This club was founded in 1997 at the Jedlíkova 9 dormitory and its goal was to build a computer network with internet connection. Among the people who contributed most to the construction of this network are Patrik Ostrihon (pa3k), Ján Ondrej (Sal), Ľuboš Vítek (Fanatik), Marcel Klein (Emsi), Marek Ondrej, Monika Farkašová and Stano Kušnír; and the members of the Student Council, headed by the chairman Karol Horanský. The first network was built in 1996 in some rooms of the A block of the Jedlíkova 9 dormitory. However, this network did not comply with fire regulations and standards for networks. For this reason, it was reconstructed and extended in 1997 after the PC Club was founded. Sockets were installed in the rooms, new wiring was made and the cabling was divided into fixed and movable. However, this network was limited to one, later two or more HUBs.
In 1998, the network was extended to the whole of block A, the HUBs were replaced by switches. Gradually, more people were connected on their own initiative, especially in Block B, and as the switches could not provide enough capacity, HUBs were added to replace them for the expansion. There were about 150 computers connected to the network at that time. This is where the load on the network logically started to show, especially outwards to the world. For this reason, the PC Club was forced, especially by SANET, to take a very unpopular step: the introduction of a quota.
It was only in 1999 that a major expansion took place. The PC Club recruited additional temporary members – technicians – in order to be able to implement the extension of the network to all rooms in blocks A, B, C. There are two connections in each room, and four in some rooms. The entire network was rebuilt and the passive elements – HUBs – were eliminated and replaced with switches. The result was 350 connected computers. At the end of the 1999/2000 school year, the Jedlíkova 13 dormitory was also connected.
By the year 2000, the network consisted of about 550 computers. The dormitories Jedlíkova 13 and Jedlíkova 5 were connected. There were 16 switches connected at Jedlíkova 9, one switch at Jedlíkova 13 and six switches at Jedlíkova 5. Of course, during the development of the network, the servers were upgraded accordingly. Initially one alpha server and a firewall, in 1999 a second bravo server was added. While the first one is a user server and students have accounts on it, the second one is a system server. The original connectivity to the school was provided by a 33.6kbs modem. Later it was raised to 64kbs and gradually as better modems could be gotten the speed was increased. Later the speed was up to 512kbit, which is beyond the guaranteed quality limits of the line; yet this speed was maintained most of the time.
Finally in 2001, after a long struggle with bureaucracy, we managed to launch a new line to the school with a transmission capacity of about 3.5 Mbps, which consisted of two parts: the 1st part was a bridge between our dormitory and the medical faculty located in the building of the teaching hospital using a wireless radio link – about 2.7 km 2. Part 2 consisted of an already existing optical line between the medical faculty and UVT TU Košice via UVT UPJŠ Košice This new line replaced the leased analogue circuit from Slovak Telecommunications. To run this line it was necessary to install a wireless Point-to-Point link to our roof and the roof of the hospital and to build two routers, one at the Faculty of Medicine and the other at the UVT UPJŠ.
In December 2002 we were able to run a 100 Mbps fiber optic link to the school and in October 2004 we upgraded the link to 1 Gbit/s. The number of connected computers exceeded 1000. At the end of 2004, there were already 4 active connections in each room of the Jedlíková 9 dormitory.
At the beginning of 2005, the dormitories of Boženy Němcova and Ferko Urbánek were connected. In April, all the connections in Jedlíkova 9 were tested and new sockets in the club and server room were connected. A new film and statistics server was also purchased. In May, multicast was started thanks to the purchase of a Cisco Catalyst 3750 Switch-Router. At the end of the year, help was given to expand the network in B block of Jedlik’s dormitory 5.
In the summer of 2006 the terminal room was remodeled, later in November the server room with AP’s was added. The servers were also upgraded with the purchase of two 1U IBM racks. In total, almost 1800 computers have been connected to the network.
In January 2007, the dormitories of the Faculty of Aviation (Rampova 7) were connected. Two 1U IBM servers were deployed into live operation. The centralized data storage system (MySQL database) was switched over. A new information system for network login was launched. All connections in the Jedlíkova 9 dormitory were retested. In March, the wifi was put into operation in Blocks A and B. The mail server was also upgraded from a Compaq Proliant to a 1U IBM. In April, fibre optics was brought to block C of dormitory J9