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The Internet At 35
Anonymous writes "CNN has a story on the 35th anniversary of the Internet, overviewing its past and the future. According to the article the history began on 'September 2, 1969, as bits of meaningless test data flowed silently between the two computers.' So, happy birthday, the Internet!"
the delay in final submission for articles should be moved from 10 minutes to 20 minutes. I submit the mistakes to the editor on duty, but unfortunately, I was too late. :(
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
The focus of the article seems to be security issues of the Internet. Talk of virusses, spam and whatnot. They even qute a guy saying he wishes security had been a priority when it was first invented. Shouldn't it be noted these issues are in software, not the hardware infastructure or protocal of the Internet?
that in the summer of 1969 the just completed moon landing would have almost no impact to our lives 35 years later, but these bits between two computers would change the face of the world. Weird...
Yeah, that brings back memories. For us, the hard part was getting fake accounts on the local adult BBSes, when they all required validation calls. I figured out a social engineering solution to that problem - just put down a totally unpronounceable foreign name, and the sysops would never call to validate for fear of mispronouncing the user's name.
Then it was just a matter of dialing up at 2400 baud and batch downloading everything we could find. Of course, this was using Telix in DOS, so to actually see anything in real-time we'd use a TSR program (ShowGIF?) that'd decode the image as it was written to disk. We'd stare at the image as it came across line by line, and try to figure out what body parts we were looking at.
"Is that an elbow?" "No, I think it's a knee." "No, no, it's the back of someone's neck..." "No it's not, it's a... oh, God! Cancel!! Hit cancel!! My eyes!"
Great fun, and really challenging when you've got four or more people in an unusual configuration in the picture.
Of course, the 40 meg hard drive didn't leave much room for pr0n archives. We had to start offloading it to 200 meg QIC tapes at some point. Ah, the good old days.
this type of thing always makes me wonder about all the other firsts out there.
like the first word. What was the first word? it had to have happened somewhere at sometime, right?
We are fortunate enough to actually know when the first bits flowed accross this leap in human communication we call the Internet (or internet for those that like to mux with things).
But that first being on some ancient plain understanding the concept that she can convey an idea; that she has ideas, that she is something.
Someone, at sometime, somewhere expressed to another entity a concept - and it was the first time.
Mind blowing.
on that day 35 years ago this same type of event was repeated in a new iteration.
In 1986 I was stationed at McClellan AFB, and got to watch some contractors install about 4 racks of beige equipment called an "Interface Message Processor" from a company called BBN. I had no clue at the time it was part of the internet. About ten years later I realized what it was, and thought "Wow, I got to see an IMP in person!"
Sorry, I don't have a photo (and couldn't find one via Google) -- cameras weren't allowed in the area. The very first IMPs looked like this, though.
Chip H.
I know I cant be the only one that misses dialing into a local BBS to check FidoNET, play some door games, chat with locals in the message boards. And whenever I had a problem I could actually ring the SysOp and actually break into chat with a real human. Those were the days. I used to pick up the local BBS newsletter for free at the supermarket. The coolest BBSs were multi node and you could "chat" with other users. It was like TTY on unix but with beautiful ANSI art. Some of the ASCII and ANSI art the came out of the BBS scene was truly beautiful. Its amazing what one can do with 255 characters and 16 colors.
Then one day one of the bigger BBSs in town, a 10 node WildCat board got Lynx and things started to change.
I remember getting "online" in '94, hitting lycos to see what the fuss was about and feeling totally alone, like a little kid in a huge subway terminal full of hundreds of people, yet no one talking. And by then USENET was already just a place to get binaries.
Well, at least theres a community on slashdot, where else am I going to get my 1. Nat Portman 2. Hot Gritz 3. in Soviet Russia 4. BSD Dieing 5. Profit fix?
My how its changed, I miss 120 pixel wide, 16 color animated gif DMCAless banners.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Here's a nice collection of Internet maps from September 1969 onwards, showing the network build out from UCLA to include Stanford, UCSB, Utah and so on.
If you define "Internet" as two or more computers communicating with each other, then it's been around for longer. Hackers at MIT way back when hooked together 2 computers (PDP-11 and PDP-7 I think) and told some professors they had created a chess program. They had one professor sit in one room at the terminal for one of the computers, and the other professor in the other room with the terminal for the other computer. The professors played each other for a while until one of them realized the responses were a bit slow, then saw/followed the wire into the next room where the other professor was sitting!
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
But nobody really cared at Case, because the emphasis there was on "high-capacity, fast-turnaround batch computing". They got really good at batch job processing. It was so cost-effective that Case stayed with it years after other schools went interactive.