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Nothing lasts forever
In 1993 Cambridge University introduced a new mail server for its users, called hermes. In December 2021 it officially closed, with end users moved to a new system on Exchange Online. And on Monday July 22nd 2024 it was switched off.
I didn't get a hermes account until 2002, and I've not been involved in running it, but I've worked closely with those who do. I helped hundreds of people migrate from using the Engineering department's mail server to using hermes instead, and then helped support the team migrating hundreds of people from hermes to ExOL nearly 20 years later.
Now it's gone I've been reflecting a little on its history, and found this excellent paper from 2004 about scaling up the system to cope with the many thousands of users it then had. It was one of the two authors who switched off the server last week.
https://fanf2.user.srcf.net/hermes/doc/talks/2004-02-ukuug/paper.html
Looking through the references of that paper I spotted a familar one, relating to a "thermal event" on one of servers making up hermes, and tried to follow it. The server hosting it in Cambridge also no longer exists, and while the page is still available via the Wayback Machine, the excellent photos of the poor DIMMs seem to have been lost. I wonder if Tony still has a copy?
http://web.archive.org/web/20181110142000/http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/fanf2/hermes/doc/misc/orange-fire/
A reminder that the web too is impermanent!
I shall raise a glass to hermes tonight, with thanks to Tony and David, and to the other David who had a vision of where it could go next:
https://dwm37.user.srcf.net/2019/email-strategy-submission/dwm37.pdf
So long hermes, and thanks for all the phish!
I didn't get a hermes account until 2002, and I've not been involved in running it, but I've worked closely with those who do. I helped hundreds of people migrate from using the Engineering department's mail server to using hermes instead, and then helped support the team migrating hundreds of people from hermes to ExOL nearly 20 years later.
Now it's gone I've been reflecting a little on its history, and found this excellent paper from 2004 about scaling up the system to cope with the many thousands of users it then had. It was one of the two authors who switched off the server last week.
https://fanf2.user.srcf.net/hermes/doc/talks/2004-02-ukuug/paper.html
Looking through the references of that paper I spotted a familar one, relating to a "thermal event" on one of servers making up hermes, and tried to follow it. The server hosting it in Cambridge also no longer exists, and while the page is still available via the Wayback Machine, the excellent photos of the poor DIMMs seem to have been lost. I wonder if Tony still has a copy?
http://web.archive.org/web/20181110142000/http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/fanf2/hermes/doc/misc/orange-fire/
A reminder that the web too is impermanent!
I shall raise a glass to hermes tonight, with thanks to Tony and David, and to the other David who had a vision of where it could go next:
https://dwm37.user.srcf.net/2019/email-strategy-submission/dwm37.pdf
So long hermes, and thanks for all the phish!