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30th Birthday of the Internet
Dymaxion writes "September 2nd is officially the 30th birthday of the Internet, being the day that the first packets were sent between the Sigma 7 mainframe that was the first internet node and its Honeywell based IMP (Internet Message Processor) at UCLA. There is a party at UCLA to celebrate the event, and although the deadline for RSVP's is over for that party, go ahead and throw your own. "
Happy Birthday Internet. Did ya every think
you would become this huge? Heh! Any really
OLD timers using slashdot? I've been on since
1990, anyone want beat that and chat about the
good old days? No graphical browsers, just lynx
gopher, telnet, usenet, and irc back then. Never
crowded, netcitizens were generally nice. Ahh
the good old days. Lets hear how it was in the
old days to give these kids some perspective.
Brothers and Sisters of the Information Age, hear me!!
:)
We must go forth to our various places of activity on the Internet, and spread this Joyous news for all to share! Sadly, many of our brothers and sisters live in the dark, and do not know about the Internet's Birthday. So be a light in the darkness, and at some point in your Internet activities make the Good News known to those around you.
Aside: Please don't spam people doing so either as I'd hate to be responsible for something as idiotic as that. Thank you.
Happy birthday to you, me and the internet.
I wouldn't exactly call myself an oldtimer, as I only beat you to the Net by about four years, but I do clearly recall those days. The best part -- not one bit of SPAM ever poured into my VAX mailbox!
Glen,
who is still working as an OpenVMS Systems Analyst and loving it...
Which is your opinion, to which you're entitled. It's also wrong, of course.
/. and all) could be dated back to 1982-1983 (TCP/IP adopted in preference to NCP/IP and DNS put in place), which is about the first time the whole shooting match got called 'the Internet'.
Look at the name: internet. Interconnected networks. The first time someone glued networks from two sites together via the magic of packet switching and nicotine they created an internet.
The one we've got nowadays (B1FFs, pr0n,
Hell, the Great Renaming was in '85...
--
Cheers
Jon
Cheers
Jon
(looking around) shub-internet.
(nervously) Shub-Internet.
(trembling) O GREAT SHUB-INTERNET COME HITHER I SUMMON THEE! (dang ASCII, no thorn characters)
My girlfriend and I had to fight over my computer for surf time, when she moved in I set up her computer on my network so now we can both surf at the same time. We even "talk" from one room to the other on her telnet and my Linux box.
We are much happier now.
-vert-
love the penguin
How ironic. I guess he was quite a prodigy...to invent something like this at the age of 21.
Kind of weird to think back to my own 10 years
of Internet travelling. There was no WWW, no
Altavista and no MP3. There weren't a zillion
Usenet groups (500 groups was considered ALOT
back then), IRC was a nice place, and there was
a cute little rodent called Gopher.
When I think back to those days, there's a very
strong picture about the meaning of exponential
growth in my mind. I wonder if anyone else feels
that sentimental? Anybody else here snuck into
the local university's computer pool to hang out
on the net 1989 or 1990?
Steve
I remember when USENET only had one newsgroup. It was a shared bulletin board among 30 universities at the time. When the traffic got too large, it was split into six subject newsgroups (sci, talk, comp, news, ...). The fragmentation has continued to get to the zillions of newsgroups we have today, but it all started with one, and at one time I read it all on a 110 bps teletype machine. Prior to getting on the net in 1978 or so, I had worked on an old IBM 1620 computer that had been donated to my high school (how many high schools had a computer room in 1974?). It had 20K of 6 bit memory, and was the size of a large rolltop desk. The 10 meg hard disk drive was the size of a washing machine, with a 14 inch, 6 platter, removable storage (it looked like a large cake platter when you screwed on the plastic cover to extract the disks. We used to prop a transistor radio on the CPU console and listen to what the computer was doing via radio noise. Compiles could take a long time, so you would go off and do other things and listen for when the computer got quiet. Somebody at another location devised a music program that played with the radio noise to get actual tones. Writing music was one note per IBM punch card, so a song was a stack of punch cards. But this was not the ultimate. I helped wire the worlds slowest computer, which was being built as a teaching aid. It used electromechanical relays, and had a top speed of 2 Hz, and a bottom speed of 0.1 Hz (with a speed control knob). The relays were mounted to a sheet of plywood, and had lights attached, so you could actually watch data being moved from memory to a register. Had 32 words of 6 bit memory, 3 registers, and you could actually write simple programs into it via manual toggle switches.
We couldn't possibly celebrate the Internet's 30th birthday without a link to some Internet history stuff now could we... (it's the ISOC's).
Here's a little culture for Internet Birthday Day. This is a famous poem about ArpaNET being switched on for the first time, which can be found in RFC1121, along with many other gems like "Ode to a Queue."
THE BIG BANG!
(or the birth of the ARPANET)
by
Leonard Kleinrock
It was back in '67 that the clan agreed to meet.
The gangsters and the planners were a breed damned hard to beat.
The goal we set was honest and the need was clear to all:
Connect those big old mainframes and the minis, lest they fall.
The spec was set quite rigid: it must work without a hitch.
It should stand a single failure with an unattended switch.
Files at hefty throughput 'cross the ARPANET must zip.
Send the interactive traffic on a quarter second trip.
The spec went out to bidders and t'was BBN that won.
They worked on soft and hardware and they all got paid for fun.
We decided that the first node would be we who are your hosts
And so today you're gathered here while UCLA boasts.
I suspect you might be asking "What means FIRST node on the net?"
Well frankly, it meant trouble, 'specially since no specs were set.
For you see the interface between the nascent IMP and HOST
Was a confidential secret from us folks on the West coast.
BBN had promised that the IMP was running late.
We welcomed any slippage in the deadly scheduled date.
But one day after Labor Day, it was plopped down at our gate!
Those dirty rotten scoundrels sent the damned thing out air freight!
As I recall that Tuesday, it makes me want to cry.
Everybody's brother came to blame the other guy!
Folks were there from ARPA, GTE and Honeywell.
UCLA and ATT and all were scared as hell.
We cautiously connected and the bits began to flow.
The pieces really functioned - just why I still don't know.
Messages were moving pretty well by Wednesday morn.
All the rest is history - packet switching had been born!
I followed that link, and hit the "Hobbes' Internet Timeline" link...
It lists the first node at UCLA as being a SDS SIGMA 7.
Running an operating system called "SEX".
Is is possible that they know even back then that the net would be used for downloading porn? The foresight of these people amazes me.
Don't you need more than one network to have an *Inter*-net? Maybe both machines had loopback too.
I can beat that by a year...1989 was the year that the University of Illinois (where I spent my freshman year) started hooking everybody up with free access. They only allowed seven hours a week on the machine (uxa.cso.uiuc.edu) set aside for that purpose, but there were some other machines available for unlimited use...in particular, there was a brand-new '030 NeXTcube that I remember word getting around about for unlimited access.
First modem I had to dial in from the dorm room was an old 300-bps Zoom internal modem that I borrowed from a friend across the street. I managed to snag an Applied Engineering DataLink 2400 that Christmas...said I could use it for classwork (which wasn't a lie, though I suspect I spent too much time on other activities :-) ). Both modems, BTW, were for the Apple IIe I was using at the time. (Still have that computer, though I upgraded it to a IIGS back in '92 or '93.)
No Lynx (no WWW) and no Gopher. Usenet was a much more useful place before the commercial spammers and AOLers arrived, though. I remember when comp.sys.apple (what comp.sys.apple2 used to be called) had useful info every day, techies from Apple getting involved in discussions, etc. Nowadays it's a shadow of its former self. Some of the changes that have happened there have been mirrored in other newsgroups.
The Internet definitely isn't what it used to be. In some ways, it's better (there's more info out there, and it's easier to get at). In others, it's worse (any moron with a few bucks a month can gain access, make an ass of himself, pollute Usenet, etc.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Corporations are artificial creations of the state. They have no natural, inherent rights.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
A bit of irony hearing the free speech of corporations defended with such vigor.
I'm sure there are many worthy corporations, especially among the non-profits. Legally they are persons, so their rights are the same as ours.
I wish I could say I viewed them as allies in the fight for free speech. Unfortunately, too many corporations have workplace environments that lack rather badly in privacy and ability to express opinions without fear of retaliation. I didn't see too many huge corporations funding ads against the CDA, did you? Too many are also very happy to hop on any "self-censorship" bandwagon rather than lobby against the threatened laws. When the insurance industry wants drug testing, they salute and implement -- no discussion by employees required.
I'm not for taking freedom of speech away from anyone or any group, but corporations just aren't at the top of my list either as victims of censorship, or proponents of free speech.
On this thirtieth birthday of the Internet, it might behoove us to think about whether corporations are helping to make the internet what we want it to be or not. Does it even matter what we think anymore?
Jim
really? i finally have money to go to the pub, buy my girlfriend nice things, and enjoy life... perhaps it's all in the perspective. then again i don't really play games. *shrug* -adam, still to lazy to log in at work.
I remember when the first net connection between Alaska and the lower 48. It was a SPAN (DECNet) link to a site in California (I believe is it was Ames). This would have been 1986. There was a huge 4800 baud modem on our end. It was a little smaller than a desktop case. We had connection to SPAN or the rest of the University of Alaska on alternate days for a while until we figured out how to get it all to work at once. In 1990 we were getting satellite schedules from ESA and NASDA over SPAN (we had routers by then). These foreign space agencies weren't on TCP/IP yet but they had VAXes. At about that time EOS was showing off a science visuallization tool. Something they called Mosaic - it was running on PC's and they said there was an X-Windows version and they would work on a Mac version RSN. One of the features of this tool was that you could view images over a network. That was a holy grail that was pushing technology hard right then.
The first IMP went online 2 September
The first packet transfer between hosts was 20 October.
These are both significant. May as well have
two parties.
[I am thilled by the whatever-ucla-says stupidity
of the previous replicant. You have a brain,
son. It's your own. Use it.]
What in the hell does whining about pornography have to with the birthday of the Internet?
Go back to sunday school, little man.
I don't think Rob ever posted an explanation of this. I think I've read the relevant moderation info, although I may have missed it. I also know someone with permanent moderation status. He's not a friend of Rob's or anything. Anyone know how one gets that?
You will then find yourself face-to-face with such apparent Anarchist contradictions as "We believe that (particular groups of people) have no free speech rights."
You leftist chuckleheads have already marginalized and slaughtered 1E+9 mostly-innocent human beings in this century alone. I don't suppose you'd have any interest in quitting while you're ahead?
i haven't been around since the good old days, but i had my first taste of the internet in 1994, when i got my first shell account. i liked usenet and irc, but i never thought the web would amount to anything. it reminded me of random graphitti and had limited appeal. a futurist, i ain't. heretic@nerdcore.org
No, actually he was 21. (Born in 1948)
Amazing here I am learning about internet protocols doing all kinds of math, thinking "wow, some people are geniouses", but it was a poltician the whole time!
Go figure, and for some reason, rob's scripts have given me a default score of 2. Guess I'm just really magical or something.
If you post a number of articles that are moderated up, your default score gets boosted. I have no idea how many it takes, but I too am one of the Chosen...;-)
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Heh here's an idea. stop spending 12 hours a day on the internet.
That just might solve a problem or two.
Don't Blaim the Object of your addiction for your own inability to solve your problems.
And finally. get some help. or you are gonna have more problems in the future. There _ARE_ 12 step programs out there. don't ask me where, search yahoo for "internet addiction 12 step" or something. mabey you'll get laid once in a while, after you get 'cured'
EOF
And to think that without the Internet, I'd probably still be a paramedic/firefighter.
Scary, eh?
-brendan
A story on Wired News claims the first "ping" was sent on October 20, 1969. They cite this website, the International Internet Day site, as a source of information. Would anyone be so kind as to explain the difference of dates? Was the first ping time a month?
i personally know that i owe a good 90% of my life to the internet.
always being the stupid artsy kid in my hometown, job options were pretty bleak.
after first picking up a computer about two years ago this coming november,
my life has exceeded well beyond what i could have possibly hoped for,
had the internet not existed.
everyday i wake up and go to what i can only describe as my dream job, in my favorite
city in the world, in the most gorgeous apartment i'll probablly ever have,
and i have the internet to thank for it. without it, i'd be the usual crackhead
working at mcdonalds at this point
personally, i think it might be a good idea
if we all posted comments or links on how the internet has affected our lives. might
make for interesting copy. *shrug*
-adam
showtell.com
javanet.com/~user
I've been on since 1990, anyone want beat that and chat about the good old days?
I sent my first Internet email in 1981. It was the ARPAnet then. I was dialed into the net at 300 baud.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
See The Story of the PING Program by its programmer. Slashdot covered this topic in Review: The Story About Ping.
Apparently she doesn't suck? Perhaps she didn't leave of her own accord, buit was thrown out. Nex
Agreed, it was an awfully stupid thing to say. But you should be glad someone *did* get the enabling legislation passed, because geeks would have had a rather rough time with that part.
Jim
So when did you sign the NSF agreement cancelling the previous restriction? Are you still restricted? :-)
CNN.COM has graced it's homepage with this news. It has information, and a bit'o'lore.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
*sigh* Anyway, this whole celebration is as stuffy as they come and I'll have no part of it.
- linley@megami.org
formerly:
linley@pic.ucla.edu
linley@oac.ucla.edu
linley@anderson.ucla.edu
linley@ee.ucla.edu
linley@seas.ucla.edu
linley@cs.ucla.edu
etc.
When I first connected to the internet the bits had to flow uphill both ways.
Judging by the speed of some sites I bet that old mainframe is still routing packets about.... Brad
Traditional Virgo Traits:
Modest and shy
Meticulous and reliable
Practical and diligent
Intelligent and analytical
On the dark side:
Fussy and a worrier
Overcritical and harsh
Perfectionist and conservative
Hmm.
Can we all stop be so F*cking pedantic? :) Brad
You need an excuse??
Absit Invidia
>>I've been on since 1990, anyone want beat that and chat about the good old days?
Well, you've got me beat a little bit. I first logged onto the eBay-net in 1998, when the clever marketing scheme of AOL won me over. I figured "If they've got enough money to send everyone on the planet about 50 CDs each, they've gotta be good" And I was right.
damn.....to think that all of us who make our livings from the Net would have been writing newspaper columns or being stock analysts...
Happy Birthday to the place I live!
I'm not feeling that clever this morning.
is al gore going to be there? he is the father, after all.
I betcha he is celebrating too - he was in it from the very beginning. Hat's off Al!
Hah, It's my 21st birthday today too. Reason #2 today is the best day in the whole year. Btw Andy Grove (intel) was born today too. yea dawg.
damn.. beat me to the political punch! Oh well, maybe my hysterical Internet rantings are catching on. See the rise and fall of the internet and what you can do about it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Yay! And here's to the next 30 years :)
Well, you've seen your kid grow up showing unusual promise at first...
...but then it nears its 30th Birthday and gets seduced by the dark side and starts talking shit like "portals" and "branding" and "American Corporate Imperialism" and insists on being as rhizomatic as a ruddy fart...
...Yes, happy birthday internet.
Well, I wonder how much did they get payed for that. Or maybe it the Internet in UCLA has died after those first packets between those two machines.
Lame...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Having just celebrated my own 30th birthday a week ago, I'm pleased to hear this; happy birthday, 'Net... lessee what we can do in the next 30.
I heard the first email message was short- He tried to send "log" the "l", and "o" got sent, but before the "g" could get out, the system crashed. I think Bill Gates took lessons from this.
Ah! At last an excuse to get drunk!
Geeks around the world; get off your lazy butts
and celebrate!
The last ten years, esp. since NSF decided to wash its hands of the infrastructure has been terrific. I am waiting to see the fruits of todays research. I hope - A gigabit connection for 20$/month or heck even free in the next ten years.
Yep, it's that time again. We're all perhaps the closest thing to a world citizen that has ever existed. More so than those jetsetting punks who just subscribe to the philosophy to avoid visas, we all exist in a society that stretches around the world. And we have existed in this society, without government or authority, for 30 years. Lets not let the corporations ruin that.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Who is the poor human beeing that is blamed to be the mother then
Hi Internet, hope you'll have a nice day with not too many AOL users asking silly questions and sending unsubscribe messages into mailing lists ;)
Greetings
So how many people posted to their favourite nerd news site, claiming FIRST PING !!!!!!!!!!!?
According to this article the first ping went out on October 20th. Anyone know what's what?
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Hmmm..perhaps I should buy the net a present...a brand new Athlon might do the trick ;-)
but right at the top of the page, it says What a rousing battlecry. FREE SPEECH FOR SOME! NO SPEECH FOR OTHERS!
i personally know that i owe a good 90% of my life to the internet.
I owe my career to it. My first break in computers
(real job) was a job to build an internet service
provider for a business man (30k a year). And of
course I used linux which probably wouldn't exist
beyond Linus's hard drive without the Internet.
From there I have worked on dozens of internet
related projects over the years and built myself a
VERY nice lifestyle out of it. Beyond just the job
I have learned so much by others sharing their
knowledge over the net.
Thanks to the guys who created the Net. We all owe
you a debt of gratitude! I'll drink a beer for ya
tonight!
Malice95
can be attained with this link. I urge you to wander around the site too for more stuff on the Domain Survey.
It was a past time of mine back in 92 and 93 to download the *entire* host list from these people. It was 20 mb or so at that time!
Now there's *at least* 56 million hosts around. That would be like, huge.
Let the good times roll? Bah.
The Internet was a good idea, but commercialism ruined it.
Yes, mah bruthas, the internet has turned me from a waitress with a creative writing degree into a savvy geeky webmistress!
Happy Birthday, you sexy thing you! Give us a kiss!
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Happy birthday I-NET Happy birthday I-NET You provide me with porn And I love you for that
My eyesight is bad. I have no girlfriend. I dont seem to visit the pub much. My handwriting is now awful. Still Im f**king solid at quake though. If you fit the above then take action. This could be also the dark side of the internet. Lets all get out once in a while :) Brad
1992, and I was using PAD X.25 access to Janet. Not fun remebering somthing like 233447565654333554. Then we got Telnet the year after. Always used to love using archie and gopher, then web arrived and sucked up the bandwidth :( Mosiac spelled the end to our downloads during the day :( Remeber using lynx a fair bit on vt100's. All this and Im only 25.
but, I can remember using gopher in maybe late '92 for the first time. Then on to usenet and I remember downloading mosaic and installing it on my old rs/6000 and feeling really cool.
I quite frankly wouldn't be doing the job I have today if it weren't for the growth of the 'net, so Happy Birthday! Many happy returns on the day!
(btw, I love my job - sysadmin/webmaster/network geek at a small startup)
(I'll hoist a few tonight)
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
I can't get to the UCLA anniverary page. See what old age does?
Actually, today we're celebrating the birth of the ARPANET, which preceeded the Internet.
The ARPANET was born on this day in 1968, and was finally laid to rest in March of 1991 when the IMPs (subsequently called Packet Switch Nodes (PSNs)) were finally decommissioned (long live 1822!).
The Internet was born on January 1, 1983 when the ARPANET was switched from Network Control Protocol (NCP) to the TCP/IP that we know today with not-so-gentle prodding from what was then the Defense Communications Agency (DCA, now the Defense Information Systems Agency), which had taken over operation of the ARPANET from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
Before that day, you had to have a computer attached to an IMP on the ARPANET to be on the network. After that day, with a router, you could be on any old LAN, and exchange IP packets with any other host anywhere, whether it was attached to an IMP, an Ethernet, a Chaosnet, an ARCnet, or whatever. The growth of the network accelerated from that point on to the world-embracing network we see today.
Now, if we can just get IP version 6 (and IP Security!) deployed to solve the address space problem. Unfortunately, we don't have any one organization with control over the Internet who can cause such a change to happen (i.e. they order it, and they have guns to back it up their authority).
Of course, there are anarchists who say that this is better...
http://www.talkcity.com/communities/computing_tech .htmpl is URL of a party we're going to have on Talkcity tonight at 8:30 PM Pacific time (chat.talkcity.com port 6667). come celebrate =)
Oops... Oh well. I was working mostly from memory.
'nuff said.
I've been around the Internet for about 6 years =) I remember tha good ol days too, where it was more the knowledge than the buck =) though, the buck is nice =) heheheheh specially if you have the knowledge.
What?
The Internet has caused more bad for me than good! I spend so much time in front of my computer that when my wife filed for divorce last month she sited my Internet habit as the reason to end our marriage. Damn the Internet!
Hey, the first ping was on October 20, 1969.
Read the Wired article here .
Anyway, it's another occasion to celebrate! 30 years, that's at least a keg...
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
The moderation is getting out of hand. Please can we have a link on each message to see the moderators (aka nazi party officials) who moderated it and in which direction ?
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Internet,
Happy birthday to you!
A little planning goes a long way...
The term IMP stands for *Interface* Message Processor, not Internet Message Processor. See (eg) the glossary in RFC 760.
I'm ready for the next leap... just wire my brain in.
http://www.moosoft.com
Is there a sort of artificial intelligence aspect to this as well? Most of my posts now seem to have the default score of 2, but a few of them have been only one.
Is there a length requirement for the automatically higher score to be applied? That seems reasonable, and it would match the ones I have seen for myself that do or do not get bumped up.
I think this is a positive thing, in a world with too few moderator points; allows a sort of proxy voting which takes a reasonable idea (that someone who posts things which get bumped up by the moderators several times is likely to continue posting interesting things) and applies it without requiring that moderators actually approve each submission.
Is this an accurate (if lowbrow) description of how / why this system works?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Freedom's just another word for nothing left Zulus
There is some debate to weather the internet was born 30 years ago. Some might argue that the Internet was born 16 years ago when the TCP/IP protocall was actually introduced in 1983.
None the less, Happy Birthday.
...
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
*sigh* Who here remembers having to sign the NSF agreement agreeing to not use the 'net for commercial purposes? I had to sign it back in '88!
Injured software engineer wins against Mattel!
Well, the first 30 years seem to be pretty funky. Unfortunatly, I have only been around for sixteen of them and have only been using the internet for 8 years. The internet, I have come to realzie, is a very powerful thing (duh), but the best use some of us seem to find for it is to look at XXX pr0n (no offense Rob :P). :)
I hope the internet stays around until I leave the picture, but I wish we could be a little more responsible with it. More coding Web sites, less Hardcore sex. Well, maybe to TOO much less
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
so I guess Al Gore conceptualised this whole thing when he was about 15 years old, or so?
I consider the InterNet born in 1987 when the various academic, military, and business subnets were interconnected. This involved privatizing the backbone (MCI), developing more expandable protocols such as domain naming and sendmail, etc. -Rick Ottolini
Isn't this a national holiday?
shouldn't it be?
hmmm, I guess I am going to have to throw another party
hugme@hugme.org
www.hugme.org