I couldn't resist asking for a slice of the SDF VPS trial, and among other ideas I thought it would be neat to put up an ITS server running on a PDP-10 simulator for the nostalgia and entertainment of SDF retro-computing fans.
It's been 2 or 3 years since I've played with ITS, and in the meantime it appears that both of the public ITS systems that were running then have gone off-line without ceremony, and several web sites that hosted ITS documents are now dead links.
It would be a shame for this historic technology to just evaporate into cyberspace, but if my lark of a project is its last chance for survival then the outlook is dark indeed.
I may have connected to one of the real ITS servers once or twice at most way back in ancient college days, but surely I'm not the only one who thinks that there's still fun to be had on a system that gave us (or had a major influence on) Emacs, info, Common Lisp, Scheme, the GNU project, the free software movement, and the ethic of network-mediated collaboration. ITS was a sourceforge, a wiki, a social network all rolled into one held together by the shared joy of shared exploration of the frontiers of computing.
UPDATE: E-mail to some of the hackers who were keeping ITS going has produced positive results. At least two public ITS systems are still up and running, and it looks like the files needed to create my own system are still out there. Maybe there is hope after all.
