Raw Transcript of Roland Turner's 30th Anniversary Speech¶
Good evening, Progsoc! Happy 30th birthday!
There is a sentence that I never, ever expected to speak.
I'm Roland Turner.
With the help of half a dozen fellow students and a couple of members of staff,
we jointly founded the UTS Programmer Society 30 years ago today.
I'm going to talk a little bit about Progsoc's first decade.
I suspect that you have other people present
who are better qualified to talk about subsequent decades.
At the time that we founded Progsoc,
compute time was a bit difficult to come by.
The university owned an Armdell 470/V8.
I couldn't find an accurate picture.
This was the nearest I could find from an ancient Armdell brochure.
But it looked something like this.
It was a conventional IBM mainframe clone.
IBM was a competitor who was making clones.
Typical operated consoles.
There would also have been an array of discs.
I never actually saw the installation at UTS.
It was hiding in a machine room that of course we weren't allowed to enter.
technology.
At the time the university had a separate school of computing science.
It had a lab full of graphical terminals.
Something like what you're seeing in the picture.
These were actually what are called X servers.
They're the graphical terminal for a remote computer.
Some sort of large computer that had 30 of these terminals connected to it.
There were some PCs around.
But these, in terms of large and more powerful machines,
these were the two things that we had.
Fortunately, the Armdell mainframe ran a Unix variant.
But in both the Armdell and Sun workstation cases,
there was absolutely no question of students having super user access.
There were a number of us around at that time
who were getting interested in system programming.
So, of course, system programming without root access is a bit of a contradiction in terms.
In terms of scale, the Armdell, of which the university had just one,
had I believe 3,500 registered users and through serial terminals supported up to 160 simultaneous users.
The Sun workstation, or the X terminals rather, for the Sun workstations,
perhaps there were 30 seats in total.
This was clearly not okay for a bunch of very curious programmers
who wanted to get involved in system work.
So, naturally, we decided to create the Young Unix System Programmers Club, or YASP.
I'm thrilled to say that we were talked out of that idea.
On March 16, 1989, a number, I don't recall, perhaps 20 or 30 of us.
I do, in fact, have the attendance sheet from that day,
but I couldn't find it in time for this presentation.
I met in one of the classrooms at level 4 of what was then Building 4.
I think it's now called CB07.
And formed the UTS Programmer Society,
and the constitution from that time still exists and I believe is on the website.
Not by itself a very notable meeting,
apart from one odd motion that was unrelated to anything else that happened during that meeting,
which was that someone moved that the logo shall be an eye in a pyramid.
Perhaps a number of us were reading Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus Trilogy.
And so, of course, as most of you will have seen, the early logos were, in fact, eyes in pyramids.
Our first port of call was, of course, the UTS Union, now called the UTS Activate, in order to become affiliated.
This created some problems.
There was already a computing science society, and they were not clear on why there should be another one.
So we had to explain that we were not a computing science society.
And, in fact, the two of us who went to seek affiliation were Chris Keane, a computer science undergrad,
and myself, and, at the time, electrical engineering undergrad.
And so that was actually, it turned out, a fairly important fact when we were being told,
"No, we don't want to go ahead because there's already a computing society."
The other big distinction that that gave rise to is that ProgSoc's objectives were and have remained largely technical,
rather than being yet another university drinking club.
There was another ulterior motive, perhaps, in forming ProgSoc and seeking affiliation.
At the time, the union had just purchased a yacht.
I kid you not.
They were slugging us for about 300 bucks a semester, which for undergrad students in 1988-89 was a bit difficult,
and had seriously bought a yacht.
The deal was that there was a UTS yachting club, this was a subsidy arrangement, there was a whole deal,
so it wasn't a straight-out gift.
But we thought that perhaps we should get our hands on some of that.
And so the deal was that by becoming a union-affiliated club,
our purchases of computer equipment would be generally covered, matched dollar-for-dollar by the union.
And, on the rare occasions we needed to buy equipment, that actually played out.
So it was actually a good choice in that respect.
Another interesting detail was tied up with longevity and continuity.
At the time, computing science students were a four-year course,
of which the third year, a whole year, was spent working somewhere in industry full-time.
Engineering was either six years part-time or six years sandwiched, meaning alternating semesters of work and study.
And so it turned out that it was useful to have a number of electrical engineers involved right from the beginning,
because we would be around for longer.
And that has helped keep ProgSoc operational.
Granted, I would not have believed anyone if they told me I'd be around 30 years later.
Somehow, someone obtained something called a general robotics Python.
It's very hard to obtain photos of this thing, because, of course, also just for Python,
find a programming language with the same name.
So this is not, in fact, the same class of machine, but it's a similar machine.
Perhaps a metre by a metre by 30 centimetres, stands on the floor, has a bunch of slots for putting in expansion cards.
Great, we finally had our hands on a machine we could be root on and we could do cool stuff with,
but we received an ethernet card and someone plugged it in the wrong way round and killed it.
We travelled so far, I sort of missed it by that much.
So instead, we connected the serial port to one of the Sun machines that the School of Computer Science had.
And couldn't do networking because there were console error messages being pushed out and PPP wasn't available,
so it was a protocol called slip, which would just break every time there was a console message.
And so we just had single serial login to this machine.
This wasn't quite what he'd intended, but it was a step up on being non-root on multi-user machines run by the university.
That machine is referred to in 1996 in a list post where it was announced as a new machine
because it had been moved when the university's IT division took over the old School of Computer Science machine room,
also on the same floor of Building 4 or CB7.
But actually, no. As you'll see if you go looking at the mailing list, it was the same machine,
still with no working network interface, and therefore actually had fallen into disuse.
Not long after that, we received from Sun Microsystems the gift of a somewhat aged machine that ran SunOS.
This allowed us to run a multi-user machine, which is what we wanted to do.
Initially, we were sitting in the School of Computing Science or SOC's machine room,
but we had full control of it. We provided people with shell accounts.
After a while, web hosting, as perhaps others who are present tonight will have noticed,
Tim Berners-Lee's original paper on the web was published three days before ProgSoC was founded.
Obviously, we didn't know that.
The relationship with Sun went on for some time.
It was useful in two really important ways.
One was that they would periodically donate to us equipment that no longer had commercial value.
It was fairly bulky, but eventually we had a full classroom to use as our machine room,
which meant that we could put to use equipment that would otherwise have been scrap.
The other thing that it did was provided a pipeline of employment opportunities for the students in their industrial year.
And so, I forget how many, but perhaps a dozen students at different times spent their industrial year from computing science working for Sun Microsystems at Gordon.
You now get to find out that I had to rush my slides a bit.
I'm actually at FOSS Asia at the moment. I'm an organizer and moderator.
And so, this is all happening tucked in between other activities, including the video setup is the full lecture theatre.
So, the room that we were allocated was room 4438, which, as I said, I believe is in what is now CB7, the wing parallel to Thomas Street, I think.
The one parallel to Broadway by the back of the building.
We had that for a number of years. That was great. That meant we could accumulate these gigantic ancient sun machines.
And it was fine right up until we had to vacate the room and then somehow had to get rid of a couple of tons of steel.
But it helped us, it provided us a meeting room, it provided a centre for the club.
Somewhere along there, a user guide for the sun machines was produced by the Programmer Society.
And pretty quickly, in its second edition, added a bunch of other stuff that wasn't just for sun equipment.
And this is more about students using the SOX-owned equipment to do their coursework rather than our machines.
Although, of course, our machines were mentioned.
The sun user guide was kind of a boring name.
Hopefully, everyone in this room is familiar with the expression RTFM.
If you are not, kindly look it up.
We therefore produced TFM.
Here are the things that a first-year or second-year computing science or a LEC-IN student at UTS needs to know.
Not just how to use the computing facilities and the Progso facilities.
How to program Emacs.
How to do really peculiar things with LaTeX for page layout.
There was a how-to-eat in and around the area.
At one point, there were sections that got us in trouble.
I forget why.
I have an idea there were sexist jokes embedded, which were a little bit on the nose,
but enough that someone got upset at us.
It is claimed, I don't remember who, but I'm pretty sure it's true, that at least one lecturer,
possibly more than one, essentially prescribed this as a text to their first years.
They said, you know, go and get this.
Because this is built to solve all of the stuff you need to know to work, to get up and running on the university equipment.
That, of course, meant that this bureaucracy got involved.
And although I don't have a copy of it, when you opened the cover of TFM,
right on the first page there was nothing other than a definition for the term RTFM.
On one occasion, we received a very polite request from the dean's office.
He didn't want us to remove this page, but he wanted us to move it to the back page of TFM.
And so we did so.
It was not that we couldn't use offensive language, but that kindly could we put it a little bit out of sight.
I don't recall how many editions that remained true for, but that was how that came to be.
Part of running a club over a long period of time is that actually governance issues come up.
And although during the time that I was away, after dropping out as an engineering student,
I'm not in a good position to talk about what happened here,
a formal review body called the Justice League of Frogsock was formed.
Please read the mailing list if you're interested.
It turned into something rather ugly that wasn't achieving much and that was doing perhaps more harm than good.
And so, although I honestly have forgotten the details when I returned to study computing science in 1995,
one of the first things I recommended was that the JLP be disbanded, and it was.
This is not to say it was a bad idea or it would now be a bad idea, just it's a food for thought.
Neither was it necessarily a good idea nor a bad idea.
Right about this time, we received a letter from one of Australia's leading commercial law firms,
alleging copyright infringement and threatening severe consequences.
we freaked out, talked about it for a bit, went and spoke to the Union Council.
They weren't able to handle it, but they referred us to another commercial law firm who took it on a pro bono basis.
And in fact, it never got beyond us briefing them and them advising us.
And the advice was, just sit on it.
I mean, locate the problem.
Basically, a member was sharing an unlicensed copy of a, or rather a licensed copy, but unlawfully,
sharing copies of a piece of, I believe, Macintosh software for which he had built a new installer.
It's fine, but also entirely legal and, of course, for us, a bit of a problem.
I've raised this because, I mean, it's not a fun part of the history, but just to state that legal issues come up from time to time.
When they do, don't panic, get expert help, it's available, people will help.
And in fact, in this case, we received, sort of, a competent legal counsel on a pro bono basis.
Yeah, we didn't, the advice was, don't respond, we didn't respond.
We never heard from the company again, because, of course, in the meantime, we had found and cleaned up the problem
and invited the offending member to resign.
The other exciting thing that happened around that time was a takeover attempt.
And again, I've got the text somewhere, but I couldn't quickly find it for tonight.
The...
We were hosting machines that belonged to members.
This is, by now, about '96, '97.
And they're being used to run what are called MUDs, or multi-user dungeons.
These are an online chat system.
We now have WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal to do more or less the same thing.
But that was not available at the time.
And so, this is what was occurring.
And it seems that, although the group running one of these was not taking the time to make their concerns known to the executive,
they were disgruntled and decided that an appropriate way to solve this problem was to cause a group of them to turn up at our AGM,
to join at the time, and thereby to basically stack the election and take over the club.
We repelled this more or less by accident.
The sudden insurge of people, we were not geared to sign up as members.
And so, I...
I suspended the meeting.
I don't know what the word is.
So that there was time for people to join and renew so that we could then resume the meeting and actually have all interested people heard.
It was after that occurred that we then learned what had happened, that there had been this deliberate attempt to mount a takeover.
And perhaps the busiest time on the ProgSoc list ever was the ensuing debate.
Again, things to read if you have the time.
The solution to that one turned out to be, one, engage with the membership and make sure people knew what was going on,
and two, once it became clear that we were, in fact, working hard to prevent the takeover,
and surprisingly, the group who was attempting the takeover didn't turn up at the resumed meeting.
And so I believe the votes came out sort of 32 for myself and co, versus eight for the contending group.
I can't say we did anything terribly clever, other than, you know, fully engaged and made sure everyone understood what was going on,
and did what we could to do the right thing.
Oop, I skipped one.
Side detail.
At the time, I took on the running of CompSoC, which was the computing science society social club, basically.
Sadly, I did a terrible job and ran the loss.
And at that time, the union once again became confused about ProgSoC versus computing science.
They had attempted to take the difference out of ProgSoC's bank account.
We were able to dissuade them.
ProgSoC had maintained a bank account throughout most of its life to allow it to purchase replacement equipment if it needed to.
And so there was an actual threat there.
They really were in a position to sort of take cash out of us.
Finally, they relented.
But it's worth keeping in mind that if there are shared executives, the union or Activate might get confused, and this may or may not create problems for you.
So I would discourage it if possible.
The happier news, one of the projects that occurred, Anton Blanchard, president at one point, now lives in Texas, I think, took the Sun4M Linux implementation, which was the initial Linux
implementation for Sun4 equipment, and did a back port to the Sun4 Classic architecture, which I believe was what Fatumsh was.
He then went on to do various things commercially and professionally that involved kernel maintenance.
One of the things that I would like to point out is that we didn't know and couldn't have guessed a number of the things that would occur.
The task was always just keep the organization alive, keep doing interesting things occasionally, and then let stuff happen.
This sort of stuff happened, and it was the fact that we had over a multi-, certainly multi-year period, if not multi-decade, maintain this practice of obtaining old Sun hardware and housing it and arranging transport and keeping the university happy so that we could keep doing this that made it possible for this to occur, and to occur within ProcSox network.
It is possible this is the machine on which the back port occurred, I really don't know, this was in about 2000, I was back in Sydney for about a year, and we were made the donation of the largest machine ever, in fact two of these machines, I forget what they were, but you can see the row of CPU cards in the rack, but it's a 19-inch rack case that stands this high, and it was two of them.
By this time we had been moved into a smaller room, basically a storeroom on the ground floor of CB7, and so yes, these two machines occupied more than a quarter of the floor space, but they were useful for some years.
The other item I wanted to flag was, hopefully there are other people present who are better positioned to address this than I am, something that in the hackerspace.org design patterns is described as the sine curve pattern.
This is normal for organisations of this type, sometimes the organisation is thriving, other times it's a bit quiet.
A few years ago it went even quieter than usual, and unfortunately during that time we lost our room, and also all of its contents.
Obviously do what you can to avoid having that repeat, I would suggest, but also just be aware that it's real, it's part of the deal, it will happen occasionally.
The really positive thing I'd point out, and it's perhaps not obvious to anyone who, certainly current undergrads, but even those who perhaps graduated a decade ago,
the world has changed in a really big way with respect to nerdy pursuits like programming computers and making electronics and all that sort of stuff.
Educators are getting excited about STEM, all kinds of people are running programs to support makers.
We sort of fit in that space, and in fact we also fit in the space of being a hackerspace, and I point to the hackerspaces.org.
There's a full suite of design patterns that are worth the executives' while, each executive's while, studying and understanding.
The one big exception is don't be tied to university because it minimises your membership.
That's part of the situation we operate in, and it's not about to change.
So, repeating some ideas, mostly for Progsock's future rather than its past.
What we learned, industry relationships matter.
The supply of hardware and the demand for industrial students from Sun was a hugely important part of what we did.
Faculty relationships matter, especially to retain a room.
I know Progsock doesn't have one at the moment, maybe that will change in future.
But we had enormous support for about a decade, a little more, from the head of the School of Computing Science while that school existed and while she occupied that role.
That helped us in a whole lot of ways, but in particular meant that we had a room for a long period of time.
Quite a large room, in fact.
When legal issues arise, and they will, and I understand that in fact, well, I won't get to that.
Don't panic.
Get help.
There are people available who are willing to help or to point you to people who can.
It can be a little bit intimidating to have, as we did, one of Australia's most capable commercial lawyers sent us a nasty letter.
But deal with it calmly, move forward in an orderly way, and it will be resolved.
Stay in touch with the membership.
One of the mistakes that we made, that made possible the takeover attempt, was that we had not done that.
We had lost track of what was happening in the MUDs.
There was a huge community of users of the MUDs who were not members and who had no contact with the membership, and indeed with the executive.
So we weren't clear on the needs and interests of the people whose needs we were in fact serving, and therefore they were encouraged to attempt to take over.
Basically, keep doing interesting stuff.
We can never guess what the side effects are going to be.
I mentioned Anton Blanchard's back port of Linux to the Sun for classic architecture.
One of our former presidents, who I suspect is president this evening, was in fact encouraged to learn to program by Progsoc, and then later became president, and that affected her career in a number of ways.
These are things we couldn't have predicted, but merely by providing the context and continuing to do interesting things, and to encourage people to come on board.
Stuff will happen, and it will keep happening.
A really important piece is, or has turned out to be, a few long-term members.
I would not have believed it if anyone told me I'd be doing this 30 years later, and I have not always been engaged, but I'm not the only one.
The list of former execs, CK and Tom Bosick in particular, but a bunch of others were engaged over multi-year periods, and this has been a large part of the basis of Progsoc's longevity.
I believe it's now the oldest, second oldest or third oldest club on campus.
And finally, plug network cards in the right way around.
That's all I have. Have a great night.
Oh, final observation, I think tonight's gathering is the largest gathering Progsoc's ever had.
I suspect, we know that it's larger than the gathering for the second session during the takeover attempt in '97.
We suspect that it's larger than the first one, although there are no records.
So this is quite a special night. Enjoy. Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay.