In the beginning, the lab was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the VAX. And Bart spoke, Let there be lab, And so there was lab, and Bart looked down upon it from on high and saw that it was good. And Bart created the DEC and the 3b1, the Be and the PDP-8. And Bart saw that they were without justice and master, thus Bart created the 12 coords. And so it came to pass that in the 10th year, the Year of our Lab, Bart looked upon the lab and saw that all was in harmony, he rested at Berekely.

Back in the day, when the web was still the hottest thing since high speed punch cards, Netscape created a thing called "The Amazing Fish-Cam". Everyone thought web cams were cool, so the UPL created the UPL-cam. In an only hollistically related incident, the UPL, by some incident of good fortune, came across a VAX. A VAX 11/785 to be exact. A big VAX. Kind of like a refrigerator, but more so, and with better fans. After realizing that the lab had nowhere near enough power to even turn it on, people decided to take the VAX apart for parts. One of these parts was a rather large 3-phase power supply.

At about the same time, a fairly new person in the lab, (me), was working on learning cgi. He looked over at the UPL-cam, and the VAX power supply, and then up at the Fishcam, and an idea was born, involving all of the above and a nifty cgi interface. He was near-instantly banned from ever owning a goldfish or bringing any volume of fluid larger than a can of Dew into the lab. And the rest, as they say, is history.