6 ms·

Reminds me of creating a wireless access point using an old 80486 laptop and a ORiNOCO Bronze wireless card, a pigtail and an antenna. It was for one of the fir

Reminds me of creating a wireless access point using an old 80486 laptop and a ORiNOCO Bronze wireless card, a pigtail and an antenna. It was for one of the first free public wireless networks in Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, New York, in 2001. The bandwidth was provided by alt.coffee, a coffee and Internet cafe. It took some convincing to get the owners of alt.coffee to let me do this because they thought it would be bad for business. I had to convince them that people who could afford laptops with wireless weren't renting their computers, but they'd likely buy coffee. It worked :) The laptop ran NetBSD and was installed in the awning of Accidental CDs a few doors down from alt.coffee because they were open 24/7, so someone was always at the front of the store. It routed its own private subnet that the NetBSD router in alt.coffee NAT'd and provided public IPv6 via 6bone. I used 10BASE2 coax cable so I could run it along the building and nobody would mess with it, because it blended in perfectly with all the cable TV coax running on the outside of the building. Aside from replacing the hard drive once, it ran for several years before regular access points became affordable. What fun!

fellowmartian 4y ago
Man, I’m always jealous when I hear these tales of how things used to be here. I came to New York in early 2021 and my experience is completely different - it’s basically 24/7 grind and this kind of hacker fun seems inconceivable now. But maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places.
- gregsadetsky 4y ago
  I feel like https://www.nycresistor.com/ https://www.nycresistor.com/ and https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/ still embody the spirit of those early communities!
  - dtaht 4y ago
    I love what these folk are doing. also the battlemesh crowd is fun. See guifi for a better model for spreading the internet around...
- 7speter 4y ago
  > it’s basically 24/7 grind and Rent is too damn high for anything else
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
projektfu 4y ago
I'd worry about some cable guy attempting to splice it before noticing it's the wrong thickness. I loved 10Base2 because it was so easy to install, no hub required. But apparently point to point is easier for most offices.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> in 2001 > and provided public IPv6 Honestly this is the part that surprised me the most. It's funny how unevenly the future has been distributed:) (As of early 2023 I appear to have finally gotten service to my house that reliably has IPv6. In 2022 this was not the case.)
unqueued 4y ago
John, at around that time you mentioned, you gifted me with my first shell account on one of your coffeshop servers, Reva. I just wanted to say THANK YOU. Up until then, I had read books about unix from the library, and had failed to install Mandrake on my laptop, but being able to access such a well configured NetBSD environment was really helpful and set me on a good path. I had never been truant from school before up to that point, but sometimes life rewards you for taking risks.
- johnklos 4y ago
  This made me smile :D You know, I'm still running servers with many of the same accounts that were there twenty years ago. Your home may still be on one (with the password disabled, obviously). Write me directly and let's see! My email address is my first name @ my last name dot com, and my handle here is my full name.
- dtaht 4y ago
  Linux was good for me too, I escaped SCO and then dodged the bullet of NT. It was so nice to switch from being tied to wires, to many hours with table service at local coffee shops in santa cruz like the Perg, and 420 union, in Santa Cruz. Sadly, both are gone now....
MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
I live in that neighborhood today, and love this story. Don't have anything else to contribute to the conversation. There are what look like "supernodes" for LinkNYC near the park, and somebody set up receiver hardware on my roof for the other network, but I haven't yet figured out who.
cubix 4y ago
I rigged up something similar in my first corporate job in 2000, plugging an ORiNOCO into the PCMCIA slot of my corporate laptop and a spare at my desk. My boss, an old mainframe guy, was blown away that I could check email during the team meeting in the conference room without going back to my desk. Now wifi is so ubiquitous we don't even think about it.
- dtaht 4y ago
  But we wuz there, first: http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003/06/wireless-connection.html http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003/06/wireless-connection.htm... I wish more thought about making wifi better. It could be so much more awesome now if we just sank more thought and resources into it. https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/ https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/
haroldp 4y ago
I love every word in this story. Remember when hacking was joyful?
- dtaht 4y ago
  :blush: I write these days primarily about bufferbloat and network congestion control (and wifi), and have become more of a BOFH than then: https://blog.cerowrt.org https://blog.cerowrt.org I really do, still, 25 years later, remember sitting on that roof, in the rain, feeling like the world had shifted into another phase, had transcended somehow. The future was right there, spreading out in waves from our antenna, and from others. Not part of that story... but later on the woz got service from our downlink fella, also...
  - dtaht 4y ago
    heh. I just re-read my diary from those days for the first time in a dacade. http://www.rage.net/wireless/diary.html http://www.rage.net/wireless/diary.html I just realized that nobody knows who mike taht was (co-author of that doc - and I do not know where greg's writing began and mine started, he was always more howtoish than I). Perhaps that is best and I shouldnt be popping up on this thread.(I changed my name to dave when I first tried to retire in Nicaragua because I was tired of being a computer guy and wanted to just focus on music)

fellowmartian 4y ago

Man, I’m always jealous when I hear these tales of how things used to be here. I came to New York in early 2021 and my experience is completely different - it’s basically 24/7 grind and this kind of hacker fun seems inconceivable now. But maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places.

gregsadetsky 4y ago
I feel like https://www.nycresistor.com/ https://www.nycresistor.com/ and https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/ still embody the spirit of those early communities!
- dtaht 4y ago
  I love what these folk are doing. also the battlemesh crowd is fun. See guifi for a better model for spreading the internet around...
7speter 4y ago
> it’s basically 24/7 grind and Rent is too damn high for anything else
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

projektfu 4y ago

I'd worry about some cable guy attempting to splice it before noticing it's the wrong thickness. I loved 10Base2 because it was so easy to install, no hub required. But apparently point to point is easier for most offices.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

> in 2001 > and provided public IPv6 Honestly this is the part that surprised me the most. It's funny how unevenly the future has been distributed:) (As of early 2023 I appear to have finally gotten service to my house that reliably has IPv6. In 2022 this was not the case.)

unqueued 4y ago

John, at around that time you mentioned, you gifted me with my first shell account on one of your coffeshop servers, Reva. I just wanted to say THANK YOU. Up until then, I had read books about unix from the library, and had failed to install Mandrake on my laptop, but being able to access such a well configured NetBSD environment was really helpful and set me on a good path. I had never been truant from school before up to that point, but sometimes life rewards you for taking risks.

johnklos 4y ago
This made me smile :D You know, I'm still running servers with many of the same accounts that were there twenty years ago. Your home may still be on one (with the password disabled, obviously). Write me directly and let's see! My email address is my first name @ my last name dot com, and my handle here is my full name.
dtaht 4y ago
Linux was good for me too, I escaped SCO and then dodged the bullet of NT. It was so nice to switch from being tied to wires, to many hours with table service at local coffee shops in santa cruz like the Perg, and 420 union, in Santa Cruz. Sadly, both are gone now....

MathMonkeyMan 4y ago

I live in that neighborhood today, and love this story. Don't have anything else to contribute to the conversation. There are what look like "supernodes" for LinkNYC near the park, and somebody set up receiver hardware on my roof for the other network, but I haven't yet figured out who.

cubix 4y ago

I rigged up something similar in my first corporate job in 2000, plugging an ORiNOCO into the PCMCIA slot of my corporate laptop and a spare at my desk. My boss, an old mainframe guy, was blown away that I could check email during the team meeting in the conference room without going back to my desk. Now wifi is so ubiquitous we don't even think about it.

dtaht 4y ago
But we wuz there, first: http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003/06/wireless-connection.html http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003/06/wireless-connection.htm... I wish more thought about making wifi better. It could be so much more awesome now if we just sank more thought and resources into it. https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/ https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/

haroldp 4y ago

I love every word in this story. Remember when hacking was joyful?

dtaht 4y ago
:blush: I write these days primarily about bufferbloat and network congestion control (and wifi), and have become more of a BOFH than then: https://blog.cerowrt.org https://blog.cerowrt.org I really do, still, 25 years later, remember sitting on that roof, in the rain, feeling like the world had shifted into another phase, had transcended somehow. The future was right there, spreading out in waves from our antenna, and from others. Not part of that story... but later on the woz got service from our downlink fella, also...
- dtaht 4y ago
  heh. I just re-read my diary from those days for the first time in a dacade. http://www.rage.net/wireless/diary.html http://www.rage.net/wireless/diary.html I just realized that nobody knows who mike taht was (co-author of that doc - and I do not know where greg's writing began and mine started, he was always more howtoish than I). Perhaps that is best and I shouldnt be popping up on this thread.(I changed my name to dave when I first tried to retire in Nicaragua because I was tired of being a computer guy and wanted to just focus on music)