/you and gemini://sdf.org/users/you.

One directory, two protocols!

Write a gophermap or add .gmi files. See gopher setup and gemini setup. And that's just the tip of the iceberg: Service Where IRC irc.sdf.org:6667 Jabber/XMPP jabber.sdf.org Matrix matrix.sdf.org Gitea git.sdf.org Mastodon mastodon.sdf.org PixelFed pixelfed.sdf.org PeerTube toobnix.org TT-RSS ttrss.sdf.org Lemmy lemmy.sdf.org Gallery sdf.org/g Deskshots deskshots.org Jitsi jitsi.sdf.org aNONradio anonradio.net Minecraft mc.sdf.org BZFlag sdf.org:5154 SDFMud sdf.org/mud TOPS-20 twenex.org How to Join Originally, the only way to join SDF and get verified was to physically mail one dollar to their PO box in Seattle with your username. This was a clever way of preventing spam and abuse. Nowadays, thankfully, you can just donate via Paypal, making the entire process a lot easier. I think one of the coolest things about SDF is the lifetime ARPA membership. For a one-time fee of $36USD, you get: Outbound tools: telnet, ssh, sftp, ftp, snarf, wget, ytalk, external IRC. Free accounts are inbound-only; ARPA opens the network both ways File transfer: scp/sftp and non-interactive SSH: ssh-copy-id is enabled Development: gcc, perl, php, python, ruby, elisp on the box Full CGI: php/perl/python/ruby on your site VoIP: internet calling, voicemail, conferencing (PSTN calling is a $15/quarter add-on with a real DID option) UUCP + ClariNET: mail and newsfeeds via TCP or dialup Voting rights: on system features and policy Quotas: ~150 MB / 5000 files each for home, mail, webspace, gopherspace Not only do you get all of the above for life, but you're supporting a networked community that's been around longer than I've been alive! Bonus: Making a Perl CGI Guestbook on SDF Back in the day, to add functionality to your website, you wrote scripts that interacted with a web server via the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) protocol. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was the primary technology used to transition the World Wide Web from static HTML pages to dynamic, interactive websites. Sadly, they're not used much in modern-day web development, and are considered obsolete and discouraged. You see, traditional CGI spawns a brand new operating system process for every single visitor click. So on busy websites, they consumed massive amounts of server memory, and slowed performance down to a crawl. But when you're making a little personal website, things like "scaling" and "efficient resource usage" can be thrown out the window!

Who cares?

Since I have access to Perl CGI as an ARPA member, I decided to make a simple guestbook on my little SDF webpage. Here's how I put it together.

1.

Understanding SDF directories In SDF, the root of your webpage is the ~/html directory, but that isn't your home directory. Rather, its a symlink into /www/<a>/<b>/<username> (the parent directories come from your username, so mine is /www/af/b/bren).