William Yang's involvement with the Free-Net
While an undergraduate student at The Ohio State University, Bill
moved up through the ranks, starting as a public computing site
monitor in 1990. In 1991, he was promoted and was put in charge of
hardware and software maintenance for the residence halls computing
labs on north campus (Royer and Taylor computing labs).
In June, 1993, Bill moved again into user support for OSU's central
Mail and Global News User System (MAGNUS) cluster; in August, 1993, he
was promoted and became a system administrator on the MAGNUS cluster.
In early September, 1993, Bill was offered an opportunity to split
his time between MAGNUS and second-level UNIX operating system support
and debugging for the campus area with the UNIX support group. Bill
happily accepted this opportunity, splitting his time between MAGNUS
and workstation support.
In Febuary 1994, the UNIX support group for OSU was asked to
design and develop a user-friendly, secure, efficient, fast, cheap,
and highly accessible environment for use as the user interface of an
Internet service providing system to be utilized at OSU. This
initiative, under the authority of Professor Steve Gordon, was
challenged to offer Internet-based information services (through the
standard protocol of Gopher, an interface to read and send e-mail, and
"perhaps, someday, USENET-style news", as well as a variety of
community information sources). Bill, along with Bob Manson and
Mowgli Assor, modified the University of Minnesota's Gopher 2.06
client to do a variety of cool things. This gopher client became the
FreeNet's main menu program, and became the basis by which the FreeNet
would operate.
In the end of April, 1994, Bill was offered a student programmer
position with the Free-Net, to provide day-to-day administrative
support for the FreeNet cluster (then two machines). Leaving the
employment of MAGNUS, Bill accepted the position and became the
FreeNet sysadmin. He continued to run the FreeNet through the end of
his college career, overseeing a variety of major software and
hardware upgrades, and overcoming a tremendous number of system design
challenges. With his graduation in June, 1995, Bill was offered a
full-time position as a Computer Specialist to continue to provide
technical know-how and operations to the FreeNet. He began as a
full-time employee on July 1, 1995, and has continued to be involved
in the Free-Net's operation ever since.
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