Welcome to mcvax

The original MCVAX was the machine (a Digital VAX 11/780, serial number 38) which brought Internetworking to Europe. It was located in the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam (now CWI) and was run by the legendary Piet Beertema.

Mcvax was originally replaced by mcsun (a Sun 4/280) and by more newer, even more powerful systems since then. The mcvax.org domain lives on in memory of all those machines. The current mcvax.org machine has nothing whatsoever to do with European networking, doesn't act as a major mail relay, and is administered by James Aldridge in his limited spare time. For those interested, the machine is currently a 2.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 PC with 256 Mbytes DRAM and running FreeBSD Un*x. This is substantially more powerful than the original MCVAX machine and takes up very much less space and electrical power!

After many years of completely uninterrupted service, the previous mcvax.org machine suffered a catastrophic disk failure earlier in April 2007. This new(er) machine is taking its place as a short term measure before a new machine can be found to fully take over the functions of the old machine.

Very little of the old system is currently installed on this machine. Please bear with me as I endeavour to restore essential functionality in my spare time.

--James Aldridge