wuarchive
1988-2010
___________________
/ \
/ \
| HERE LIES |
| |
| wuarchive |
| lvl 22 |
| Mirror |
| |
| killed by a |
| World Wide Web |
| |
| 2010 |
*| * * * | *
_____)/\\_/(\____/)\___/(\_/|__)______
WUArchive is now retired as an active mirror.
Once rumoured to be the cause of 10% of the early Internet's traffic, WUArchive was a repository of the popular and the esoteric. Founded with help from the National Science Foundation and the Digital Equipment Corporation, WUArchive shared its files via FTP, Gopher, HTTP, and even NFS. It birthed the infamous wu-ftpd daemon, as well. As late as 1999 it was a Stratum 2 NTP server.
Today, the vast sprawl of public source repositories, freeware/sharewire sites, and valuable community efforts make a true, monolithic Internet Archive a task that seems quixotic. That task is better left to this new Internet of peer-sharing and clouds.
The known history of WUArchive is spotty at best.
In December of 1992, it was a DEC Alpha AXP 3000/400 workstation, with a 64bit 133Mhz 21064 Alpha CPU.
By 1997, it had 65GB of space, and 192MB of RAM.
It was a Sun UltraSparc 2, with dual 200Mhz CPUs, 512MB of RAM, and 180GB of disk in 2001.
It retired as a dual Pentium 4, with 1 GB of RAM and 1.2 TB of disk.
If you have ancient knowledge of WUArchive, please share it, to wuarchive {at} seas.wustl.edu.
A selection of responses so far:
That should read "...shared its files..." It's = it is.
I'll miss you.
The first contact that I had with the Internet was at a University of Arkansas computer lab in 1995 when a friend sat me down at a ncftp prompt with no instruction and no supervision. I flailed around enough to exit out to the shell, then sat until boredom overcame me enough to reenter the ncftp command. This time it suggested a helpful command to enter:
open wuarchive.wustl.edu
...and friends, the world changed after that.
Throughout the rest of the nineties WUArchive was a staple site for me with my interests in Linux, id Software titles and MUD games. Even in recent years I'd still log in occasionally, typically as a simple test for network connectivity. I tried that today, and discovered alas...
Just felt the need to let someone know what a monument WUArchive was to me in my formative years as a computer nerd, and I'm certain that countless others feel the same.
Cheers!