There was a burst of hacking because of the final transition to UNIX. I was privileged to experience the much more diverse before time: A DECSYSTEM-20 was the main campus computer (it used a Z-80/S100 bus custom terminal multiplexer), the OS course involved writing an OS in PDP-11/23 assembly language, you could write your documents using the Wang word processing computer, of course there were VAXen and there was even an IBM mainframe. There were some UNIX machines (3B2s..), but everything changed when the DEC-20 was replaced with an Encore Multimax and Decstation-2100s (I remember "xtank" was a popular multiplayer game on them).

I could see the vestiges of the previous burst of hacking in the DEC-20's student written software library.

The popularity of the messaging programs should have been a big hint to us..

> a Z-80/S100 bus

What used to be the heart of a microcomputer.

A Serious Business Micro, that is, not a glorified game system like a Commodore-64.

> xtank

There's documentation of a work to port it to modern systems:

http://documentation.wikia.com/wiki/Xtank

Also something on Freecode:

http://freecode.com/projects/xtank

It sounds awesome but I was there in 1990 and worked in the computer lab and never saw it.

DEC-20 was retired in 1988 I think. Also this was when the computer lab (WACCC) was in the library- before it moved to the CS building.

Also, the hackers were big users of the the wpi.* USENET groups (which were a replacement of the TOPS-20 MM groups- actually one of the first student written UNIX programs was 'bboard'- because they didn't have news installed on the Encore at first).