David Malone

I was at secondary school at Mount Temple and I got some limited experience of computer networking there.  Our maths teacher, Maurice Maxwell, had a small network of BBC micros at the back of his class. He bought them in the UK, drove them home in the back seat of his car and paid for them by providing computer training to other teachers. We mainly used them to do word processing, though I learned to do a little C programming through a friend-of-a-friend, Jo Jaquinta, outside school.

About 1989/1990, I got a 1200 baud modem for a birthday, and used it to connect to some of the Amiga bulletin board systems (BBSes) in Dublin (in particular, Infomatique frequented by Eddy Carroll, Karl Jeacle and others). When I began doing this, local phone calls were flat-rate, regardless of duration, so as long as you didn’t get disconnected, this wasn’t too expensive to do. I have a vague memory of seeing Ireland On-Line on a list of bulletin boards around this time, and the confusion in the BBS community about about how you could charge for a bulletin board service, because it wasn’t exactly clear what the Internet was.

My first modem – 1200 baud

In September 1992, I started studying in the maths department in TCD. There was quite an enlightened computing environment there – maths and science undergrads were required to get an account on the department Unix system. Access to the system was mainly via “dumb terminals” though some graphical “xterminals” appeared in my first year. A computer literacy course, run by Tim Murphy, required the undergrads learn how to use e-mail, Usenet, markup languages (originally LaTeX, but later HTML too) and a little C programming.

The maths department had a history with e-mail and UUCP. Tim Murphy made things happen as part of the Unix Users Group (e.g. he hosted the European Unix Users Group meeting in TCD in 1983). You can find mentions of maths.tcd.ie going back to 1988 in a post from Peter Craig.  Before that, the UUCP name “tcdmath”, appears in 1984 as the only Irish Usenet site in a Usenet map posted by Gene Spafford.

Eight years later we had limited Internet access – we could use e-mail and Usenet to contact anyone, but outgoing telnet and ftp were blocked. The story circulating was this was to protect the Internet from wayward undergraduates, but more likely it was to protect the limited available bandwidth. I seem to remember a figure of 64kbps for TCD’s Internet access at the time, but others would know better. When I arrived, it seemed like these regulations had been in place for ever, though retrospectively they must have been quite recent.

Assignments for maths department course 152/153 in 1992

We were able to use ftp-mail to download files, and I remember doing this to get interesting software for my Amiga. It was possible to dial up to maths and get shell access to the Unix system, so I used to connect and download the software using zmodem, which was also used on BBSes.

When I started, the computer system was managed by two students, Alan Judge and Christine Hogan. Another student, James Casey, began helping to manage the system and I gradually became interested in how it worked. Possibly inspired by Justin Mason, who been a maths undergrad and was now working for Iona, James set up a web server and a web proxy in 1993 (initially, I think, on a machine belonging to Jim Sexton called lattice, because it was used for Lattice QCD; Jim is now an IBM fellow). This meant that as undergrads we could set up our own web pages and browse the web. This was promptly integrated into the computer literacy course.

I remember James first showing me the web using the w3 line mode browser on a dumb terminal. I had trouble understanding how selecting a link was different from downloading a file using ftp, reading it, and then downloading a file it referenced. In one sense, there is no difference, but in another way, I (initially) completely missed the point of the web.

After James Casey finished his degree, Sharon Murphy took over as the webmaster for www.maths.tcd.ie. This (as far as we know) was the third web server in Ireland.

In 1994, I was also asked to help run the computer system in maths. I was trained in by Alan Judge over the summer and learned how a bunch of protocols and Unix things worked. One of the early tasks I was involved with was letting users connect over the maths modems by IP, rather than getting a Unix shell login, and we had “SLIP” working by July 1994. Simon Boyle, a maths and economics student, who set up one of the first Irish Web consultancy companies (called Winc, I think), was one of the first regular users.

One thing that I remember from this time was some initial scepticism in the university that a generic student would need access to e-mail, much less the web. Consequently, international students and other special cases were sometimes sent to maths, as there were rumours we were providing network access. The level of network usage by maths did sometimes create some issues because of TCD’s cost allocation model. To help resolve this, and other issues (one involving a picture of nude firemen!), we set up a regular meeting of people operating computer systems in TCD. While we didn’t always agree about what to do, it helped us all understand where we were coming from. I acted as note taker these meetings for a few years.

Over the following few years, we met up with students from DCU and UCD (Niall Murphy in particular, but I think Colin Whittaker also) who were trying to figure out how to set up student-run Internet services. Maths also provided support to TCD’s netsoc (where Tom Holmes and Cliodhna McGuirk were involved). I think some of the interesting lessons that technical people learned about running networks cooperatively in those days may have been lost with the subsequent corporatisation of networks in the 2000s.

In third year I took a cryptography course taught by Michael Purser and spent my Easter break working in Baltimore Technologies on implementing the Digital Signature Algorithm for their Crypto Tool Box. By the summer 1995 I had two offers of summer jobs, one from Baltimore and the other from IEunet, where I was interviewed by Cormac Callanan at Alan Judge’s suggestion. I decided to take the job with IEunet, for variety. I think Michael was a little disappointed with me, as any computer person could have done the IEunet job but he needed someone mathematical for the cryptography work. Michael must have forgiven me, as I did some prototyping work for Baltimore in 1996 to combine one of their crypto products with the web and Java, and got to meet Fran Rooney.

When I started in IEunet, Nick Hilliard was the full time technical person with backup from Alan Judge. I remember Mike Nowlan keeping an eye on things in the background: he was often logged into the Usenet server, making sure it was keeping up with the news feed from Amsterdam.

My initial jobs were to set up a new server running FreeBSD and also to streamline some of the log processing software that was used for billing (I think this was written by Dave Broderick, though Dave was busy with other things at this time). I was initially a little anxious after an indignant customer complained that they had been billed too much. We responded with a list of login times extracted by my billing code, which resulted in prompt payment and restored my faith in the code!

After a few weeks, Nick was happy that I could deal with day-to-day issues. As he hadn’t had a holiday for 18 months he went on holiday leaving me in charge of the technical stuff! I enjoyed a summer of writing Perl code, learning about FreeBSD on the new server and even site visits to resolve customers’ problems (some of whom had clearly been surfing for adult content). I was told that I didn’t need to worry about dressing up for customers. If I turned up scruffy, the customer would know they’d got a real technical person.

On the networking side, TCD’s router (maintained by Ken Gordon) and IEunet’s router were connected by a longish run of 10Mbps thin Ethernet at the time, so connectivity between both was good. TCD’s main Internet connection was through HEAnet. However, the Usenet news servers in TCD got a feed from both HEAnet and IEunet. In practice, this meant that HEAnet got their news feed through TCD. At the time, the volume of Usenet news was pretty big, and I think we may have received Usenet news by tape from Amsterdam when the service got backed up.

The TCD-IEunet Ethernet cable had occasional issues. If the link dropped, suddenly all the Usenet traffic would be routed around the world and come in through HEAnet’s external links. I used to tell people that you could almost hear the sloshing sound as the traffic suddenly changed direction!

International sloshing around of traffic made people think about establishing a place where the various Irish ISPs could exchange traffic. As IEunet was moving off TCD’s campus, I did think of suggesting TCD as a possible neutral place that could host this. I got the feeling, however, that people felt that the solution would be a commercial one, so I didn’t pursue it. At the time, the Internet was increasingly run commercially, and less by universities and researchers.

When the summer came to an end, I continued doing weekend and evening work for IEunet until April 1996, when I started my final exams for my undergraduate degree.

I continued helping with the system administration in maths when I began studying for a masters there. Based on our experience with FreeBSD in IEunet, Alan Judge, myself and Ian Dowse began using FreeBSD in maths for providing both xterminals and servers. About the same time, Tim Murphy became interested in Java, and we ran a summer school on this new up-and-coming language.

Over the next couple of years, networking evolved in maths. On the one hand, we tried to reduce our network usage to reduce costs, and we introduced smarter web proxies that did better caching and also interoperated with other caches inside the college. On the other hand, faster Ethernet became available. The building was rewired, and we removed the serial cables and thin Ethernet and replaced them with twisted pair which was first served by 10Mbps hubs, then switches and gradually 100Mbps and 1Gbps network equipment. We also began experimenting early on with WiFi and with IPv6, eventually leading me to my current job of applying mathematics in networking research.

© David Malone 2016