http://www.rumored.com/sowder/home.html
Sid Lives! The Sowder Utility HomepageThe SSowder utils (later called the Sowder utils) is a VMS utility package used by thousands at Indiana University from 1991 to present. Written by Sid Sowder and a small group of other hackers, crackers, and lackeys, the often-imitated package has been maintained and modified over the years by others, and still runs on IU's last remaining VMS machine.
[sid lives, or has been spotted anyway:
Promotion is a big part of a record label and generally it's the bulk of where I spend my money when doing a record. For information on what radio stations and zines have my rekkids, or how your radio station or zine can get my rekkids please visit the promotions page.
I've been asked: "How can you say you want innovative and still put out
all the tribute comps?" Well I guess you have to understand why I do
the tribute comps. For me, it's a way to stab back at indie rock. To
say that no matter how many records Fugazi may sell, they will never
be as popular as Journey. No matter how high and mighty we let
ourselves get, we have to remember that we will always be in the
shadow of REO Speedwagon. It's just a reality check on a slab of
spinning plastic I suppose.
-->
You can email me at sid@urinine.com, call me at 816.726.8445, or you can send snail mail to:
URININE Records • PO Box 413903 • KCMO 64141 • U. S. of A. ]
Thousands ran and loved the SSowder utilities, and many others, including all of IU's administration and UCS's management hated the package with a vengence. There were many scandals and controversies along the way. As the saga unfolded over the years, thousands and thousands of lives were somewhow touched by this collection of scripts and executables, until the demise of the VMS cluster and the rise of error-prone Windows machines with clunky Microsoft software tore apart this tightly-knit community.
This page is a tribute to the SSowder utilities, to the people who wrote, developed, and administered everything and to the people who used it. Read about its history, learn what happened to its authors, and maybe even download some code for that VAX 6400 you've got gathering dust in the kitchen.
Select one of the following:
What was it? - A brief explanation of the utils
CREDITS.TXT - The file from the util telling of its history, by Sid Sowder and Jeff Morris.
The Machines - A brief overview of IU's computing environment
The History - The complete history of the utils, by Jon Konrath
Where are they now? - What happened to the key players
Essays - Essays from those who knew and loved (or hated) the utils - Coming soon!
Archives - Mail messages and other text having to do with the utils or authors
Source code The ugliest DCL you'll ever see
Please email any suggestions, corrections, stories, or further info. Thanks!
Last Updated: 3/23/99
What are they?To explain the Ssowder utilities, you have to understand why they were written.
Back in the early nineties, Indiana University used a cluster of miniframe computers for its central computing. There was no web, and no email program that conveniently sucked all of its messages from a server. You either sat down at a terminal or a PC or Mac running terminal emulation software, and logged into one of the washing machine sized computers that also served a few hundred people doing the same thing. Then, you'd read your mail on this remote computer. And when your prof wanted to post something to the class, it would go in VAX Notes, a rough conferencing program. All of your files sat on this computer. And if you were really smart, you'd figure out how to do neat stuff, like go into the FORUM BBS or talk to someone else on the VAX phone.
The problem was that the computers were VAXes, built by the Digital Equipment Corporation, which ran a proprietary operating system called VMS. To the beginner, VMS was like DOS with all of the nice commands removed. Changing directories required a huge command. Looking at a file a page at a time required a huge command. The help pages were written with Data the android as a target audience. To edit a file, you had to choose between EDT, a shitty editor only slightly more advanced than vi, and EVE/TPU, a wholly proprietary visual editor that was impossible to learn and more impossible to customize (unless you read the wonderful help, of course.) And the mail program SUCKED. It didn't let you include messages in your reply. It didn't use an editor by default. It didn't delete messages - it moved them to a wastebasket that didn't always get emptied. It used a bizarre record format that required you to periodically run through a compression routine when you ran out of quota - but you couldn't run the program when you were out of quota, because it made a second copy of all of your shit and then spent half a day sorting and re-organizing it. And if you didn't hit return after each line in the non-editor composition area, it would simply eat the rest of the message. Whenever one of your friends got a VAX account and mailed you the first time, the message would undoubtedly be only 80 characters long, and broken off in mid-sentence. Oh, and all in caps.
I don't mean to belittle VMS, because it had some other very cool features. It had stuff like the VAX Phone, which was this multi-user chat thing that's better than most of the internet chat stuff out there. Programming was very cool, thanks to a bunch of shared libraries that predefined everything from math to very cool screen manipulation routines that you could use to practically build your own GUI. And hey, the VAXes could run like a champ while hundreds of people pounded on them. But they weren't the kind of thing you'd give your parents to use; this was on the opposite end of the scale from something like AOL.
How did VMS sites usually deal with this? They'd pay some programmer tons of money to write some system-wide aliases in the Digital Command Language (DCL), VMS's 'scripting' language. But that wasn't idiot-proof enough for IU and University Computing Services, who wanted any random swahili major with no technical know-how to be able to do the essentials on their shared systems. So they wrote their own interface, and called it the Academic Information Environment, or AIE.
In theory, the AIE was a good idea. Every user that logged into the VMS cluster would get a big menu with about a dozen numerical choices, and a handful of frequently commands, like email, in a 'quick menu' at the bottom of the page. It was text only - faster than a graphical display, and no worries on funky old terminals that weren't VT100-esque. To read mail, just hit M. To look up a library book was two, maybe three menus down. So was renaming a file, or checking out the FORUM BBS, or sending a file with bitnet. Pretty simple, right?
The AIE was retarded for several reasons. First was speed: it took this program in upwards of five minutes to load during peak hours. There was an optimization at one point in 1990, but it was such a huge program, it ate the CPU alive. And what happens when you keep a huge program in memory a few hundred times? The whole system gets slow. And because it got slow, secretaries and other 9 to 5 types would sign on in the morning and stay idle all day, adding a constant overhead to the cluster. Other complaints: 90% of the people logging on only used mail, which meant they could've just gone straight to a VMS prompt and typed MAIL, saving a lot of resources. Also, it took forever to do some things on the menus - copying a file took about 16 screens. And copying two files did not take 17 screens, either. It was a pain in the ass, and it didn't even offer things like a realistic way to compose e-mail, or find out if your friends were logged on.
That's what the Ssowder utility program (and many imitators) offered people. Instead of a big, stupid menu or a bunch of cryptic commands, there were easy-to-remember commands that were either new programs or aliases for VMS commands. The util fixed email by setting up a mail editor that let you include and attribute other messages. It also fixed the compression problem with a smarter solution that fixed your mail on another temp disk. It let you look for a list of friends on the VAX, and even told you where they were logged in from. And all of the mundane commands for manipulating files were clearly defined for simple or complex use.
Aside from getting things done, the utils were about screwing around, and this built a large sense of community. Before the World Wide Web, there were several variations of Sid's MENU program, which let you surf through a large collection of song lyrics, phrack issues, jokes, porn, and other text files. Access to outside distractions like IRC, usenet news, BBSes, and muds was easily provided. And functions let people enter finger information, biographies, and later even dating information in their accounts for others to browse and maybe use to start a conversation. Although thousands of people only used the utils to avoid the AIE and do a few tasks a day, many more spent countless hours meeting new friends, acquaintences and lovers on the computers using the util's programs.
All of this might sound stupid in the era of homepages, chat programs, web forums, AOL, and everything else. But remember most of this happened from 1990 onward, long before Netscape and Internet were household words! Because of the variety of programs and communications tools available, and because all of this happened on one college campus, I feel that the community was much tighter than the internet in general today, in 1999. There are probably many Indiana University graduates who sit blankly in front of their copy of Outlook and wish computers were like they were back in 1992. And on top of that, as one of the original authors of the util, all of this is incredibly sentimental to me. I worked closely with all of the other authors, went through some hairy incidents, and had a lot of good laughs. We hacked - everyone involved spent many nights in front of a VT240 that later turned into mornings and then back into nights again. I've worked in the software industry professionally for almost five years, and I've never been on a project that had such immeasurable teamwork or spirit involved. All of us thought we were saving the world when we were hacking DCL for this project. I'd like to think we at least changed it a little bit.
I hope that's a good enough explanation :) Feel free to email me with questions or comments.
-Jon Konrath
Last Updated 2/24/99home

[john continues the util story. this is about sid, of sid's music server, who was my roommate in 1994, but i never knew this part of the story till today. sid was my first client in a federal court.]

The next scandal was very murky, but I feel partially responsible. I have to start by explaining something else, though, so bear with me.
The utils had a feature called LAST that let you see the last time a util user logged on. As I mentioned before, SHUTTON tried this by checking every minute or two who was logged on and who wasn't, and making a giant log that differentiated this information so you knew when someone logged off. That was great, but it killed the CPU, running that many tight loops every minute or two. Sid used a much simpler approach. Every util user had a file sitting on a temporary disk. When they logged on, the util wrote a timestamp with the name of the machine in the file. Then, when someone did a LAST on that user, the timestamps were shown, and you could know when they logged onto each VAX. One day, I was putzing around when I realized that these files were world readable, and world writable. So I went in to my file, and under the timestamps for the ROSE, AMBER, GOLD, and JADE vaxes, I added an entry called BLACK. It looked cool, ominous, and top-secret.
I told a female friend to do a LAST on me, and she thought it was weird. She thought that Black was some kind of BBS, like the Mars BBS at msstate or the ISCA BBS at Iowa. So, she telnetted to Black, and tried to log in as guest, bbs, and soforth, with no luck. Then she tried JKONRATH, SSOWDER, with simple passwords, many times. None of it worked, so she gave up.
The Black VAX did exist. It belonged to the Glenn Black anthropology institute. It was a personal machine belonging to an anthropology faculty member who was also a high-up at UCS in some kind of odd dual-appointment. He also happened to be one of the most tight-assed data nazis at UCS. I logged on and found a shitty warning from this guy, telling me to cut it out, and I didn't even know what was going on. And moments later, I found out that none of Sid's VMS passwords worked anymore.
This caused a spiral of confusion within our small circle. Losing an account is possible at IU, but it's a lot like losing a job at the Post Office: you go through many levels of disciplinary warnings first. And when Sid finally bucked up and went to the Computing Support Center in the IMU to see if some unsuspecting worker could magically reset his password, their password-changing tools refused to work on his account. Nobody there knew about it being deleted. Sue Stager didn't know anything. My theory is that the data nazi guy had administrative access on the VAX cluster and nuked Sid's passwords without telling anyone else at UCS. But we didn't know, and in fact, Sid was never given an explanation for this.
News leaked, and the shit hit the fan. A "Save Sid" campaign started, and hundreds of users changed their process names to various pro-Sid sentiment. They ranged from the standard "Sid Lives!" and "Save SSowder" to the slighly more odd "SSOWDERdiedForU" and "FreeSid&Charlie". UCS played dumb, and no answers were given. The util would continue to run, but at the end of the school year, we had no idea what to do if something broke, and no clue how we'd keep making things better.
Next: The Second Year ->
The Second YearBy Jon Konrath
In May of 1991, the spring semester was over. Sid didn't have a VAX account anymore, although he did use his silver account to keep in touch. He moved back to Indianapolis for the summer, worked at a dry-cleaner, and kept low. We still had no clue on what would happen with his account in the future.
I was sure we'd never get back into Sid's account. And all of the files were world-executable, but not world-readable. We had no way to get a copy or a backup of the code, and no way to start over. Although I was working full-time and going to school at IUSB, I tried to think of a better way. I'd recently broken up with Becky and started dating a girl from Bloomington named Johanna Wise. She loaned me her old Mac plus and modem, and when I'd get home from my second-shift job and my family was asleep, I'd dial up for hours to a local IUSB number, and talk to Jo on the VAX Phone or bitnet. This also gave me time to hack from home. And I did.
In a very short period of time, I managed to reverse-engineer about 80% of the features of the utils. Another 10% were things I left out, like BOMB, and 10% were things I simply couldn't figure out. I also worked on adding some of my own new features. I called these utilities the Heart of Gold utils. This wasn't because I'm a Neil Young fan - it's a reference to the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy (although maybe Douglas Adams is a Neil Young fan, who knows.) There were many minor aethetic differences - I wasn't as into clearing the screen after each command like Sid. The major departure was that my code was world readable, and I encouraged others to look at it and do things on their own if they wanted. The stupid thing was that I didn't copyleft it or do anything else to protect it as my intellectual property, which I deeply regretted later.
The Heart of Gold utilites worked okay and were moderately successful, even though I had no testers or support. My only tester was a guy named Brian Hostetler, who was a Bloomington student home for the summer and always hanging out at IUSB's labs. He gave me some input, or at least bitched about what didn't work, for much of my development cycle.
In the last week of June, a friend and neighbor of mine was killed in a tragic car accident. This really freaked me out, because he was only 18 and he was the only person that I really knew well that died. Because of this, and because my parents were telling me that I would never go back to Bloomingtion about every 14 minutes, I decided my time was too important to waste on the util. I pulled the plug, and almost nobody noticed, except Brian Hostetler, who cried about how I was pulling the carpet out from anybody. If there was a movie version of this story, I'm sure the character playing me would tell Brian "if it's so God damned important, start your own util!" I'm not sure it was even that obvious, but Brian copied all of the Heart of Gold code and went to work on his own creation.
In mid-summer, Sid's util did crash. I don't remember what happened, but it was something like a temporary file that had to be world-writable got botched up, and we couldn't go into the account to clean it up. At least it was during the summer, when not as many people use the thing. But the only more demoralizing end to the whole thing would've been if they towed the thing out to sea and dropped a nuclear bomb on it.
Contrary to my parents' predictions, I made it to Bloomington in the Fall, and got a room in a boardinghouse just south of campus, about a 15 minute hike to the brand new 24 hour labs in Lindley hall. I also got a job as a UCS consultant, working in the computer sites around campus. Sid was back too, and so were his accounts - they all came back with no explanation or apology. He quickly started patching things up, with help from his new roommate Matt Reece. Both me and Sid were in a C251 class and got busted for hazing John Gibson in the class notes conference. We were also in the same C335 class and spent even more time hacking 68K assembly code and sleeping under the desks in Lindley hall.
In the fall, I started coding something I partially designed for Heart of Gold. It would be a fully-functional database to replace all of those world-writable files for the last command. An ISAM database, implemented in pascal, would store fields of information for the last login. It would also store info that could be used to implement a real finger command for VMS (name, address, phone number). And to solve a pain in the ass programming snafu of mine, it would store everyone's home directory, so anyone else could easily make a call and find it out, without doing something retarded like piping the results of finger into a file and parsing out the directory name. Multiple programs could use the database information, and I would program everything to be as Ssowder-inspecific as possible. That way, other util programs could also lock into the same database and even more people would be in it. The program fell in place a lot faster than I thought it would, and pretty soon I named it XINFO (Doctor X, Xinfo, get it?) When it ran on login, I printed a two-line tag with my name on it, so I'd get even more name recognition in the future. It ran fast, and the clients were great. The LAST command used it, and XFINGER was my all-out finger client. BIO was a program that let you put a biography.txt file in your home directory, and then anyone could browse through a list and see it. The idea of bios was stolen from FORUM, but my implementation got pretty elegant.
Around October, we also had our first Utils lunch. I mailed everyone on the utils userlist (maybe 2000 people) and told them all to meet at Garcia's Pizza on a Friday at noon. I thought a dozen people would show up, but the place was packed with people who wanted to see if Sid was real or not. I must've met a hundred new people that day. We kept looking out the window and seeing more and more confused people look in and think "is this them?"
By the fall, BHOSTETL got his utilities going, which were called the Tigger utils. They were based on Heart of Gold, but he'd done a considerable amount of work on them. Here's what he had to say about them recently:
"Anyway, Tigger-1000 was so named because AnneMarie was always upset that I was in the computer labs. I remember her tracking me down in the IMU lab several nights a week and trying to get me to come home. "Stop wasting time on the computers." That pretty muched summed it up. She was a big winnie the poo fan, so I named the utils after one of the characters for her. I don't think it did any good, though."
"I'm sure it's no secret that I was in over my head. I had little in the way of a computer background at that point. I wasn't taking any programming classes and hardly hanging out with anyone that would show me the ropes. Hell, you and Jeff did more for me than anyone else. Reading your history...well, I honestly didn't know over 99% of what you wrote in there. Most of those names I VAGUELY recall. Amazing, huh? The whole thing was rather embarrassing, as I've said. I wanted to be known as a microbio geek and not a computer geek. When people approached me about Tigger, I really over-reacted and did my best to push them away. I wanted nothing to do with it. Tech support? Forget it. Pests, those users. Some times, I would out right lie to someone if they asked if I was The Brian Hostetler of Tigger." The Tigger utils were very styleized and hip; the difference between the two was like PC vs. Mac. As Brian said recently:
"It's no secret that I was then and actually still (yes, still) am a Mac person. I was sure people cared more about that stupid 2 color animation at the login screen than anything else. So what if it was slower, it came in colors. ;)" He started to gain some momentum, and became a fierce competitor with Sowder. I stayed neutral in the "util war", although I did directly contribute to the Tigger utils twice. Once, I remember consulting in Jordan Hall when he was poring over some pascal sort code I'd originally written, and I gave him some advice on how to do this. It turns out that code eventually became his FRIENDS program, a much-refined WHO program. The other time was when I got his utilities hooked up with the XINFO database and related commands. I guess that was more of a favor to me, but it meant that Sowder users could find out when Tigger users last logged on, and vice-versa.
In November, Sid got involved in an alleged sexual harassment case. Basically, he was exchanging porno and provocative comments with some woman, and her boyfriend got ahold of it and sent in a complaint along with Sid's side of the exchanges to Stager. Everyone thought Sowder was fucked this time. The charges were with the University this time, not just with UCS. He would have to attend a judicial hearing and present his case, and both me and Matt Reece would also attend as character witnesses. In addition to losing his account, he could also get kicked out of school, blacklisted, and worse. The funny thing is that the guy was a luser from IUSB who thought he was hot shit, and even ran his own util, which was mostly stolen Heart of Gold code. The three of us went to the hearing, and carefully explained the case, that this was a consentual exchange and was not any sort of harassment. They must have listened, because Sid was later cleared and all was okay. But it scared us, and we wondered if the utils could somehow be moved to a safer place.
Around this time, I started thinking more about UCS-proofing the utils. Also, a fellow hacker named Aaron Renn joined the team. Aaron was a finance major who went to business school and took all of the straight-man classes, but also hacked like a fiend at night. Not only was he into very advanced unix stuff, but he also got deep into the inner workings of VMS. He recently got a job as a UCS consultant, and could always be found in the Orchard cluster in Lindley hall, or at the PCs in Lib102a. Both Aaron and I worked diligently on cleaning up and fool-proofing the programs. For example, the WHO program was notorious for leaving behind huge files if you hit Control-C in mid-WHO. People would often fill up their accounts with these files and then go to the UCS Support Center to get their account fixed. The UCS people would hem and haw about those damn utils, and our reputation would be further tarnished. So we tried to find smarter ways to deal with temp files smarter, and parse files nicer.
The Spring of 1992 is what I would call my personal apex in computing and hacking VMS. Outside of the utils, I wrote a unix-like command shell for VMS that did some cool things. I wrote a very complex program to browse all of those biography.txt files I mentioned before, using the SMG$ graphics library. I spent a lot of time using unix, and started to go head over heels for unix, thanks to Bill Perry. And both me and Aaron kept the hacking going on the utils. There was another great lunch; this time, we pretty much filled up a Noble Roman's. But by the end of the semester, I knew I wouldn't be able to work on the project forever. I was looking for a bigger UCS job, and I'd become so entrenched in unix that I didn't want to keep working on VMS. I silently sent Sid my resignation before the final VAX lunch, and planned on going back to Elkhart for the summer, to work in the factories.
Next: The Next Era ->
Last Updated 3/2/99Home
http://www.rumored.com/sowder/history/next_era.html
The Next EraBy Jon Konrath
In the spring '92 school year, I finished with a 0.0 grade average, and Sid didn't do much better. I planned on going back to Elkhart, working the factories, taking summer classes at IUSB, and hoping to get the GPA and bank account back to reasonable levels. But during finals week, I went through a catastrophic breakup with a very close girlfriend, I lost my factory job before I got it, and I couldn't sublet my apartment. I decided life was too short, and I stayed in Bloomington for the summer. I had almost no work, since UCS consulting dries up to almost nothing during the summer, but I had a full load of classes picked to straighten out my grades. I spent the summer hacking, chasing women, DJing at WQAX with Sid, and slacking.
One of my main events of slack during the summer was Showalter Fountain. The year before, a FORUMite named Jenn Kimble invented a daily gathering at the Showalter Fountain at midnight. It would be a no-context social event, where all of the summer people on the computer and otherwise would come down, shoot the shit, take a swim if the cops weren't looking, and maybe later go to Denny's or the bar. It happened every day, which meant there were dead days, but it also meant that there was always something to do. In 1991, this whole thing went over well, and I used to go on the weekends I was in town visiting my then-girlfriend Jo. But this year Jenn would be gone, so we would have to carry the flame for her. And we did; myself, Chris Hagen, Joe McKenna, and others I can't remember were there often. Aaron Renn made many appearances. So did Mindy McKaig - she and Sid were no longer an item, but we were still good friends. Many others outside of the VAX showed up too; I used to bring my roommates all the time, and so did others.
Sid was around that summer, although I never saw him at the fountain. He was living with a new girlfriend, and worked with me at WQAX. We talked about new things, but no real changes were made to the utils over the summer. I worked on a new version of XINFO that was 99% done and then failed to work. I had no idea what happened, and I had to give up on it and go back to the first version.
Mid-way through the summer, Aaron announced his departure. He finished a finance degree, but the fear of working in a bank made him look for something computer-oriented. He got a spot at Andersen Consulting in Chicago, bought a brand new Saturn, and left us.
Sid wasn't taking classes in the fall of '92, which meant we had to scramble to do something with the utils. I had plenty of space, so we moved everything there, and started to get it set up. This was also risky business, as I was working for UCS. We made the switch briefly, but then Sid got a job with IU, which extended his account indefinitely. We kept everything there, although I put a backdoor in the startup script. Whenever the util ran, it ran an empty COM file in my directory. If Sid's account ever got locked again like it did in the spring of '91, I would be able to put commands in the COM file to direct people to a re-installer that would automatically point their stuff at a new util, instead of having to tell 2500 people to reinstall everything.
By the fall, I was too busy with other things to continue, and I sent a mail to all of the util users, bidding them farewell. Although I got the usual confused "take me off your list" messages, I also got some very touching and supportive messages from users of the util who thanked me for my contributions and understood my conflict. Also, my last words in the message were the same last words of the Beatles, and I'm glad more than one person caught that. :)
Although I left the util, I still maintained XINFO. This didn't mean much more than a sacrifice of disk space. But in December there was a catastrophic crash involving the database that seriously screwed up both utils. I don't remember this well, except that it happened. Sid alleges that I simply backed out of the disaster, but it was probably something like a file locking problem where I simply couldn't do anything. Jeff mentions that I came up with a new version of XINFO at this point, but I may have simply purged the old database or recompiled a new version to get around the bug. Either way, it was ugly.
Sid brought on Jeff Morris to work on the utils a couple of months after I offically left. While I was busy programming in Motif for C490, I'd see Jeff logged into the VAX continually, working on the util. Through most of early 1993, Jeff did the programming and Sid did the email questions and problems.
In the spring of 93, my boss at UCS gave me a friendly heads-up about my involvement with the utils. I told her that I didn't work on them anymore, but my little XINFO tag was still appearing on screens all over campus, printing my name. I got Jeff to take out that line of code, and eventually got him to take over the whole database. I kept copies of the stuff, and I ran my own copy of the util. It was chopped down considerably, and ran without a title screen or any other discernable marking, just in case some UCS net.nazi was snooping over my shoulder at work.
In the fall, I lost a job at a better position solely because of my involvement in the Ssowder utilities. My current boss went to bat for me, and I managed to get the job, but I worked for the person who didn't want me there, which was more than uncomfortable. She continually accused me of helping people with the util programs, running the util programs, and one time almost fired me for a piece of mail I forwarded to someone five years before. I tried to appear as neutral as possible when helping people with util problems while on the job, but it was tough.
Jeff got a job with UCS, and kept working on things. He moved the utils over to his account in October, renaming them the Sowder Utils. He continued the refinements, and numbers kept strong for most of the 93-94 school year.
At the end of 1993, Brian Hostetler announced that his utils would also transfer ownership, and he would split. This happened, and the new maintainer was nowhere near as adept as Jeff was with the Sowder utils. I have no idea what eventually happened to Tigger - it must've gained some momentum before crashing with everything else about a year later. Here's what Brian had to say about it:
"When I got rid of Tigger, I just wanted it out of my life. I feel bad now that I didn't let Jeff have it. The two guys that took it, hell I didn't even know them at all. The last I remember, it had over 5,500 users and that was way weird. I remember going into UCS for something and was shocked to find out they knew who I was. I really had no idea what an impact the utils where having at IU."
Although we all fought the good fight, by 1994, the end was near. UCS was getting away from those clunky DEC machines and moving to more disposable unix boxes. In the fall of 1994, EZmail made its premiere, and every new freshman got an account there instead of the VAX. It was an HP-9000 which only ran a copy of pine for email. Many people tried to leave EZmail and move to the VAX cluster, but UCS made it difficult. In the spring of 1995, applications were phased out from the cluster, and VMS mail was disabled. The FORUM died in late summer of 1994. Eventually, bitnet was gone, and it was almost impossible for a student to get a new VMS account. The machines were slowly rotated out of the cluster, until only one was left, with almost no applications.
Today, I'm told that the Sowder utilities still run on Teach, the last remaining VAX. Almost nobody can get an account to it anymore, and there are many commands that no longer work. Many of the old terminal-room hangouts now house braindead Windows NT machines. (I still have one of the terminals from Spea in my office, though.) The era of the VAX is long, but not forgotten. Sid still lives!
Last Updated 3/2/99

[see, to you guys, this might be meaningless, but back in the day, guys like sid were legend.
every year or so i'd change campuses, and get some whole new kludge of a mainframe and operating sytem to use, and knowing a few of these hacks to make it work was essential. whn i first met sid, i was using a vt-100 dumb terminal to dial up to an indynet account, and ran into him on irc.
bisexual anarchist vegetarian hacker? living in his parents' basement? let's get a house!
so we looked at a few places and wound up on eastern avenue. we never actually got along that well. his idea of vegetarian was cheese sandwiches; i'm vegan. i was at the warehouse most of the time, making the money i used to buy my own place a year later. our landlord gregg, that's a whole other story, he taught me stuff about slumlording and opting out of the system, reality hacking, that i failed to use and became a target, but i still have an appreciation for.
for me to tell the sid story, and my brush with fame which i sidestepped, well i'm not there yet, let's back up and continue the story...

sid's music server
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/internet/sids.server.html
Sid's Music Server
Services Offered:Lists of rare live recordings, cd's for sale.
Instructions:
Send mail to:mwilkenf@silver.ucs.indiana.edu
With subject: BOOTHELP
http://www.friends-partners.org/oldfriends/music/music.html
info explosion - i'm guessing this stuff is dated
http://icar.naarm.ernet.in/AgriGateway/Yanoof.asp
Sid's Music Server. Lists of rare live recordings, cd'sfor sale. ssowder@copper.ucs.indiana.edu (Subject: BOOTHELP ). SOUNDS.
==================================-->> 36 <<--  General Bootleg Info==================================IRON MAIDEN bootlegs are readily available...you just gotta look.  Manypeople on this very net have a literal abundance of concerts on tape, CD,or even video.  Another place is to check local record dealers, especiallythe 'college-type' ones, ones with imports, etc.  Then go to specific bootlegdealers, like Goldmine, etc.Via internet there are a few things you might want to check out.  The firstis a Bootleg Music server, which will tell you all kinds of information,from 'what is a bootleg' and other bootleg FAQs, to what the music server hasavailable, and will even allow you to add yours to the list. E-mail:  Sid's Music Server <mwilkenf@silver.ucs.indiana.edu>Using keywords like 'send BOOTLIST', 'send BOOTHELP', etc.  This should getyou started in this direction.

First of all, some FAQ's about Bootlegs. (partly taken from Sid's Music Server bootleg list)What is a Bootleg?  A recording released and distributed without the artists permission.  This may be a taped concert or studio demos or outtakes. Nowadays, the  term bootleg is also used for mixes (or 'mash-ups') of different songs,  where the vocal track of one song is mixed with the instrumental version  of another song. These kind of bootlegs usually circulate on the internet  in MP3 format, and are not listed here. Some remix-bootlegs appear on  vinyl for DJ's - these bootlegs are listed here.Are they Illegal?  Well in the United States and most european countries yes.  It is   illegal to sell, trade or buy bootlegs, but owning them is a grey area.    It is slightly greyer in other countries and in Italy, for example, they are   tolerated, thus many bootlegging companies are based in Italy.  There is   some general royalities fee that I believe many Italian companies pay to.  (Luxembourg idem -FV)What sort of quality do bootlegs have?    This varies a lot! Some are made from people with cheap equipment in  their pockets at the back of a theatre, while others are made from  people who work at the stadium and record off the soundboard producing a  quality equal to studio recordings.Where can I buy bootlegs at?  Well big stores do not usually carry them since it is illegal.  Mail  order is very common, and GOLDMINE magazine is an excellent place to  shop.  There are some small shops that do carry them.  There are  several people on the net that do mailorder. Bootleg sellers often use  on-line marketplaces like eBay to sell their material as well. Although  eBay officially has an anti-piracy policy, they hardly remove illigal  items from their database (after all, they get money for every item  sold...) Just make sure, when bidding on a bootleg CD, you're actually  bidding on a factory pressed CD, and not some home-burned CD-R, which  has no value whatsoever.What is the difference between a live rare recording and a bootleg?      Live rare recordings are legal.  Bootlegs are not. [viewpoint not endorsed -ed.]                                ***- The albums are put in alphabetical order, due to the inaccuracy of the  release-dates.- All records are on black vinyl, unless stated otherwise.Boot's in this list will be described as followed

from a 1993 article:
Sid's Music Servermwilkenf@silver.ucs.indiana.eduSubject Line: BOOTLIST, BOOTHELP, SELLLIST, BOOTADD, PROMO, TRADELISTNot a dealer per se (this person trades constantly from his large musiccollection and also sells/trades radio station promotional material) butif you send a letter with any of the above subject lines you'll get animmediate automated response. BOOTLIST and TRADELIST will get you anextensive (216K) list of boot traders and what they have available, whatthey want, and other information of that ilk. The two addresses above areequivalent. BOOTHELP is a partially accurate, limited description of whatboots are. SELLLIST and PROMO is basically a list of tapes, LP's, and CD'sthat the person (Missi Wilkenfeld?, Sid?) wants to sell; I believe it isconstantly updated. BOOTADD is a way to add your list of rare liverecordings to the big bootlist trading list.This is an ongoing list, by no means complete and still limited in scope.Fell free to e-mail me with additional dealers or commentary about theones already on the list. Contact me if you want to know of any additions,as I am often adding to and revising this document. I have received a fewEuropean dealer names and addresses, many with vast stocks, but since Iorder almost exclusively from American places, I did not put them on thislist. If there's enough interest, I could possibly do a list of Europeandealers, but someone in Europe would probably be more qualified. Thanks toJoshua Paxton for help with many of these namesand addresses; he trades, too, so mail him for his list.Again, I take absolutely no responsibility for any of the information inthis list, which is accurate to the best of my knowledge. Mail me ifyou're interested in trading.
-
apparently sid's has been offline since 1994 and these are just orphan pages.
let's let jon pick up the story
:http://www.rumored.com/sowder/history/first_year.html

As fall 1990 began, I led a sheltered life. IUSB was largely a small commuter campus full of people who didn't want to leave their parents' houses, or working-class people like my parents, trying to earn an MBA a class at a time at night. Aside from hanging out with my best friend Ray, I spent all of my time on a shitty Leading Edge Model D PC, logging into the VAXCluster at 2400 bps. I was learning unix, and learning pascal and C, but I wanted something big to happen. I'd read Phrack magazine back-issues and wish there was a ring of hackers at IUSB, or at least a couple of other people to talk to. I counted the days until I could move back to Bloomington.
Then Sid showed up. He was just Sean Sowder back then, but he exploded like a storm into FORUM that fall. Most FORUM newbies either sit back and listen for a long time, or start writing out-of-place, all-caps messages. But Sean took over, and acted like he owned FORUM. I could almost tell that he'd done some time on other BBSes, and I dug his story. He had a good rap, talking about hacking, punk rock, anarchy, mohawks, and living in his car and everything else. I wished I was in town so I could've broken into some vending machines with him or something. He took FORUM by storm, and changed to the Sid nickname, as a Sex Pistols tribute. He got bored of FORUM, but not before nabbing Mindy McKaig, a FORUM regular and the dean's daughter. They seemed like total opposites - she was a bleach-blonde sorority girl and he was a punk computer hacker, but they became inseperable after that.
Sowder met up with Joseph Hillenburg, a 14 year old kid who used his mom's account, ANLHILLE. I don't remember this clearly, but I think Joseph had a SHUTTON-like util program already, and Sowder simply wrote a program for it. That program was MENU, which let you read, mail, or print a bunch of text files. He used it to go through a bunch of movie reviews written and collected by Eric Miller, another util writer. After this, Sid and Joseph collaborated on the Ssowder utils. These were a util package that ran on top of SHUTTON's utils. Shortly after collaborating, Joseph and Sid parted ways. Sid wrote a program called BOMB to mailbomb people, and would't remove it. Joseph had compiled a game called GALTRADER and wouldn't remove it. They went their own ways. Joseph continued to maintain his own util program, but didn't put much energy into it; he later focused on unix and the Amiga.

Scott Hutton got a job with the UCS Support Center, and just before he started, a UCS staffer kindly explained to him that running a program that essentially killed the batch queue wouldn't be a very good idea for a UCS employee. He kindly obliged, not wanting to lose his new job before he even started working there, and shut down his utilities. Much of Sowder's code relied on aliases defined in Hutton's code, which made his util completely fall apart. Although this was in December, right before finals, Sid and his roommate Mike Meyer wrote the "Shutton Simulator", which was a package of just enough reverse-engineered commands to get things back up on their feet.
By the end of 1990, I was running out of things to do hack-wise, and pascal wasn't cutting it anymore. I knew I'd have to learn Modula-2 for the next semester, but I spent the whole Christmas break reading Steven Levy's Hackers and trying to devise a scheme to get $500 together for an Amiga 500. I didn't have a home computer, and had to drive 45 minutes to get to IUSB. I got so bored, I was trying to write a game in the BASIC-like language in my Casio graphic calculator. I absolutely needed to get back to Bloomington.
I visited in January, and finally met Sid (and Mindy.) It was at like 2 in the morning, in the Lib102A Macintosh lab. We sat in the back row and exchanged hacks for a while, like it was some sort of James Bond exchange of secrets or something - very surreal. Around this time, I was running the util sporadically, but not every time I logged in. Becky had found a VAX Macro (i.e. machine language) program that you could run instead of a bunch of DCL, and I used that instead.
In the beginning of March, Sid got into his first bout of trouble with UCS. I taught him how to forge mail, and he sent mail to one of his arch enemies, John Gibson, with the username of GOD. I don't know if this was somehow traced, or if it was simply guilt by association, but Sid was asked to come down for coffee and donuts with Sue Stager, the dean of computing ethics. He was nailed: they disabled his mail on the VAXes and his silver account, and made him email an apology to JGIBSON, CC'ed to Stager. The mail thing wasn't a tremendous blow, because Sid stole an entire stack of cards with class accounts on the silver VAX, which ran Ultrix. They had numerical userids, like SL123456. But that would let him use email for the time being. And the util would still run fine.
In March, I decided to spend a week in Bloomington, sleeping at my old roommate's place and hacking as much as possible. On one of my first nights there, I ran into a friend of a friend named Chris Hagen, who immediately knew me as Doctor X. Although he never did much programming, he became a source of great feedback for those of us who did, and a great tester. On this visit, I started working for Sid for the first time. The util was getting slower and slower on startup, and I intended to make some massive changes, including installing that piece of VAX Macro to speed up the assignment of global symbols.
I still remember the first time Sid gave me the password to his Amber account and let me tear stuff apart. I was in the old HPER cluster of terminals, with two VT240's pushed up next to each other so I could look at stuff in my JKONRATH account and modify it in the SSOWDER account at the same time. Now this was before the days of source control and mirrored deployment, or at least before I knew how to use it. I was patching the code while hundreds or even thousands of people were using it! The big trick was to quickly swap copies of stuff, or mess with some scheme of renaming one file for the other. I somehow screwed this up at one point, and about five seconds after I saved a file, the SSOWDER account was lit up with a barrage of bitnet messages like "Is something broken?" or "Are you working on the utils now?" I had to call Sid at his place in Willkie, and we hacked out the problem over the phone until I got everything ironed out. I made a lot of major changes that week, and there wasn't a single day that I got to bed before 8am, but by the end of the week, I'd cut a significant amount of time off of the login sequence. Plus, I had a lot of fun hanging out with Sid and his roommate Mike, and met a lot of new people I'd only seen as usernames before then.
Aside from working on refining old programs, I also started answering a lot of email. Tons of people would write with complaints, and we tried to divert as many of those messages as possible to me, since Sid's mail was technically dead. Ben Jackson, a hacker friend of Sid's from high school, also helped out during this period with some of the refinements. And in April, Sid unveiled an installer program. Instead of editing your LOGIN.COM and inserting the lines to run the util, you could now type @$DISK39:[SSOWDER]INSTALL and it would magically install the lines in your LOGIN.COM, ask you for a bunch of friends' names for WHO, the program that showed which of your friends were online, and some other preferences. After the install program, usership skyrocketed.
The next scandal was very murky, but I feel partially responsible. I have to start by explaining something else, though, so bear with me.
The utils had a feature called LAST that let you see the last time a util user logged on. As I mentioned before, SHUTTON tried this by checking every minute or two who was logged on and who wasn't, and making a giant log that differentiated this information so you knew when someone logged off. That was great, but it killed the CPU, running that many tight loops every minute or two. Sid used a much simpler approach. Every util user had a file sitting on a temporary disk. When they logged on, the util wrote a timestamp with the name of the machine in the file. Then, when someone did a LAST on that user, the timestamps were shown, and you could know when they logged onto each VAX. One day, I was putzing around when I realized that these files were world readable, and world writable. So I went in to my file, and under the timestamps for the ROSE, AMBER, GOLD, and JADE vaxes, I added an entry called BLACK. It looked cool, ominous, and top-secret.
I told a female friend to do a LAST on me, and she thought it was weird. She thought that Black was some kind of BBS, like the Mars BBS at msstate or the ISCA BBS at Iowa. So, she telnetted to Black, and tried to log in as guest, bbs, and soforth, with no luck. Then she tried JKONRATH, SSOWDER, with simple passwords, many times. None of it worked, so she gave up.

majors plan of attack-
where to go next-

1) redraft taylor v taylor file to include
lawrence election less than 100 signs exception issue - no treat is a good treat.
eric barnes situation.
2) review martin county file of little old ladies re disclaimer.
3) find out more about RIAA case against Berry Records, and statute in question, google for Norman Reed.120 E Market St Indianapolis, IN 46204-3250 (317) 972-0717,


Norman Reed is a former hip-hop DJ who performed locally under the name Melo-Mix. He gave up performing to go to law school, and is now an entertainment attorney in Indianapolis."Historically, there's been this unsaid rule that it's OK for DJs to do this," he said.But downloading has hurt the music business. The solution would be a way to license mix CDs in exchange for fees paid to the rap artists, he said."I understand the industry's position. The fees just need to be some reasonable amount."
Reed is best known for the Michael Jackson "ripples and waves" case, where jackson attended depositions in indianapolis.

Reed, Norman
norman.reed. at worldnet.att.net - not same one?
The Best of DJ Melo-Mix, Pt. 1: Ride or Die isn't really a best-of album in the traditional sense but rather a particularly focused mix. Melo-Mix draws from all coasts -- East (the Notorious B.I.G.), West (Too Short), and South (Master P) -- as well as from all ages -- old school (Run-D.M.C.), golden (EPMD), and contemporary (Eightball & MJG) -- and he often mixes them together, a cappellas over instrumentals. Furthermore, he tends to pitch his records down, not to the point of "screwing" them, but enough to alter the feel of them. He doesn't cut up the tracks much, instead generally cross-fading them into one another and letting them play out. This mixing style emphasizes the track selection and pitching, though unfortunately the track sequencing is confusing to navigate. The overall effect is a relatively laid-back mix that's full of surprises, as old meets new school and East meets West Coast. ~ Jason Birchmeier, All Music Guide
Hailing from Indiana, DJ Melo-Mix stood as one of the few Midwestern rap DJs with mix CDs on the national market during the late '90s and early 2000s. During his stint of activity, he independently released an album every year or so, generally mixing the latest hits (usually hardcore and Dirty South ones) with a handful of old-school classics. He never broke out of the Midwest but maintained a strong presence in his home state, where he would often DJ at college parties and other high-profile...Full DJ Melo-Mix Biography


Gangsta, Gangsta: Melo-Mix Is A Soldier, Vol. 30 (1998) - DJ Melo-MixBy: DJ Melo-MixCredited Role:Main PerformerSong List: Drink A Yak/You Don't Wanna Go 2 War, Mary Jane, Let Me Hit...EXPERT RATING:No Rating USER RATING: Not Yet Rated  Be the first to write a review 

Return to the Mothership (1997) - DJ Melo-MixBy: DJ Melo-MixCredited Role:Main PerformerSong List: 'Crush On You' Mixed With 'It's Your's', 'Hypnotize' Mixed ...EXPERT RATING: USER RATING: Not Yet Rated  Be the first to write a review 

Who Bout It, Vol. 2 (1998) - DJ Melo-MixBy: DJ Melo-MixCredited Role:Main PerformerSong List: 2nd Chance, You Know I'm A Ho, Weed & Hennessey/The Man Rig...EXPERT RATING:No Rating USER RATING: Not Yet Rated  Be the first to write a review 

Greatest Mixes, Vol. 29 (1997) - DJ Melo-MixBy: DJ Melo-MixCredited Role:Main PerformerSong List: Mix 1, Mix 2, Mix 3EXPERT RATING:No Rating USER RATING: Not Yet Rated  Be the first to write a review $20.00 - $20.00 (CD) - Compare Prices

Swervin' on Seventeens (2000) - DJ Melo-MixBy: DJ Melo-MixCredited Role:Main PerformerSong List: Swervin/G-Stak Whoa, Born to Roll, Hot BoyzEXPERT RATING:No Rating USER RATING: Not Yet Rated  Be the first to write a review $12.23 - $27.23 (CD) - Compare Prices
http://www.legalmatch.com/
 alan@berrys.tv.

http://www.mtv.com/bands/m/mixtape/news_feature_021003/index4.jhtml