+[[!meta title="SIPB History"]]
+
SIPB was originally founded in 1969 by Bob Frankston, Gary Gut, David Burmaster, and Ed Fox. The original purpose of the board was to provide students with access to MIT's big timeshared computer systems, particularly <a href="http://www.multicians.org/">Multics</a>, back when computers were room-sized and cost millions of dollars. In addition to distributing computer time on Multics to students, SIPB provided a printer for text output, operated modem-based terminals in dormitories, fraternities, and the Student Center library, and maintained the Educational Calculator Service (ECS) subsystem, which allowed users to code in a BASIC-like language.
The SIPB office was originally located in 39-541. Within a year or two, it relocated to 39-200. From there it moved to 11-205. There it stayed for a while, until its move to its present location to W20-557 in the summer of 1989.
Many of SIPB's traditions date back to this time, including member drawers, Cokecomm, and Joseph Jeffrey Sipbadmin. There were also some significant differences; for example, full members were expected to provide regular office hours. There was also a carpeted wooden loft.
-As computing technology has progressed, SIPB has gone on to provide many groundbreaking services to the MIT community, such as:
-
-* Around 1988, SIPB supported dialup service to Athena. IS&T has taken over this now.
-* SIPB provided the first support for LaTeX on Athena. IS&T has taken that over too, although SIPB continues to provide support for it.
-* SIPB created [discuss](http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/www/discuss/discuss.html). It was modeled after forum on Multics. IS&T also took over this.
-
-The first SIPB chair was Edward Fox (now a professor at Virginia Tech). Some early chairs include:
-
-* 1984–1985 Jon Rochlis (jon)
-* 1985–1986 Bill Saphir (wcs)
-* 1986–1988 Ken Raeburn (raeburn)
-* 1988–1989 Stan Zanarotti (srz)
-* 1989–1990 Rob French (rfrench)
-* 1990–1991 Andrew (Rhu) Greene (amgreene)
-* 1991–1992 Juliet Bourne (jcbourne)
-* 1992 Chee Chew (web)
-* 1992–1993 Derek Atkins (warlord)
-* 1993–1994 Matthew Gray (mkgray)
-* 1994–1995 Jessie Stickgold-Sarah (sorokin)
+As computing technology has progressed (and Project Athena happened), SIPB has gone on to provide many groundbreaking services to the MIT community, such as:
-SIPB was responsible for [the original www.mit.edu web server](http://stuff.mit.edu/webmasters.html#history) in 1993; it may have been among the first 100 HTTP servers in the world. On August 8, 2004, IS&T took over the [www.mit.edu](http://www.mit.edu/) name, and SIPB's portal became [stuff.mit.edu](http://stuff.mit.edu).
+* Around 1988, SIPB supported the first dialup service to Athena.
+* SIPB provided the first support for LaTeX on Athena.
+* SIPB created [discuss](http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/www/discuss/discuss.html). It was modeled after forum on Multics.
+* SIPB was responsible for [the original www.mit.edu web server](http://stuff.mit.edu/webmasters.html#history) in 1993; it may have been among the first 100 HTTP servers in the world. On August 8, 2004, IS&T took over the [www.mit.edu](http://www.mit.edu/) name, and SIPB's portal became [stuff.mit.edu](http://stuff.mit.edu).
+* SIPB was originally responsible for Linux-Athena.
sipb-www / wiki.git / blobdiff