Confusion.org started life as some mucking around with a Linux box and a few other machines that my room-mate Chris Brown and I had during our final year as undergraduates at University. Since the room that we inhabited was 'E5' - room five on 'E' staircase in Trinity Hall the system was known as E5net. These days of course Trinity Hall actually has internet connected ethernet ports in quite a few of it's rooms, had that been the case when we were there we'd have probably just connected our machines up to the internet and that would have been that. As it was, we had quite a bit of fun with our isolated system and the various things that were run on it for the benefit of various friends and acquaintances.

This picture shows E5Net (well most of it, anyway) as it was at the end of its residence in E5, Trinity Hall, in June 1995. The person sitting in the corner is an individual by the name of Andrew Bolt, who cannot really be blamed for the surrounding mess (he can be blamed for many things, such as his multi-player snakes game, but not this one. The picture shows an upgraded Macintosh Centris 610, one of the BBC Master's, an Acorn Risc PC and two Linux PCs. The one on the table was used as the network server, the second had just been built to provide an internet gateway - it now provides the central services for confusion.org, albeit in a somewhat upgraded form.

E5Net consisted of a PC running Linux, a couple of scrounged VT320 terminals (we got them from the Chemistry lab), my old Master 128, a Risc PC (occasionally two if the other was brought into the vicinity!), a Macintosh and an Amiga. This lot usually lived in the sitting room that my room-mate Chris Brown and I shared (when I say 'we' shared it, that isn't quite true as it was quite usual to find neither of us there but lots of other people instead - very confusing for visitors!), Anyway, we ended up with about 30 users in total and 15 regulars (as I am sure they would like to be known).

Although this system got used occasionally for serious uses (the RiscPC was used, for instance, to run a national Archery league for the Cambridge University Bowmen and typing up dissertations) most of the time it was just used for entertainment, mainly for running a local news system on (including the deliberately and cleverly devised anonomysing mechanism - it batched news articles and sent them out at particular times so that you couldn't tell who posted them by login times. This system caused quite a few problems on many occasions though with people posting, er, rather 'controversial' articles. We also had a prototype MUD on the system and a number of web pages, including some interactive ones that people wrote.

Anyway, this system continued to work for most of the academic year 1995, those of us that ran it (myself, my fiance Louise, and two friends Matthew Slattery & Alec Gunner) learnt a lot about networking / running public systems and in general found the whole thing quite entertaining. Ok, so I lost my sitting room, but then in my view the almost continual stream of different people livening the place up was quite fine anyway (the two previous rooms that I had seemed to get used as general meeting places, to a lesser extent maybe, even without E5Net). The only downside of it all was that I never got any work done.

On leaving Cambridge, we had originally hoped to be able to set things up as a public access system, but this time connected to the Internet. So far this has proved to be prohibitively expensive, both in terms of financial cost and time, since we all now work full time. The domain confusion.org was chosen as a suitably amusing replacement for 'E5Net' which no longer seemed appropriate somehow, we still run a variety of mailing lists used by some of the people who were there at Cambridge (and indeed some new ones as well!)

If you want to know more about E5Net/confusion.org, or if you were involved with it and feel that something needs changing/adding then please feel free to contact me.