To: what@cosym.net, dashaw@bell-labs.com, cbm@whatexit.org, tommy@bell-labs.com, amq@whatexit.org,fazall@plts.org,tal
Subject: plts.org is now a myth

In a matter of moments plts.org will become simply a myth....  an alias
for another machine... a placeholder for the future rebirth.

All services (including DNS, email, web, etc.) were moved off of it
ages ago, and were actually performed by joisey.whatexit.org or some
other machine.  Now the machine is finally shut off.

You may have heard the story of the hammer: "I love this hammer!  I've
had this same hammer for 50 years!  I've changed the handle 10 times
and the head 4 times, but it's lasted me 50 years!"  That's the story
of plts.

plts (the Plainfield Latex Testing Squad, or Pretty Lame Taco Salad, or
Pain Lasts Till Sundown or Petty Little Tyrant's System or Porcupines
Let Tom Supervise or Potatoes Love Tom's Symposium or Penis?  Let Tom
See or People Like Tom's Style) was born in 1991.  It was a 68020-based
Sun 3/110 connected to my office via UUCP.  Soon it was upgraded to a
Sparc 4/110, and later the motherboard was upgraded to a 4/330.  It was
listed in the UUCP maps as "plts", connected through a host named "sdl"
and then to "uunet".  It ran mailing lists for various GLBT things in
NJ, and was actually used to send a LOT of the email encouraging people
to lobby in Trenton during "the big push" at the end of A634 (the NJ
GLBT rights bill, which became law in 1992).  It was registered as
plts.org back when domains were free; back then you had to prove that a
".org" was really an organization, and our application claimed that
PLTS is a funky old shack and you'll want to come back.  While it was
only connected via UUCP, email to plts.org was gatewayed via a Internet
to UUCP gateway.  Because of the odd-ball configurations that this
machine had, this is where I learned a lot about Sendmail
configuration, DNS entries, and other technical things.  It's also
where I learned a lot about building SunOS kernels and dealing with Sun
hardware.

Eventually it was replaced by a a Sun 4/60, then a Sun 4/75.  By then
it was running PPP to an ISP and was actually called plts.org.
It was now running services for multiple organizations, mostly
mailing lists.  It didn't have a web server on it due to the low
bandwidth connectivity it had... a dial-up PPP connection that was
only live a couple hours a day.

When I was getting divorced, I had to move it somewhere to maintain the
services.  My new place didn't have DSL, so it was relocated to a place
that had some bandwidth to spare.  Ironicly, soon after that it had the
bandwidth, I didn't need it anymore since a new machine
(joisey.whatexit.org) was alive and well on bandwidth that I was paying
for.  Most of its services were moved to joisey, though various aliasing
tricks made it look like plts.org was still doing the work.  Recently
it was hinted to me that it may lose it's "free rent" status,
so I moved the remaining services off of it.  When the end was
finally near, I copied all the data off of it.  It's tiny, slow
CPU took an entire a day to copy everything off.

plts.org# date
Sun Dec 23 10:39:59 EST 2001
plts.org# uptime
 10:40am  up 133 day(s), 23:58,  1 user,  load average: 0.58, 0.25, 0.11
plts.org# halt

The final messages on the console were:

Dec 23 10:38:04 plts.org su: 'su root' succeeded for tal on /dev/pts/0

Dec 23 10:40:34 plts.org halt: halted by tal



plts.org console login: syncing file systems... done
Program terminated
Type b (boot), c (continue), or n (new command mode)
>

--tal

ps.  If anyone needs a shell account on joisey, please let me know.