The End of an era? Or just the beginning…

This is a long over due eulogy/ode to C4 space, I warehouse space I rented for two years:

So around November 2001 I had spent a little over a year working on SeattleWireless as well as acquiring a gang of servers hosting websites, dns, and mail for myself and some friends.

So I started entertaining the idea of getting a shop space on Capitol Hill for the purpose of providing a more permanent home for the servers, and to also have a meeting/work space for Seattlewireless. Finding a decent sized space on Capitol Hill proved to be extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive.

By the end of November I had settled on a 1200 square ft. space in the *old* Rainier Brewery. Most people think of the Tully’s building as the old Rainier Brewery (which it is), however before the brewery was there it was in an old brick building on the 5900 block of Airport Way South. The space I selected was in the old “Malt House” and owned the aroma of the fish company that had previously dwelled there. But smells aside I was extremely excited by it all. Georgetown has a awesome community of people and local coffee shop, bar, and pizza place.

Off I went, scoring old server racks from Boeing Surplus, getting a business class DSL with no rules about hosting servers/services and a grip of static ip addresses.

My friends were somewhat skeptical of the space, Georgetown being almost 7 miles from Capitol Hill. Around January of 2002 Seattlewireless was hosting the annual Freenetworks summit. I think this is when I really realized what an impact having the space really made. On a Sunday afternoon, the last day of the summit, we had over 200 people that had come to C4 to meet, listen to, and converse with some of the most active people involved in community wireless.

Among the attendees were people that worked on FreeBSD, Apache, OpenSSL,802.1x, and others. Many people got their first look at the Soekris Boards (brought by Matt Peterson) and the Musenki beta product (brought by Jim Thompson). Of course there were wireless folk from all over the world including:

BAWUG – Bay Area, CA

Nocat – Sebastapol, CA

Consume – London

NYC Wireless – NY, NY

AustinWireless – Austin, TX

BCWireless – Vancouver, British Columbia

Personal Telco – Portland, OR

Free2Air – Austrailia?From this point things moved along, we started having SeattleWireless meetings at the space (named C4 because of its unit number and the pun on explosives). Other people in the warehouse were using our internet connection, people brought couches, chairs, a pool table, ping pong table, plenty of old machines for spare parts. Even the most alpha of the geeks were amazed at the amount and variety of networking/computer gear housed at C4 space.

As time went on C4 hosted the weekly Seattlewireless hack night. Where we built many nodes, worked on Airport Linux, argued about node architecture, and had cracked out arguments with various people sometimes until 4 a.m. It was not uncommon for Matt to resolve arguments on the mailing list, by calling someone and telling them to come down so it can be hashed out on the white board.

As time went on though things happening at C4 slowed down. After leaving my job at Flight Safety Boeing, I was definitely in much less of a position to carry the weight of a second rent, second DSL line etc… Eventually we moved the Seattlewireless.net server, and all of our personal servers out of the space.

It was pretty obvious at this point that the Salad Days of C4 space were over. In the final months we cleaned it out. Moving every piece of computer equipment, ethernet cable, whiteboard, was like moving a piece of Seattle’s geek history. In a short two year period this damp, fishy warehouse space had fueled a faction of Seattle’s geek community and help put a project and a movement on the books permanently. While I would definitely think twice about doing something like this again, I cant say that I regret it at all.

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