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• FTP
• Telnet
• FTP mail (which predated SMTP)
• UUCP
• Kermit
• IBM IMS
• INGRES
• the original MUD
• MRDS

• Maybe you should just read A Brief History of the Internet which lists FTP, email, telnet, NCP, TCP, UUCP, and BITNET gateways as being developed and in production before MS-DOS was released in 1982.

  CBBS was a dial-in BBS (think web forum without the WWW, HTTP, browser, or pretense) in 1978 on CP/M.

  IBM had terminals connecting to remote servers -- a serious precursor to proper client/server -- in 1964. The first ATM -- clearly a client-server technology -- was installed in 1970. Usenet was invented in 1979. Essex MUD was in 1979. Ask the Computer History Museum about networking.

  Creeper traversed networks in 1971. Wikipedia calls it a virus, but the description they give is more of a worm. It ran on TENEX and infected systems over ARPANET.

  In 1971, RFC 189 described a method and system for submitting jobs to a mainframe from remote systems over ARAPANET and to receive the results. It includes the connections, protocols, the mapping of ASCII to EBCDIC for systems that used ASCII to not need to translate on their end, a name for the whole thing (NETRJS), and several details of implementation.

  Need any more examples?

  Why yes, yes, computer history is a hobby of mine.

is Randy Suess

I'm not sure what happened to the *original* CBBS hardware, but several years ago, Randy Suess sold me one of the old hard drives, a 10-meg one, that had been used in *a* CBBS. He also sold off a bunch of S-100 boards, and an old chassis, so I suspect the original CBBS hgardware was sold off, over the years, as parts no longer needed.

Randy's running Chinet nowadays, and last I heard, Ward had CBBS. You could always ask Randy, if you're curious.

He worked as a consultant for IBM. Whenever you bought IBM mainframes and or mini's a consultant usually came with the purchase. My father purchased 1 mainframe and several mini's back in 79 and happened to recieve Christensen as a consultant.

Anyway the link is here written by Christensen back in 88. Amazingly his old cbbs program for cp/m ran for 15 years before being retired!

He tried to get my father to join his bbs but my old man didn't have a pc or I should say Micro-computer back in those days and did not see the fun in it or understand why anyone would need a computer at home. Back in 78 the pc's did not have any off the shelve software like development tools( besides Microsoft Basic), spreadsheets, or games. Christensen's z-80 computer for example only had 16k of ram, an editor and assembler compiler. Thats it. My father only knew cobal and IBM 360 assembler so he couldn't really program it.

Anyway how it got started was that he loved to share diskettes and tapes with his buddy in Michican. The blizard of 78 was real bad. My parents could not leave the house for close to a week and snow drifts almost reached the roof. It took 2 days for my father to clear out a path to his car. We had close to 5 feet of snow. Anyway as the story goes he couldn't share the diskettes with his buddy so he decided to develop a way to use a phone line and a cbbs was born.

He also came up with the idea of using phone lines before modems were around. Back in the early or mid 70's he was playing with a spectograph and was analzying analog data over an ethernet line. Out of curiousity he examined a phone line and saw striking similarities when examing the wave forms. He wondered if it were possible to use phone lines as a poor mans wan. He began working on a modem and hayes beat him to it before he was done.

There is still an annual CBBS get together in Chicago every year. A number of the folks from those days still drop in on newsgroups like chi.general and chi.internet.

Randy is still around. He runs a CBBS successor called Chinet www.chinet.com.

BTW: Ward is also the fellow who invented XMODEM

Of more interest are the early BBS systems. Wonder when the first menus came along to make things easier. Another poster also mentioned something called NOTES that would be nice to take a look at.

When I first got on the Net, it was via an Amiga 1000, dialing from Kansas City to Boston to call The World, the first dial-in ISP at 1200 baud. I then moved to Chicago, where I looked around for an ISP, and joined Chinet. This was run by Randy Suess who, with his friend Ward Christensen (who wrote Xmodem) and they created CBBS which launched in 1978, considered to be the first BBS.

Yawn. Slashdotters get bug up ass, waste precious bandwidth. Story at 10. Let me see if I can clarify what just happened here with a synopsis of events:

• ~01/1994 Project Gutenberg volunteer types in the text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in ASCII.
• ~06/1998 I snarf the text and use it over the next several weeks to recreate a precise replica of the original 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as a VolumeOne print-on-demand classic. Of course, I had a long chat with Mike Hart at PG about how to deal with the rights. Mike is very laid back about it, and so am I. (Q1: Of what musical genre is Mike a connoisseur?)
• ~07/2000 Several companies, including Glassbook, BookVirtual, and Adobe, ask to use my typeset version of the book. See my eBookNet column which started it. (Q2: What major technology-related accomplishments distinguish the founders of Glassbook and BookVirtual from the rest of us weenies?)
• ~10/2000 Glassbook chooses to flip some weird PDF bit which describes reading aloud, probably a meaningless, never-to-be-used flag which can be ignored by most and hacked around by those of us who care. (Q3: What was Adobe Acrobat's original name, circa 1991?)
• ~12/2000 Now that the election business is laid to rest, wAr3Z punks and EFF-style maniacs focus on the next thing. They assume the free world is ending because they see a single bit flipped in an obscure Internet file. Sane but technologically unsophisticated human beings read this as Constitutional armageddon. Peter Zelchenko's e-mail spool fills up. (Q4: What two typographical errors did Peter leave in the typeset work, and why?)

My take: The VolumeOne edition of Alice, the first true typographically accurate replica, may be freely read, printed on your laser printer, pumped through a synthesizer, or whatever, as long as you're not making a profit doing it. The creative effort that went into my edition was major; it is the first of its kind in 135 years. Any derivatives of the work, including the ones at the Glassbook, BookVirtual, and eBookNet sites, should also be open for free access.

Don't like the Glassbook edition? My computer can't even read it. Try my original PDF at eBookNet.com.

A1: Mike Hart is an old-time folk music aficionado of the Chicago School (think Old Town School of Folk Music, Earl of Old Town, Gate of Horn, Bonnie Koloc, etc.).

A2: Len Kawell of Glassbook was one of the three original authors of Lotus Notes, which itself is based on the venerable PLATO mainframe product, vintage about 1973. Patrick Ames of BookVirtual was Adobe's first evangelist for PDF. He wrote and designed the classic Beyond Paper manifesto for Acrobat.

A3: Acrobat was originally called Carousel.

A4: I won't tell you. But my original offer remains: the first person to find and report these errors will receive a free print-on-demand edition of this classic and my deep respect for life.

I must say that I am sick of hearing about the WELL and how long it has been around and how influential it is. The very first BBS in the world was CBBS (now chinet) in Chicago. Ward Christiansen of CBBS wrote XMODEM. Almost everybody who's been on the Internet more than 4 years in Chicago is a former chinet user. (Rumor has it Randy Suess ran the thing out of his studio apartment with racks of modems everywhere). Very few people seem to know about CBBS though. I guess it is because the magazines that write about this stuff are concentrated in the Bay Area and thus focus on it.