What do you mean “the Internet”? I can go back to my days in college (84-89), where we communicated with UUCP to various other universities and organizations.

What do you mean “the Internet”? I can go back to my days in college (84-89), where we communicated with UUCP to various other universities and organizations. I occasionally read USENET news at the time, and also sent e-mail. But we didn’t have a direct always-on connection, instead we had old-school 300 baud modems. At the time, I also had a 300 baud Hayes modem at home (connected to my Apple ][+ with 64KB of RAM, thanks to the 80-column card), and could use that to dial up to BBSes in the area, and connect to the university computers. Later, as I recall, the university did get always-on connectivity to ARPAnet (via a T-1, I think), which later became the backbone for “the Internet”. Then I went to work at what was then the Defense Communications Agency in 1989, and we had a group inside the agency that was responsible for running the one-and-only Network Information Center for the Internet, although the actual work was contracted out (to SRI?). At the time, I was doing classified work elsewhere in the agency, but I did stand up the first recursive DNS server on our internal network, because I was sick and tired of always updating the HOST.TXT tables on our machines.