Perhaps I'm wrong but the opening sentence - "At the stroke of midnight on December 10, 1993, an executive at id Software uploaded a file to an FTP site on the University of Washington’s network" - seems inaccurate - the big ftp site back then was actually Washington University St. Louis - a different entity than U of W.
"A sympathetic computer administrator at the University at Wisconsin, Parkside, named David Datta volunteered to let id upload the Doom shareware to a file transfer site he maintained on the school’s network." (page 123)
Yes-- wuarchive.wustl.edu and ftp.wustl.edu are what I was thinking of, too. I fondly remember pulling Aminet and Linux-related files off those servers back in the early-to-mid 90s.
