The Uniform Resource Locator for this document is:
http://tardis.ed.ac.uk/tardisinfo.html

Information about the Tardis Public-Access Service

Tardis is a public-access UNIX service. The Tardis project provides free networked
UNIX accounts for educational and non-commercial purposes. We are kindly hosted by
the Department of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. However, the
Tardis project is independent of the department and is run by a group of volunteers.
The service is run along the lines stated in our charter. 

The original Tardis service was provided by a GEC-63/30, which had previously
provided a service managed by the Edunburgh University Computing Service which has
since been discontinued. It was "liberated" by Brian Tompsett and given a new home
as the basis of a free UNIX service for anyone who wanted it. In its new life as
Tardis, it came on-line on August 15, 1988. That Tardis service continued for three
years (to the day), until it was withdrawn due to the increasing pressure of its
size, air conditioning and power requirements. (A GEC-63 is a pretty big and hungry
beast.) 

The new Tardis service is based around Sun-3 equipment which has, like the original
machine, been donated free-of-charge by various groups as it has become surplus to
their own requirements. We have more CPUs and disks available to us and will use
them to increase and expand the Tardis service over time. 

jpd, January 14, 1994. 

