WolfeDen.Org History

I used to run community mailing lists, web sites, photo galleries, blogs, a pre-Dropbox personal file depot via SSH, FTP and rsync and provided co-location services for friends and family for fun and purely intellectual profit. Now it serves nothing more than a few static pages of cars and computers I used to own and other personal diversions.

Prehistoric

1980s
I cut my network teeth on 300-2400 bps dial-up BBSs from our TI 99/4A computer or an old ADDS terminal. It was a whole new world.
1988-1993
I gained what seemed like infinite bandwidth from my account on cs.utexas.edu…at least when I could get a seat in the HP or Sun lab. Usually I was stuck on a 2400-14.4K baud analog modem from the dorm/co-op/apartment. But now I had actual Unix, not just some similar utilities I wrote for DOS 3.3. There was no stopping me. This was before the WWW but we had plenty of Usenet, FTP, gopher and source code to compile on my Minix and, eventually, Linux 0.95a machines. CS assignments were still mostly turned in on tractor-feed paper.
ca. 1992
I squandered an opportunity in the early ’90s to get connected to a local UUCP node before “dot com” was a significant domain. Eventually I had a couple stone age web pages in my included user web space on the Sun SS20 that was my dial-up ISP’s server. But I had good bandwidth and stable email at work, so all was well.

WolfeDen.Org Arrives

1997-1999
The official start of WolfeDen.Org was in the summer of 1997 on one of my 1991-vintage Data General AViiONs co-located at my new ISP on a 128 Kbps dual-bonded ISDN Internet feed. I registered it at the InterNIC and finally had a genuine Internet node to call my own. A friend of a friend was running his own small ISP. He provided dial-up and co-lo for a very reasonable rate. Personally, I think he ran the ISP as a way to pay for his Internet feed. :-) He was a cool dude.
1999-2001
Eventually that shop closed and I moved WolfeDen.Org to 56 Kbps PPP dial-up in my house to Jump.Net, a popular, local, Unix-savvy ISP that actually offered static IP to residential customers. I quickly increased that to a 384 Kbps SDSL line and then to 768/392 Kbps ADSL when that became available in 2000. Things were great for a couple years until Jump.Net was bought out; the new owners changed the business model and purged all their residential customers.
2001-2017
For many years I ran this node out of my house over a 6 Mbps/768 Kbps ADSL line leased directly from the ILEC. Back in the early 2000s, 6 Mbps was as fast as you could get without directly leasing a chunk of the optical infrastructure (which also cost orders of magnitude more than residential DSL), easily besting the nascent cable “modem.” And I had the logs to prove The Phone Company met their five-nines uptime requirement.
2017-present
Nowadays ADSL is an order of magnitude slower than the slowest residential cable, HDSL and fiber options. But few of those offer static IP for servers without paying business rates. I had been experimenting for a couple years moving parts of the domain to a cloud server. Other parts disappeared and the co-los moved off-site. In 2017 I finally dropped my static IP ADSL service and moved everything left up to the cloud where WolfeDen.Org lives today.