It's taken quite a long time, but finally...
The files on this page are all taken from the University of Warwick Department of Computer Science gossip files. These were maintained by a (now possibly defunct, or at least changed-beyond-recognition) group called Newwords, who also provided some funky extra programs and stuff. When my year left in 1998 various people took copies of the files with them, for posterity (or something)... There used to be seven files which are listed in the table below. The files are available individually, or in one big zip file. Please note that I have deliberately not included contacts - it contains people's addresses and it would take far too long to check whether people wanted their details splashed all over the web...
| Contact | Contact details for Fysh past and present. |
| Events (85 Kb). | Information about Newwords events, and general noteworthy happenings in and around DCS in general and Fyshbowl in particular. |
| Gossip (72 Kb). | Lots of gossip. |
| Lecturer (4 Kb). | Lecturer quotes |
| Quotes (89 Kb). | Quotes by the inhabitants of Fyshbowl. |
| Recipe (26 Kb). | Allegedly contains recipes... |
| Stories (13 Kb). | Bizarre and generally strange ramblings. |
| All six files (125 Kb). | All six files in one easy-to-grab Winzip file. (If there is sufficient demand I can try to add a tar'ed, gziped file here as well.) |
Notes: While I was there, DCS had three terminal rooms, one upstairs and two downstairs. The one upstairs was called Attic, and originally (1995) contained SparcStation 5 machines and some NCD graphical dumb terminals, later (1998) Sparc Ultra 5 boxes and an Ultra 10. Oh yes - and a couple of Apple Macs, a massive, noisy line printer and the department laser printer.
One of the downstairs rooms was called Windtunnel (due to its shape - long and thin) and contained SparcStation 2 boxes in 1995, later upgraded to Ultra 1's.
The third room was called Fyshbowl, because it had one wall made almost entirely out of glass, and anyone walking in to DCS could see what was going on inside. (And they must has seen some horrible things over the years... ;-) Sorry guys... here are some of the people I might have just offended.) Fyshbowl (no idea why Fysh was spelt with a y - if anyone can tell me, drop me a mail using the contact page link) had a range of computers ranging from dumb text-only terminals (ADM 3e machines) through graphical dumb terms (more NCD's and six, I think, Sparc ELC's), very poor machines with good (relatively speaking) graphics systems (the Sparc IPC boxes), slightly more powerful machines (the SparcStation 2 machines) and finally the "jewel in the crown" and Richard's favourite, Tamarind, our SparcStation 5. (Eventually Tamarind was joined by a couple of friends from Attic, following the conversion to Ultra 5's in early-1998.) There were also two line printers, adre and ddre, also known as Audrey and Deirdre (Computer Science students don't always get out that much)...
A good number of the machines in the building in general and Fyshbowl and Attic in particular were given names that were lifted straight out of Jabberwocky (Flivoreuse springs immediately to mind). Better than Computing Services, though - their UNIX machines were all either biscuits (Richtea, Figroll, Digestive, etc.) or herbs (Parsley, Thyme and Rosemary, among others, and those well known herbs Spam, Pork and Veal)...
Coming at some point maybe, unless the people concerned get to me first and stop me... pictures of some of the Fyshbowl dramatis personae, both during and after the Fyshbowl years (yes, and photos of Gavin's wedding)...
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