the cam.* FAQ Wiki

I mentioned earlier that the cam.* FAQ Wiki had been occupying a lot of my time for the last couple of days. The cam.* newsgroups are a venerable part of Usenet, a way of having online discussions that pre-dates the Internet (posting were originally distributed from server to server via dial up modems using a protocol called UUCP). Some news groups were global, circulated all around the world, and some were local, normally only residing on one company's server. The original cam.* group, cam.misc, was an exception in that it could be found on a number of servers in companies around Cambridge including Acorn (ARM's predecessor) and Torch and it provided a way for engineers in the growing "Silicon Fen" to chat to each other.

Over time it evolved and some more groups were added and it's now distributed via the Internet and is available on a lot of news servers all around the world although most posters still live or work in or near Cambridge.

A long time ago I set up a FAQ page on our web server (a list of "Frequently Asked Questions").

This evolved over time into a Wiki and I bought the domain misc.org.uk so the Wiki was hosted on the sub-domain cam.misc.org.uk. That Wiki used the PhpWiki software and for a long while it did OK but when we upgraded the server to use PHP5 (as PHP4 was becoming unsupported) it got decidedly flaky.

We limped on with it for another half year or more but as part of the move to a new server I decided to move all the content over to DokuWiki which, in my experience of using it for two other Wiki's recently, is far superior Wiki software.

It's taken me several evenings' work to get all the content copied over and the Wiki tuned up to have the same basic look as previous iterations of the FAQ but it's now live so my work here is done.