SDF

The Super Dimension Fortress (sdf.org, also freeshell.org) is a public-access Unix system and nonprofit organization that has run continuously since 1987, making it one of the oldest online communities still operating. It provides shell accounts, web hosting, and a community on shared NetBSD machines.

Adapted from A Love Letter to the Super Dimension Fortress on brennan.day.

SDF began in 1987 as a single BBS running on an Apple IIe, before the modern Internet reached most homes. It grew into a public-access Unix system running NetBSD on DEC Alpha and Opteron hardware, surviving everything from the commercial web's rise to termination by its own ISP. Founder Stephen Jones's 30th-anniversary retrospective and a 2006 bsdtalk interview cover the full arc; cmccabe's History, Evolution and Future of Public Access UNIX places SDF in the pubnix lineage documented at The Tildeverse.

Members describe it the same way the early Unix designers described their systems: “more than a shell account, it's a community.” The site is deliberately not corporate and not modernized for its own sake.

• Shell accounts with web hosting at sdf.org/~user
• Gopher and Gemini hosting
• Fediverse instances: Mastodon, Pixelfed, and the toobnix.org PeerTube instance
• Tiny Tiny RSS, git hosting, and internal IRC and bulletin boards
• twenex.org: a restored TOPS-20 system for historical computing
• Domains for ARPA members: the one-time-lifetime membership tier that funds the operation

The hardware itself is part of the story: the pictorial tour shows the actual machines, including a stint housed in a telephone museum.

• tilde.town
• The Tildeverse
• tilde.pink
• Gopher
• Gemini
• The Internet as a Place
• Return to wiki home