Simtel originated as SIMTEL20, a software archive started by Keith Petersen in 1979 while living in
Royal Oak, Michigan. The original archive consisted of
CP/M software for early
8080-based
microcomputers. The software was hosted on a
PDP-10 at
MIT that also ran a CP/M mailing list to which Petersen subscribed. When access to the particular MIT computer was removed in 1983, fellow CP/M enthusiast Frank Wancho, then an employee at the
White Sands Missile Range, arranged for the archive to be hosted on a
DECSYSTEM-20 computer with
ARPANET access, accessible via FTP at simtel20.arpa, later known as wsmr-simtel20.army.mil, became the focal point for online Simtel access. For much of its life the Web site and primary mirrors were located at www.cdrom.com, www.simtel.net, and oak.oakland.edu at
Oakland University. In July 1998, the Simtel FTP server set a record for overall traffic with a total transfer amount of 417 GB of data in one day. ==References==