Technology History | 臺大資訊工程學系 — A 486 in a Dorm Room, Still on the University's Network

Type ptt.cc into a terminal today and the address that answers is 140.112.172.1, inside the block registered to Taiwan's academic network, TANet. The same block serves www.ntu.edu.tw. Thirty years on, the island's busiest forum still answers from a university's address space. 批踢踢實業坊 (PTT) opened on 14 September 1995. 杜奕瑾 (Ethan Tu), then a second-year student in this department, put it together on a 486 PC running Linux in a dormitory room on campus. The site is named after his login. Friends called him Panda Tu for the rings that late nights left under his eyes, and since PT was too short he added a second T. PTT was not Taiwan's first BBS, nor even 台大's. The campus already ran 椰林風情, 陽光沙灘 and several others, and Tu had been a sysop before he was a founder. What separated it was what it declined. PTT has never carried advertising, and it could not: sitting on TANet, the Ministry of Education's academic network, puts commercial use against the network's own rules. Its software is public — pttbbs, written mostly in C, GPL v2, descended from a Maple BBS fork taken from another 台大 station, and still committed to on GitHub by students and graduates of this department. On the night of 23 March 2014, while police cleared students out of the Executive Yuan during 太陽花學運, the Gossiping board held 100,084 people at once. No single board on the site had passed a hundred thousand before. The cover photograph was taken the following evening in 台中: a hand-lettered canopy reading Ptt.cc 臺中鄉民服務台, run by volunteers, hung with placards for the universities whose students had come. That 486 sat in a men's dormitory, which is student housing and not a stop on anyone's tour, so the honest address is this one: the building the department works out of. The link is still legible in the logs. When PTT shut off unencrypted telnet at 00:31 on 15 April 2022, leaving SSH and WebSocket, the announcement went out from 140.112.30.76, an address whose reverse lookup returns mirror2.csie.ntu.edu.tw. The building that carries the department's address today, 資訊工程德田館, opened on 29 September 2004 — nine years after the BBS did. What you can check is the network address instead, from anywhere, in one command. Photos: the 臺中 service desk, 24 March 2014, by 中岑 范姜, CC BY-SA 2.0; 杜奕瑾 photographed in 2019, 臺南市政府, Attribution licence. Coordinates from the OpenStreetMap footprint of 德田館, cross-checked against NTU's official campus map. DNS and RDAP records checked 19 August 2026.