We have made the transition to our new public streaming server. This is a somewhat momentous occasion as it hearkens back to a day in the not so distant past when the digital heartbeat of WSUM was a pile of CPU's from SWAP in a converted closet with no ventilation on State St.
This final transition of our web streams completes a journey of a stream of nearly continuous audio programming hatched neck to neck with an invention called "The Internet." This signal started in the 90's sans RF broadcast and existed in data form only for many years before it had the opportunity to excite spectrum.
The signal started as a single headphone connector pigtailed off of legit analog broadcast gear. That connector plugged into what must have been a re-purposed CPU even then. This CPU, HUM, spent near a decade sandwiched into that hot closet and played it's heart out over a 10 megabit wireless link to the Com Sci building which pre-dated wireless internet as we know it today.
Around 2005, after the signal had been given it's long awaited broadcast spectrum, the webstream got an upgrade of a dedicated encoder wired properly to the broadcast equipment, albeit on yet another SWAP computer. Our buddy HUM in the closet, however, did keep the job of taking the world's request for the stream. Stream hardware remained as such until the summer of construction 2007 landed a crane in the path of the wireless network bridge.
Due to the reduced bandwidth of the obstructed path, HUM, finally passed the torch of the public listeners to VU1, yet another SWAP CPU which made it's service life debut in the penthouse HVAC room of Vilas Hall. In Vilas, VU1 didn't have to be on the suck end of a wireless link. Until last week, VU1, a $25 SWAP computer, has had the job of passing our digital stream to all interested Internet listeners over the course of the last two years.
This last move, relegating VU1 to a new home and a backup roll move the stream once again back to the WSUM studios. Now we have a 1 gigabit fiber uplink to the Internet2 backbone in our racks at the new WSUM studios. The streaming server is a completely dedicated $4000 Dell server. The signal is 100% digital from the broadcast booth, has it's own dedicated audio processors, and uses both state of the art hardware and code to make itself available to the world.
