This site runs on a Sun Ultra 250 running Solaris 8. The web server software is Apache.

In the early 1990s, Al Marshall at Proteon hosted the 802.5 email reflector. In 1993, John Messenger joined Proteon and started to host a committee FTP site for working documents. Later this migrated into a web site, which served both 802.5 and 802.12.

The site you see today was created by Neil Jarvis and John Messenger while they were working for SilCom/Microvitec. Both were long serving (and hard working!) members of 802.5, who had collected a mass of electronic papers and email from the committee. In this enlightened age of the internet, it was a obvious step to start publishing this material for the benefit of the whole token ring community.

When the group was taken over by Madge Networks, the web server machine came too, and they continued to maintain and update the site as part of their 802.5 committee duties. When Neil Jarvis left, Simon Harrison joined the web team.

The 8025.org domain name was acquired by John Messenger to anonymise the hosting of the committee's site, and make the URL more memorable than p8025.york.microvitec.co.uk.

Madge's York office closed down in March 2000, leaving just the web and email servers running there (both Sun Sparc machines running NetBSD). In June 2000, John Messenger transferred the web site to grouper.ieee.org, the IEEE standards working group machine, but still using the www.8025.org name. As the web site made extensive use of server-side includes and these are not allowed on the new site, some perl hackery was involved and the broken links may clatter for some time yet.

In July 2001, grouper got an upgrade, but the site and virtual hosting survive.

At some point the 8025.org domain name didn't get renewed and the web site went down. As John is now responsible for the 802.1 web site, he doesn't have time to maintain this one. However he seems to have found a few minutes to hack something together to get most of the pages back up.