Why the Name?

Why is this site named valinor?

Back in the late 1980s, I bought an old surplus Intel 310 Xenix mini-computer from my former employer, Geac, for $150. Not bad, since Geac had probably spent about $10K on it new. The 310, like all UNIX machines, then and now, had to have a name or you couldn't boot it properly. I called it Numinor; a place-name from the Silmarillion of J.R.R. Tolkien. Numinor could run up to 8 dumb terminals and 2 operators' consoles, and we wired up in the rental house we were living in so that we could work in different rooms and broadcast messages to each other, like, "Are you making dinner?". Later, I bought an Intel 286 machine, which ran under Microsoft Windows 3.1, and though it didn't really need a name, I called it Numinor as well.

On joining Wayne State University in 1994, my first request was for a UNIX box, and my director obliged by providing a reconditioned Sun Microsystems SPARC Station 1. To avoid confusion with my home computer, I called it Valinor. Its full name on the net was valinor.purdy.wayne.edu, and it first, it just supported ftp and telnet connections for LIS students. Some of the material was really on the University Library's IBM AIX box, which ran Gopher and Web servers. The first Valinor was replaced with a Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC Station 1, which ran a Web server.

Valinor.purdy.wayne.edu soon grew. When it ceased operations in 2001, it was receiving about 6000 hits a week, for about 1200 page hits, because of its graphics intensity. Material from the site was being used in LIS and Journalism schools in North America and abroad. The domain "valinor.ca" was registered in 2001 with the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA). This was mostly in response to a challenge from Celtic musician and computer geek Christopher Rennie to keep Valinor alive. Softcomca.com currently hosts valinor.ca, which is a much smaller version. It currenlty houses about 2,000 files, with a much lower page to picture ratio.

In the old days, people named their machines after things they did, or things they liked. Sometimes, they also chose names just for fun. For instance, back at Geac, one group of advanced development programmers had a pair of machines named "This" and "That". Astronomers named their machines Jupiter or Andromeda. The University at Buffalo named its main machine "wings", and Ferris State University had a "wheel". A site at MIT which housed documents, was was dubbed "rtfm", for "Read the flippin' manual!".

I always admired Tolkien – here was one professor who really could popularize his work and make it accessable to huge audiences.  I'd also studied medieval philosophy, art, and languages. Valinor and Numinor are Western lands. (Detroit is West of Toronto, or you might be visiting "Middangeard" at the moment). I always thought they were much like Tirnanog in Celtic mythology, or the Isle of Promise of the Saints, in the Voyage of Brendan. There's also a connection in both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis between these lands and Plato's Atlantis. But don't take my word on anything about Tolkien or the other Inklings. Read Christopher Tolkien, or some of the other real Tolkien scholars.

If you came here looking for fantasy, the best I can offer is Sigrids Saga. The only other medieval stuff on this site is the page about King Arthur. The rest is about Librarianship and Archives.

Nothing much. Namarië. Ferðu hal!
Text and photos: Chris Brown-Syed, 2001. Disclaimers.