The CTSSR group, that the idea there was that, uh,  some things that we had evolved in the running the BEV system, in particular, with system administration and stuff, uh, some of the tools and techniques, uh, at that point, Seth was kind of holding together the GIS infrastructure with his bare hands, and it was an opportunity for him to actually do more GIS work, um, in terms of leveraging some of the capabilities of the tools that that software and those systems presented, without having to worry about the infrastructure as much. Because even though Richard Phipps and I were, we were pretty much the systems BEV people at that point, uh, even though we, uh,  didn't know squat about GIS to speak of, we knew how to run the systems that the GIS stuff ran on. Mostly there was we had to learn about Windows stuff more because we've mostly been on the UNIX Linux side. Um, and then the VTIT enterprise GIS just kind of fallen on after that. I worked with the email client system, which was basically too Rube Goldberg to survive. At one point, one of the great things for me about working with the CNS, uh, non-operational projects, uh, was that, or the research projects, I got the opportunity to go to a number of, um, really interesting convention events or working group events. Went to Interop a couple of times, you know, this is in the late '80s, You know, you had presentations by, uh, you know, people from Xerox who invented the first mouse. It was uh, it was a character, uh, who had, I think he had a Humanities degree from MIT, named Michael Padlipsky. If you look him up, some of the really low numbered RFCs are written by him. He was a real character. The RFCs are, uh, kind of the foundation of the internet. In the beginning, there were all these, there were computers. Okay? They stood alone like nothing was connected to anything except the power grid. Okay? If you wanted to get data from here to there, you, like, put a bunch of nine track tapes in a car, which were enormous. They held an enormous amount of data at that point, a nine track tape could hold 100 megabytes, which was incredible. Um, especially when you think about a tray of cards was like 150k. You put a bunch of tapes in a station wagon and drive them to UVA, and your bandwidth was incredible. Eventually, data centers did get connected in kind of these little balkanized networks, like the BITNET thing, which was oriented towards academic institutions. Of course, the military, uh, had what was known as the ARPANET, which was the, what the early protocols were developed on. And they used the RFCs as proposals, requests for comment. It was like, okay, here's my proposed way to get data from, here to there in a reliable fashion. I mean, it was basically get data from here to there at all, which was IP, internet Protocol. And then there was get data here to there in a reliable fashion, which was TCP. And here's how to get email from here to there and know who it came from, uh, and what the subject was and that kind of stuff, which is RFC 821 and 822 originally. These were simple text documents they didn't have a the images were all like typed, flow chart type things and stuff. Um, so they could be sent between each other using the modes of the day, which were like text, emails. And those were the foundations that, and you can actually, you can go back find and you know go online and look and you can read the early RFCs. It was like a bunch of real clubby professory internet old boys. Now this wasn't known as the internet yet. The internet was when the people said hey, we can connect all this junk together and everybody can communicate. That was how the internet came about. Then the really neat thing, was I, um, there was, there's these IFIPs working groups and I forget exactly what IFIP stands for, uh, but it's basically the guys, it's the guys who wrote the RFCs. So I went to a couple of those working group conventions related to email stuff. Which was really, it was a great opportunity just to meet some of those people. And you know, I sat in a bar at one point in Costa Mesa, California and drank Scotch but you know, Vint Cerf was was there Einar Stefferud, Marshall Rose, uh, Nathaniel Borenstein, I think. He's the guy basically orchestrated in the MIME protocol. In fact, that's, that was one of the subjects of the that particular convention. And in some levels, I had no business being there because I was this is, you know, 99% academic people. There were some industry representatives. You know, I had no credentials to speak of. I never got anything beyond an undergraduate degree, but I was working on a project that was in the neighborhood of what they were doing, and they didn't have one of those bars at the door that says you must be this high enter, you know, credit to ride on the thing, you know. So it worked out. All right. So the email thing, it developed, there were other better ways that were emerging to do it. One of the things that happens in IT or any fast moving profession is almost anything you might be interested or to discover that is worth doing, if you do not do it quickly enough, somebody else, and even if you do do it quickly, oftentimes someone else will do it better, cheaper, faster than you will. One of the things that I learned at the IFIP convention in, uh, Costa Mesa was there was this guy Einar Stefferud, who had been involved in, uh, early protocol development of different things, uh, including email, I think maybe the POP protocol. He was running the convention. And, uh, there were various housekeeping things that came up at different points in discussions. A lot of these, you know, early internet old boys are just Renaissance people. And one of his, one of his favorite, Einar's favorite quotes was from a weird movie called "Buckaroo Banzai." It's like "wherever you go, there you are." [laughs] It was kind of like the be here now thing. One, and then another thing he said was "The best kind of progress in the world is the kind that I have nothing to do with." [laughs] Because YOU can do something else. You know, it's like, oh, I don't have to worry about that now somebody has already developed that. It's important to keep perspective with these things that you don't have to do everything. What you do need to do is to try to keep your head up and see where you at, what's available, take advantage of things and keep things rolling forward, and then keep everybody else pointed in a positive direction. The early processing things which were used by the university and actually had been used to you know, estimate bomb yields for the Manhattan Project, for instance, what were called unit record machines. Unit records were things like cards. And you could actually do sophisticated mathematics and things by reading cards through machines that were adders, and then doing, you could do sorting and whatever. And, they used those systems to do things at the university for administrative systems before they had an IBM 360. There were earlier systems that were in use before I was even an undergraduate here.