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If I were to check a random sampling of this material - which I can't, because the news article doesn't link to the $!%* leak

Oh ffs. Take your pick of references:
https://www.google.co.uk/?gfe_...

Could I also suggest http://www.livinginternet.com/...

Fine, 30 years. The ARPANET, and so the Internet, was born on August 30, 1969, when BBN delivered the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) to Leonard Kleinrock's Network Measurements Center at UCLA. I built an intent connected device (coffee pot) ca 1995 using a pc/104 board and linux running SLIP. See also Trojan Room coffee pot (1991).

"The Coca-Cola company got a range of MAC addresses allocated .. What are they planning to use them for?" ..

To use in their Internet Coke Machine ..

...so I found an article on the history of Electronic Mail that names all of the relevant RFCs and their date of publication, beginning in 1972, with links:

http://www.livinginternet.com/e/ei.htm

Chomsky sucks at websearch... altho the crux of his argument is linguistic, where "email" was not in use before '81, and therefore Ayyadurai's innovation was a new contraction. I can see how that would be a big deal to a linguist - using "email" instead of "electronic mail" or "mail." It's an innovation of the profound nature of McDonald's coining the phrase "chicken nugget!" Before, we were adrift in a benighted age of the chicken crouquette.

Sixty seven years ago, Vannevar Bush envisioned the "memex", and as people became technically capable of doing so, they created it. http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_bush.htm. He was extremely influential in creating what eventually became DARPA and the ARPANET. To suggest that his "prediction was missed" is not correct. It was a less of a prediction and more of a vision that he and many other brilliant people worked hard to realize.

The Space Elevator may have been Clarke's idea, but he didn't create a Space Elevator Coalition to build one.

Let's see, should we take the word of Ken Thompson (yes that one), who according to the fine article seems to have been on the investigative panel, or the word of a random slashdot troll? Duhhh...

Actually neither. We should Read The Fine Reports.

Beyond the plain expression of the program, there are lots if artifacts which come through from source to binary. Even if two progammers start in the same language to develop the same algorithm to solve the same problem they will normally end up with great differences. The exceptions are the stuff of legends, and we are talking about 20 line long assembly programs. One programmer will choose an integer because it's big enough, another a long because the variable will mostly be used with other longs. This choice will not be optimised out of existence.

Looking at the report, it seems they used various different artifacts and clearly showed similarity between the programs.

How about the Internet Coke Machine?

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_myths_coke.htm

It's an issue as we (the entire Internet, not Slashdot readers) slowly crawl towards IPv6 adoption over the next century.

Or did you think there was going to be another big switch?

If you don't know what you're doing, you can cause a lot of harm. If you send out a message to a ton of clients and use CC instead of BCC.... you are in deep trouble.

You know the BCC list can still be intercepted at the recipient's server, right? The only secure way to email a group of people is to send individual emails (using an app that automates it of course).

http://www.livinginternet.com/e/ea_bcc.htm

Interop in 1990: a TCP/IP controlled toaster was demonstrated:

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_myths_toast.htm

And in 1991, a robotic arm was built to insert the toast, again using TCP/IP commands.

Filing Date:
11/19/1998

Yeah.

And when was the "Internet Coke Machine" at CMU?

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_myths_coke.htm

--
BMO

I thought the US military still had the largest block op IP addresses though. Who exactly contributed on TCP/IP outside the us? I'll grant you, that the WWW and a whole host of other things were developed outside the US but TCP/IP? I believe that goes back to 1957.

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_darpa.htm

What we did or did not do, is not the issue, but were sharing, so be happy.

"And today, we can send and receive blocks of styled text, with images, buffered locally -- to say nothing of audio and video. I think I can say with confidence that all terminals were dumber than a web browser."

Styled text was standard on a number of terminals, as was the ability to only update those portions of the screen that had changed (something that's a fairly recent development with web browsers). Graphics terminals have existed for a long time, starting with vector graphics (where text was also drawn with vectors, so it could be displayed in any combination of font, size, and orientation), and later, raster graphics, which reached its zenith with X Terminals, many of which had sound hardware. And all terminals that could send and receive blocks buffered locally, because they wouldn't have been able to send and receive blocks otherwise.

The following link contains some info about the late and much lamented Doug Engelbart's NLS, which had a GUI, hypertext, video conferencing, and various other "modern" features in 1968. It includes a picture of the terminal the system used, complete with mouse (note the round display, which was typical of vector graphics terminals).

http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_engelbart.htm

"Of course, with a proper netbook, you would streamline the operating system and the applications."

Then please cite some examples of "proper" netbooks that ship with streamlined operating systems and applications.

"However, being able to run more users does not imply that they were doing more useful work, either."

It does when all of those users are actually working, which was pretty much always the case with mainframes, because people whose jobs didn't require access to a terminal weren't granted access to a terminal. I think you would have a very difficult job demonstrating that one person can do more _useful_ work on a netbook (or for that matter, any PC) than 17,000 people doing similar jobs on a mainframe equipped with block-transfer terminals.

"16 megabytes of RAM will support a lot of text, but not a lot of images before you start thrashing"

How many of the jobs that people do in the sorts of companies who used (and in some cases still use) big mainframes actually require images for anything? And for that matter, how many of the web-sites that people might want to use for such work-related tasks use images to convey information that's (a) actually useful to the person who is seeking information, and (b) couldn't have been equally well expressed (and in some cases been better expressed) by some text that would have significantly less Internet bandwidth and machine resources to store, serve, decode, and display?

"Some other things I doubt you would have seen: Find-as-you-type autocomplete"

Auto form completion was a common feature of mainframe applications.

"underline-as-you-type spellchecker"

That's something they didn't have. Score 1 for the web browser.

"a GUI at all (let alone a rich one)"

NLS had a GUI running on terminals; much of the original work on GUIs at Xerox was done on graphics terminals; and X Terminals also frequently ran GUIs. Note also that, as the Xerox Star, the original Mac, the Amiga, and in the modern world, various mobile phones have demonstrated, it doesn't require a gigabyte of RAM, a 1.6 GHz CPU, and several gigabytes of hard disk space to run a GUI for one user.

"audio and video chat in realtime"

Check out the link to NLS. The capabilities of mainframe operating systems and peripherals reflected the requirements of the corporations who were the manufacturers' customers, not the capabilities of the technology. As Englebart so aptly demonstrated in 1968, if those customers had wanted (and been willing to pay for) that sort of stuff, they could have had it.

"multiple simultaneous text conversations"

The PLATO system developed by CDC and the University of Illinois in the 1970s had both real-time c

Check out how to Post to your wordpress blog using email. or possibly Internet Access Via Email, Get Web Pages to deliver web pages via html formatted email.

That is all.

OTOH, we (or rather DARPA) built the Internet because there was at the begining a a demand for the internet. Namely a test stand for protocols and equipment that would maintain communications in time of nuclear war. Shortly thereafter, one of the most important applications to ever grace the internet was introduced, email. If we threw up a space elevator today, what would we use it for? How would we pay the upkeep and operations for the elevator? What is the equivalent of "email", of the "web", etc and how long would it be before they manifest?

My take is that it'd be a long time. We don't have much in space that requires products from Earth. Even though a space elevator has good economies of scale, there's no scale to exploit.

And the first text-based multiplayer virtual world was created in 1978/1979 by Messrs Bartle and Trubshaw. I thought everyone knew that bit of lore by now.

I hate to burst you bubble, but it does not mean I'm 12. It means that I'm older than sin.

You young'uns these days just don't understand anything that has a black rope coming out the back. It's got to be all "txtm3 or gtfo". 4COL. Well, @TEOTD I have a message for you, young man! GOML* and GAL! --AKAIB

* Get Off My Lawn

Free public news groups:

http://www.disenter.com/
http://www.livinginternet.com/u/ua_pub.htm

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_dns_history.htm

Anyway - the era of Netscape is over.

Conveniently killed by Microsoft and reborn into Mozilla/Firefox.

Today the alternatives to IE; Firefox, Opera and Safari are the most well-known and supported by web developers. Yet another alternative is the Lynx browser for those with pure text terminals. (you may think it's masochistic trying to use a text-only browser in today's web but sometimes it's helpful or the only resort left.)

Safari for Windows is still beta (and has had some bugs, I haven't checked the latest yet but 3.0.3 did crash on me). However it is still useful to verify your web page with and compared to the crashes we had with older browsers it's actually OK.

And still - there have been an era where Mosaic was a revolutionary new interface, but even that wasn't the first as you can see at Web Browser History.

A relatively up to date graph can be seen at Wikipedia, but your browser should support SVG to make the most of the graph. Unfortunately it only shows the most common browsers and oddballs like tkWWW are left out.

Computers could send signals from one another at many places and countries still in 50s and 60s.

A telegraph could send signals.

It is not your Internet. It is because people of the World temporarily gave one of yours NGOs the task to look after the DNS system. Since this NGO was eager to do this job add seemed to be qualified.

...you too are talking out of your ass, while insisting others have their head shoved up their own. IRC, Skype and AIM are *all* capable of direct connections between users (and indeed at least in Skype, this is the default), with connection and routing through the central server only during the setup of the call. AIM: http://reaim.sourceforge.net/dcc.html Skype: http://saikat.guha.cc/pub/iptps06-skype/ IRC: http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ra_dcc.htm

how many did it take to copy Mozilla's tabs for IE7? Better a couple of years late than never, eh

Probably about the same number that "stole" it for NetCaptor, Opera, and eventually Mozilla (better a couple of years late than never, eh?).

Like this:

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_myths_toast.htm

Ok, so they didn't use SSH... small nit to pick.

This even says so.

Maybe you should read it.

look it up if you don't believe me.

You insinuate that hardly any work at all went into the creation of email. This says otherwise.

"Thirdly, noone is going to upgrade their OS just to buy a praticular game."

No no no...you have it backwards: All OS upgrades are for particular games.

A particular game (Space Travel) was even the reason UNIX was invented.

Oh the whit, how I envy you. Tabbed browsing was actually added to Mozilla in 2003, a full 3 years after it was added to Opera and a full 9 years after it's original debut in 1994 by Brooklink, Inc. (http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wa_browser_mult.h tm).

:-)
Actually, I wouldnt call Netscape as the "fist prophet"
I'd say Mosaic was it.

(though technically there were some even before that, but at least if I recall correctly, it was the first to introduce images in the pages)

History of browsers:
http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/browsers .htm
http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_browse.htm

On an only-slightly-less-serious note, I would love to have something that plugs into a USB port (or something) and that has lots of nice blinkenlights that are somehow related to what the system is doing.

Christ, now I was misled by this article's link to the March article.

I'm giving up on pretending I can give a definitive answer, but this looks like the original announcement of Mosaic, in February, 1993.

NASA was (basically) military research. We went into space because the USSR was. It's not an accident that most of our astronauts were (and still are) Navy or Air Force aviators. It was not in the name of "Basic Science," that we went into space, but in the name of national defense.

Without basic science research, we would not have the Internet

Or, put correctly: Without military research we would not have the Internet.

To meet this need, ARPA established the IPTO in 1962 with a mandate to build a survivable computer network to interconnect the DoD's main computers at the Pentagon, Cheyenne Mountain, and SAC HQ. As described in the following pages, this initiative led to the development of the ARPANET seven years later, and then to the NSFNET and the Internet we know today. http://livinginternet.com/i/ii_darpa.htm

Cutting NASAs budget makes me angry too, but military spending does not kill intellectual growth. Don't kid yourself, military research = science research.

... is it SNMP manageable?

Because I need something to go with my coffee maker.

NCSA Mosaic was programmed by Marc Andreessen

What if Marc didn't actually program Mosaic but instead took the project along with some developers to form Mosaic/Netscape? I'm not knocking Marc's vision but to say Mosaic was created by him is a bit of a misnomer. Poor Eric Bina.

This is pretty far offtopic, but this calls for a response:

the Commercial Internet Exchange, who fought against the NSFNET's plans for an Internet monopoly grant to the regional Bell operating companies and ANS, an IBM and MCI venture

The part of my brain this history is stored in hasn't been accessed for a while, but suffice it to say that the above is only one, fairly debatable, perspective on Internet history.

Here's a half-decent capsule history of the NSFNET which provides a different (more accurate, from my keyhole) spin. The tag line of the article is "The National Science Foundation's enlightened management of the NSFNET facilitated the Internet's first period of explosive public growth." Which is pretty accurate as happy-talk goes.

The NSFNET was a good thing. The CIX was (in retrospect) a good thing. Figuring out how to move the Internet from being largely taxpayer-funded to being primarily commercial was a good thing. It certainly wasn't painless or without friction, but it was driven mostly by people of good will, not smoke-filled rooms where evil government bureaucrats were plotting to grant monopolies to their bell-head cronies.

The CIX, at the outset, wasn't a "fight against a monopoly". It was a way for folks to move commercial traffic between their networks without making inappropriate use of the taxpayer-funded NSFNET.

The [Open Hyperdocument System]'s initial design specifications are a result of 50 years of innovation and experimentation by Doug Engelbart and his team of researchers among a variety of user communities, including aerospace and software development. These requirements include fine-grained addressability of all types of documents and support for multiple ways of viewing and manipulating them. Some of these features have found their way into existing tools, such as the World Wide Web, while others are currently being explored. The purpose of the OHS is to serve as a standard framework for these features, so that different applications may interoperate with the DKR and with each other.

The point is that we can use the coming ubiquity of WiFi connectivity in new and interesting ways. The fact that you can't see past WiFi as utility is part of the mindset bubble he hopes to break.

The TCP/IP protocol set was created in 1974 do deal with the fact that NCP couldn't handle wireless (and adopted in 1983)... so this whole wireless thing is very old news. The use of notebooks to interact with others in an anonymous, but local area, is new.

I think there are lots of cool directions to take this, but serving as yet another bit of the Internet Collective isn't one of them. Maybe they should put that on the front page of the web site you get on the captive portal, to decrease social friction.

It's a cool project, makes me want to do my own.

--Mike--

IPX/SPX is better than TCP/IP in mnay respects, but the Unix community was committed to a non-proprietory protocol.

Some very nice recipies there, and a number of versions of some of the more popular ones.

The archive at http://www.funet.fi/pub/culture/recipes/ has about 700 recipes others may have more.
Each recipe has a rating for difficulty, time and precision needed.

The network started to become a reality on August 30, 1969, when BBN delivered the first Interface Message Processor to Leonard Kleinrock's Network Measurements Center at UCLA. The IMP was built from a Honeywell DDP 516 computer with 12K of memory.

Makes 32k sound postively roomy!

Try here: history of chat.

Email me and I'll tell you where to send the cheque.

Linux: A clone of Minix, itself a clone of UNIX.

UNIX: A rough implementation of Multics, written expressly so that Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie could port a game called Space Travel to old, cheap hardware.

Who's got new ideas now?

True. Exclusive image of the guy. He could only be identified by a three letter recursive acronym written to the walls of all houses he has lived.

Spam blocking makes email unreliable.

The goal of most spam blockers is to eliminate commercial use of the Internet.

We got unblocked yesterday.

not only is Hans-Werner Braun a network engineer, he is one of the most fucking impressive network engineers around. he's probably been building networks longer than you've been alive. not only did he spend some time as the network architect for Teledesic, Hans-Werner was a principal investigator at Merit on the NSFNET project. (in other words, he was in charge of the Merit portion of the project.) that's right: he's one of the people that started the fucking internet you enjoy today, period! (see the Living Internet page on the NSFNET for a little context.)

So maybe we want him to be the expert here :-).

3. Use your favourite partintioning software to delete all partitions and replace it with one large FAT32 "C" drive.

When one large partition has an operating system that fails, it can be irritating to save files stored on it.

4. Get a copy of windows XP $179, which is cheaper than the phone bills for "FREE" software.

You can order a CD of whatever "FREE" operating system you want to be sent to you for under $10 if you don't have a fast internet connection. Besides, would you want an operating system that has a huge market share and no reason to compete, or one made by people with making something better as their main motivation. This is a tough on to think about....

7. USE YOUR COMPUTER WITH EASE

This really depends on your definition of what "EASE" really is. If you want to watch everything using Windows Mediaplayer then things are easy. If you want to chose other software that impoves itself over releases instead of just adding backwards incompatable technology to squeeze a couple more bucks out of my poor bank account, then you may want to stay with the "FREE" OS.

8. If you really want the command line, install DOS, the original and best!

If DOS was the original, then who originally wrote it? A quick look at the history shows that unlike what is popularly believed, Bill Gates didn't author DOS himself. Another thought, DOS may be a command line, but it doesn't have that much power. If someone wants to write a script, they use VB. And VB isn't much of an improvement on anything, except that its the chosen virus writing language because of its ease of allowing stupid people to do stupid things.
Oh yeah, and being the first doesn't really mean being the best anyways.

...Diffie-Hellman (sp?) algorithm, which is incidentally also the first public-key alg ever invented...

*cough*GCHQ*cough*

Correct, it was invented in 1973 by Ellis, Cocks and Williamson at GCHQ.

There is an article at Living Internet about the history of email. An interesting quote:

Commercial Email. In 1989, MCI Mail and Compuserve provided the first commercial electronic mail connection to the Internet through the Corporation for the National Research Initiative (CNRI) and Ohio State University respectively.
Does anyone else know of other early comercial implementations of email?