On Phoenix

Hello again, patient reader; I apologise for my long absence, I have had a pretty busy couple of weeks, what with the Amsterdam trip being added to my otherwise hectic life. If you have been pinning for information on how it all went, I can finally reveal that it went very well, thanks for asking. In addition, I went to Artis (Amsterdam Zoo) as part of my continued quest to visit all the science museums in Europe (the zoo contains their equivalent of a Natural History Museum); perhaps in the future I will write something about this. I will have to synthesise everything I remember about all the museums into a Coherent Whole though, so you will have to be patient.

Anyway, today I went on what you could describe as a Journey into the Past, if you were feeling grandiose. It started when I had a free hour due to one of my students being taken ill, so I decided to look up a question that I have been meaning to find the answer to for a long time. I must warn, this post gets a little sentimental, and if you find such things irritating, I apologise.

Why are all the Cambridge computer services named after birds?

We (those of us who pay attention to such things) noticed a while ago that the Cambridge computer services tend to be named after birds. The password authentification system is called Raven, the e-mail look-up system is called Jackdaw, the WiFi is called Lapwing, the cluster system is called Condor. Until today, I had no idea why this was. But not anymore; I followed a series of websites, and was enlightened. The reason is something called Phoenix.

Once upon a time, back in the ancient past of the 60s and 70s, Universities would have a single computer, the University Mainframe. These computers would be shared by a lot of people, and often a number of people would use them at once. All in all, they tended to be among the fastest computers around. In the early 1970s, the Computing Laboratory at Cambridge turned off their old ATLAS computer, and switched to a new IBM mainframe. The operating system that ran the computer was disappointing, and so the Computer Lab wrote their own software to manage to cluster. Out of the ashes of ATLAS, Phoenix was born.

Phoenix was both the computer and the operating system that ran on it, then being considered essentially one and the same. It was with Phoenix that the tradition of naming programs after birds begin; the mail system was called Pigeon, the software that organised the users was called Parrot, the specialised software library was called Wren (I see what you did there). Question answered. But there is more.

A Computer Legacy

Pheonix lived until 1995; it was on for more than 23 years. There are people who had known this computer longer than they had known their loved ones. The variety of users, along with the open nature of computing in universities at this time, lead to a shared culture that grew up on it. It hosted the General Purpose Reverse-Ordered Gossip Gathering System (GROGGS), and as it had some of the largest memory capacity of any computers around, it was used to write early Text Adventure games (see here); you could write a interactive story that had real plot, rather than short throw-away stories. It was full of odd surprises left over from years of programming; if you asked it “HELP BUS”, it would recite a poem about buses to help you to learn latin grammar. When it was turned off, on the 30th of October at 09:17, they held a wake for it.

I find this all surprisingly bittersweet. There used to exist a community of people; programmers, scientists, writers, gamers, students, who were intimately connected to this old piece of hardware. It was a feature of the University, like the UL, every bit of the software constructed in Cambridge over the years, with old traditions, quirks, oddities. Now it is gone, pretty much entirely forgotten. But like the thousands of students and staff who have passed through this university (or, in the case of lots of fellows, and Phoenix, lived and died here), it has left its mark. One thing I found interesting was the logins of the authors who made games for phoenix; in 1978 people went under jgt1, ru10. Now all Cambridge students are assigned a CRSID; mine is lj237, Johannes Jaeger is jj231. That, and the birds, are little marks that have been left on Cambridge, like the blocked windows from the window tax, marks of a history almost forgotten.