pitch & velvet

pitch

A thick, black, lustrous, and sticky substance obtained by boiling down tar. It is used in calking the seams of ships; also in coating rope, canvas, wood, ironwork, etc., to preserve them. Websters 1913
velvet

A silk fabric, having a short, close nap of erect threads. Inferior qualities are made with a silk pile on a cotton or linen back, or with other soft fibers such as nylon, acetate, or rayon. Websters 1913

The UCC wanted some fast workstations but didn't want to fork out for expensive machines that would just end up running Windows the entire time. It was decided that we would build cheap machines that booted off a network NFS server, thus preventing them from being able to run Windows.
They have nVidia nForce ethernet cards in them, which for a while did not have native Linux kernel drivers. [DAG] developed a patch that allowed us to compile the nVidia binary driver into the monolithical kernel image, allowing them to boot
When meito was retired, their shared disk image was copied onto manbo, where it now runs
At some point it was decided that their onboard nVidia GeForce2 GPUs were not fast enough for Enemy Territory, so half height GeForce4s were purchased and installed.

[PXY] (Davyd Madeley) got the bits, helped build them, helped get them booting, and heaps of other stuff
[TRS] (James Andrewartha) helped build them, helped make them run, keeps them running
[DAG] (Bernard Blackham) did arcane things with kernels