about remarque.org

The Remarque user community has its origin in 1988 at UC Berkeley's Computer Center. Marke, Mike and I (all who worked at the computer center) gave out guest accounts to friends and friends of friends on our diskless Sun 3/50 workstations (anableps, eris and riki). Having only 4 megabytes of memory, the Suns were normally slow when one was on the console, and even slower if people logged in remotely.

When my officemate, Genji, got his 3/50, he named it Remarque.Berkeley.EDU, after the German author Erich Maria Remarque. The only problem, was that he didn't use it. It sat on a corner of his desk, while he continuted to used to his tvi925 terminal. Rather than let this machine go to waste, Marke and I, secretly, decided that we should migrate our users over to Remarque, in order to off load the burden on our machines.

That was how Remarque was born

In the next year, Remarque got a donation from one of its users: a 100 megabyte drive, which became root and swap, which sped it up a bit. Genji never noticed addition of the drive.

In 1993, Ken donated a Sun 3/60, with 24 megabytes of memory and a six hundred megabyte drive, Dan donated another six hundred meg drive, and Remarque became alot more capable. That's also when it moved from my office to the computer room, and became the guest machine of my new department, the campus networking group.

In 1996, I left Berkeley for Wired, and Remarque followed, changing its name to Remarque.ORG. It lived in the Wired, employee machine room.

In 1998, Remarque followed me to my next employer, Whole Earth Networks. That year, Remarque was upgraded to an AlphaStation 200 4/233, with 128 meg of memory, running NetBSD.

In the middle of 2001, Remarque was changed to a PC, running FreeBSD.

Currently, Remarque is located at a colocation facility in Oakland, California and managed by Ken and I.

      ---rob

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