DATELINE: East Lansing, MI, ca. 1992.
In the early 1990s, the Michigan State University Physical Plant oversaw a huge and in some ways sophisticated physical campus infrastructure.
In the 1980s, the Physical Plant had wired nearly all of the buildings on campus for cable TV, foreseeing that instructional video was the wave of the future. Instructional video may not have panned out quite as they had predicted, but more importantly, while installing the cabling the Physical Plant had strung additional dark cable, for future unspecified purposes. Soon enough, high speed local area networks became all the rage, and MSU was able to be on the forefront by attaching broadband Ethernet cable modems to the existing cabling. The modems turned out to be very finicky, requiring frequent tuning, and eventually we had to restring fiber optic. However, we enjoyed good service 98% of the time, when other campuses lacked an integrated high-speed campus-wide network.
Another aspect of our first campus Ethernet network that wasn't great was the fact the entire 42,000-student campus was served by a single, unrouted network. Students using word processors in the public microcomputer labs sometimes suffered poor performance due to the PC's CPUs being interrupted frequently by the unsophisticated network adapters to handle ARP requests. Eventually we were forced to bite the bullet and install routers in place of the Ethernet bridges in each building, reducing campus-wide ARP flooding.
The Physical Plant was also an early adopter of CAD systems to manage blueprints of buildings and of the extensive outdoor plantings for which the Michigan State campus is well known. My plant scientist wife told me of a seed time capsule planted on campus in the 1800's by botanist W. J. Beal. Only three living persons knew where it was, she said, and she wasn't one of them. She was taken aback when I told her that I knew where it was, as a result of working with my colleague Alan, who had consulted with the Physical Plant on a setting up and running their CAD system.
A less modern part of the campus infrastructure was the campus-wide network of steam tunnels. These became notorious when the campus newspaper published an article about a student's suicide attempt in a steam tunnel. The poor fellow had been an avid player of the mysterious and likely subversive game Dungeons and Dragons. The resulting media furor led me to become skeptical about the very existence of the steam tunnels. (I was incurious about how campus buildings actually were heated - odd, given that prior to college I had worked at an architectural firm, writing code to calculate the size of steam pipes.) Years later, a colleague at the Computer Center showed me how to access the steam tunnels, and I was suitably impressed at the size and extent of the tunnels. They really do exist.
This brings us to the campus electrical service.
MSU had its own power plant. It had sufficient capacity, as I recall, but fell short in the reliability department. There were frequent power outages on campus. They were a particular pain to those of us who worked at Computer Laboratory, as after a power failure, the ancient mainframe computer had brought back online slowly and painstakingly.
Inevitably, it seemed, power failures were blamed on a raccoon having wandered into the power plant and committing an act of self-immolation. It baffled me as to how this could be allowed to go on year after year. I pictured an angry confrontation with the Physical Plant director the day after a power failure:
Provost: Tomlinson, there was yet another campus power outage yesterday. This is outrageous! I've half a mind to have your job over this!
Tomlinson: But boss, it was a raccoon - there was nothing we could do!
Provost: Oh my god, a raccoon? They're a force of nature that no man could possibly stop! Very well, then, carry on, Tomlinson, carry on.
Years later, I came to be the owner of a Bluetick Coonhound. With no training or encouragement, this dog would willingly chase away raccoons, and have fun doing it. All it cost was a $75 adoption fee, some dog food, and occasional broccoli stalks as a treat. (Note to readers: you may wish to rethink your dreams of being reincarnated as my dog.) Evidently the Physical Plant, advanced though it may have been, was unfamiliar with coonhound technology. Either that, or there was a chronic shortage of coonhounds at the time.
# # #
One summer day, BSD Unix guru Bill Joy was due to give a lecture on campus. I decided to attend not because he and I grew up in adjoining Detroit suburbs, but because Michigan State was an avid user of BSD-derived Unixes. Our hardware included not only Sun workstations and servers, but also NeXTs, a Convex minisuper, and even an exotic BBN Butterfly - all running BSD-derived OSes, or at least BSD userland.
Because of the anticipated popularity of his talk, Joy was scheduled to speak in B-108 Wells Hall, the largest classroom at Michigan State, and the scene of many a stultifying American Thought and Language lecture. Unfortunately, fate - most likely in the form of a 10 pound masked critter - intervened, and the campus lost power. Knowing what the huge windowless classroom would be like without air-conditioning, the authorities declared the presentation cancelled.
Joy let it be known that he was willing to hold forth outside Wells Hall if anyone was interested. Strangely, though hundreds were willing to listen to Bill in a stuffy lecture hall, few were willing to hang out with him in the light of day. (I guess they must have been true computer nerds - more power to them.) Thus it came to be that Bill Joy and I and a small handful of others spent part of the afternoon sitting on the grass under an oak tree outside Wells Hall, near the Red Cedar River. I don't recall what we discussed, though I think this was before Joy's Luddite phase. But I do remember thinking that this is what college was all about. And just one coonhound could have prevented it.
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