The Uniform Resource Locator for this document is:
http://tardis.ed.ac.uk/tardisinfo.html
Tardis is a public-access UNIX service. The Tardis project provides free networked UNIX accounts for educational and non-commercial purposes. We are kindly hosted by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. However, the Tardis project is independent of the department and is run by a group of volunteers. The service is run along the lines stated in our charter.
The original Tardis service was provided by a GEC-63/30, which had previously provided a service managed by the Edunburgh University Computing Service which has since been discontinued. It was "liberated" by Brian Tompsett and given a new home as the basis of a free UNIX service for anyone who wanted it. In its new life as Tardis, it came on-line on August 15, 1988. That Tardis service continued for three years (to the day), until it was withdrawn due to the increasing pressure of its size, air conditioning and power requirements. (A GEC-63 is a pretty big and hungry beast.)
The new Tardis service is based around Sun-3 equipment which has, like the original machine, been donated free-of-charge by various groups as it has become surplus to their own requirements. We have more CPUs and disks available to us and will use them to increase and expand the Tardis service over time.
jpd, January 14, 1994.