A Love Letter to the Super Dimension Fortress

The more I learn about the web, the more appreciative I become of what came before. We truly are standing on the shoulders of giants. In the past week, I've had the pleasure of (finally) becoming an ARPA member on SDF, a non-profit public-access UNIX system and online community that has been in continuous operation since 1987. But what is SDF? Well, to answer that, we need to go back four decades and talk about the BBS era. Bulletin Board Systems It's June 16, 1987. Ted Uhlemann ("iczer") plugs an Apple IIe's 300-baud[1] modem into a phone line his mother had just given him for his birthday, running Magic City Micro-BBS (written in Applesoft BASIC). He names it SDF-1 after his favorite anime, hoping to attract fans of "anime, industrial music and the Church of the SubGenius," per a 30th-anniversary retrospective by Stephen Jones. The original hardware is one 1200bps modem and two floppy drives holding 280 kilobytes each. This was the very beginning of SDF. SDF is self-described as "a…