Owlnet Lab Report
Hand-drawn icons from the Owlnet Lab
Report, circa
1998.
Row 1: Mac II, Mac PPC. Row 2: SGI Iris, Indy, and O2. Row
3: Sun SparcStation, Sparc Ultra.
Hey, another one of my Rice projects found its way onto a public network. The
Owlnet Lab Report, which I
built in 1997 or 1998, is being proxied to the wider Web at this location.
The Lab Report used rwho and finger data, combined with schematic layouts of
the Unix computer facilities (“Owlnet”) on the Rice campus, to generate
diagrams of machine availability in those facilities. Absolutely crucial when
you’re an undergrad hunting for a free Sparc station on which to do your
homework, especially back in the days before everyone and his sister was
running Linux in the dorms. The Lab Report was (internally) called
mach5, since it was about the fifth time I had reimplemented my
ad-hoc machine-availability shell scripts. When I graduated, the Rice IS
group offered to move the tool out of my personal directory and maintain the
service as the labs on campus evolved. (Since it’s been owned by IS, however,
it’s been restricted to on-campus users, which is why the public mirror is
news.)