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Kendra Electronic Wonderworks
Kenmore, WA 98028 USA Telephone 425-483-7309 |
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UUPC originated with the first release in 1985; the UUPC Project members included Stuart Lynne, Richard H. Lamb, and Samuel Lam, in Vancouver, British Columbia.
UUPC/extended is based on the widely distributed 1987 interim version of UUPC, version 1.05, which was also done by the original UUPC project.
UUPC first appeared on our radar scope in 1987, when Drew Derbyshire tested an incomplete port of UUPC 1.0 to the Zenith Z-100 MS-DOS PC. Due to various issues (including the Z-100 is not a true IBM PC clone) and that other e-mail solutions were available to Drew at the time, work with UUPC was dropped.
Drew did revamp the Z-100 Kermit-MS specific routines during this time frame. When his original Z-100, AKA the Fantasy Factory, retired in 1992, it was sent to the prime author of Kermit-MS, Joe Doupnik, to spend its retirement testing future versions of Kermit-MS for the Z-100.
In late 1988, Drew migrated from the Fantasy Factory to the original kendra, an Epson 286. Kendra was a true PC clone. This, combined with the growth of UUCP as a low-cost Internet mail gateway, in May 1989 encouraged a return visit UUPC/extended as a dial-up e-mail link. Specific function and bug fixes were done over a two week period in May which got the system working well to be used for various e-mail, and this was labeled as version 1.06a. Work continued on various fixes and improved for the next 8 months, until 1.07g was the first release generally posted to the Internet in 1990.
And now a few words about where our names came form.
Oddly enough, while the original Z-100 had the name the Fantasy Factory for virtually all of its service life, the Epson 286 didn't have a unique name for the first six months. Since a unique six character name was required for registering in the UUCP maps (the UUCP-net equivalent of the domain naming system), the name kendra (meaning womanly knowledge in Old English) was selected in May 1989 for registering.
In autumn 1989, Drew Derbyshire moved from Kingston, NY to Boston, MA, where he already knew an MIT student, Katherine Williams. She suggested Drew query a MIT mailing list to obtain a local UUCP feed. She also inspired the naming of the business name we operate under today; she allowed her initials to be used as the actual domain name (kew.com), and our full name is reverse engineered from the acronym.
True story #1: We came up with "Electronic Wonderworks" first, and only belatedly remembered that "kendra" starts with a "K".
Hobbes Internet Timeline and RFC-1296 show the Internet had about five thousand domains at kew.com was registered; given there are now ~ two million Internet domains, so we beat the rush.
Since Katherine's full name is now Katherine
Derbyshire and the
MIT system provided our backup UUCP feed for ~ 8 years, things
worked out for the best.
Once You Start, It's Hard To Stop
kendra, with an assist from MIT's project athena, actually set a precedent; most of our systems since her have been named with similar feminine names. In accordance with the UUCP convention, our system names are never capitalized; the Fantasy Factory is an exception, but it uses a UUCP name of ffactory anyway. Those names (and the year they entered service) include:
The systems which bear boldface years for their latest generation are still in service within the extended family; the italicized systems are owned by third-parties or employers.
A physical kendra was not in our service for some five years, but her name continously lived on as the advertised UUCP name of our mail gateway. (We were still in the UUCP maps when the UUCP mapping project terminated.)
As an aside, the longest systems in service were pandora (1994), sonata (1996), and minerva (1998). Each started on Drew's desktop, and passed into server/firewall duties in their later years.
minerva (1998) has a special place in our history. She was a Dell GX1 Desktop with a 350 MHz Pentium II. She worked so well that we bought her from Katherine's employer and later bought three more Dell GX1's, including pandora (2002) and diana (2002), used on E-Bay. minerva retired before her siblings only because they have tower cases and thus are better suited to server duty. In addition, most of our non-portable machines came from Dell from 2003 until 2006, when we switched to Apple.
kendra (2003) and cassandra (2004) are also unique, in that they are not unique to each other. Although built 9 months apart, both are Dell GX270's with the same OS, processor, memory, video, and disk. The only differences as shipped from Dell was that kendra had an upgraded sound card and a DVD burner instead of a DVD-ROM/CD burner. (This is explained in part because Drew dragged kendra into his day job for three months, and provided kendra's specifications to his employer when demanding a permanent replacement).
sonata (2005) is special because she was our first Mac at home, a 12" powerbook. sara has always been various Apple machines, but she's never been personal property.
In November 2006, sonata was joined by helen the 24" iMac, our first new Mac, our first Mac Intel, and our first Mac desktop. She'a enough of a machine to run virtual machines minerva (Windows XP) and ophelia (Windows 98) for programs which require them.
catzilla (2004) is another GX270 at work, but not as close as the other two in configuration. The machine is of course named after our feline catzilla.
True Story #2: dumbo (1992) got its unique name because it was a obsolete 386/25 portable Drew borrowed from an employer, a 10 or 12 pound Toshiba which ran on AC only. Being portable made it a flying white elephant, of course. The second dumbo was also a white elephant, and came from the same employer as the first. The 2005 edition of dumbo is slightly different; it came from Drew's employer but is our property.
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Kendra Electronic Wonderworks
Kenmore, WA 98028 USA Telephone 425-483-7309 |
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