Location

University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, LA

Now (2003) known as the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

First Installed

1975

Configuration

3 L68 CPUs, 12 MSU0451, 4 MSU0501

The Sale

Jim Hildebrand, Pat Lyon, Larry Merritt

Site Analysts

Warren Johnson, James Dugal, Steve Landry

System Administrators

Bill Haga, Bill Watt, and Ken Byrd.

Student Users

Peter Bahrs, Rose Carinhas, Stan Chesnutt, Ken Clement, Matt Delcambre, Brian Doré, Bryan Durio, Edmund Gallizzi, Ken Horton, Randall Jouett, Craig Martin, Sammy Migues, Lane Robert, Paul Rogers, Robert Sonnier, Johnnie Stafford, Jim Stephens, Bill Tims, Mary Tims, Scott Sheppard

Notable developments

Application areas

One of the main selling points for Multics was that both university administration and student computing took place on the same machine.

Anecdotes

One of the first university Multics sales after MIT. USL had a swamp on campus with real alligators.

See Ron Riedesel's story about Installing USL.

Also see the (untrue, but funny) Louisiana State Trooper Story.

[Jim Stephens] Much work on the DN355 there, there were more terminals on that system than previous systems sold.

[Jim Stephens] I broke the Ring 1 security used for mail and caused a minor panic by using it to get into Ring 1 w/o authorization.

[Jim Stephens] I had a program that was stolen from the send messages command, called "send command" once you did an "accept command" for some unknowing user, you could go to another terminal and do a "send command" to that user and have it executed w/o any indication to the user that you were doing it. The star trek game that was run locally had a log facility that I read, and if I were to have been a bad user, could have been used as an early "trojan" to do an "accept command" for any user, just by setting a trap for him / her. I do know that one of the Honeywell SA's saw the log and reamed some of the sys admin users for running the game on their SA accounts. Since I was an employee of the University, I did all this mischief as a "good" guy and never did any nasty stuff to anyone (not even cookie).

Final Shutdown

1990

Honeywell Publicity

[Ron Riedesel] Here is a USL Site Profile (Honeywell marketing document) salvaged from the Great Garage Clean up of '03. This was a Honeywell promotional profile of the USL site, probably from 1976 or 1977.

(Click any image for a larger view)

Page 1 of the brochure. Front of Martin Hall, the campus administration building. The Comp Center building, Stephens Hall, was across the quadrangle behind Martin Hall.

Page 2of the brochure. Honeywell 6180 CPU, doors open.

Page 3 of the brochure. Delta Data 400 terminals in student terminal room.

Information from Ron Riedesel, Bryan Durio, and Jim Stephens.