🚀 go-pugleaf

> ANTS was based on a PDP-11, and one of the fun things about it was the
> visual design.  That was the era when DEC equipment still had decent looks
> instead of the industrial bland of the modern machines.  The cabinets were
> all black, with an orange and purple stripe across the top.  The folks at
                                ^^^^^^
> Illinois got custom stenciling on the stripe so it had a row of large black
> ants crawling across the stripe.

Orange and BLUE, I'll have you know! Have you forgotten the school colors
already?? "Hail to the orange, hail to the blue, hail alma mater, ever so
true," remember?


At least one of those panels survives today, anachronistically pasted to the
front of the VAX 3500 which replaced the VAX-11/780 which replaced the
PDP-11/50 which replaced one of the Center for Advanced Computation
machines. It reads, in some funky sans serif curvy print,

       university of illinois
       ANTS
       arpa network terminal system


And on the right in smaller type,


       DEVELOPED BY THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED COMPUTATION
       AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
       FOR THE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY

       digital equipment corporation - maynard, massachusetts


And there are indeed a line of blue ants crawling across the orange
background, going off the right of the panel, presumably to be
continued on the next panels, which consisted just of ants with no
verbiage. But who knows where they have disappeared to.

_____
Charley Kline, University of Illinois Computing Services
c-k...@uiuc.edu