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100% the internet was a diverse mix of public and private technologies. BBSes were run privately (group or individual), Fidonet was by private individuals, and
by Karrot_Kream 4y ago
100% the internet was a diverse mix of public and private technologies. BBSes were run privately (group or individual), Fidonet was by private individuals, and Usenet was run by universities, just on the social side. DARPA may have funded TCP/IP but computer networks were thriving before then.
- WalterBright 4y agoThat's right. The idea that a global network wouldn't have existed with DARPA is not credible. Everybody with two computers wanted to connect them, and various schemes of doing it flourished. Heck, even I came up with an outline of how a global system could work before I'd heard of DARPA. (I never did anything about it because I was stupid.)
- HaZeust 4y agoWe still know you from Empire, though - so not everything was fruitless ;)
- WalterBright 4y agoSo many opportunities to become a billionaire I missed! America is not only the land of opportunity, it's the land of blind fools.
- HaZeust 4y agoThat, and the opportunities of even the opportunistic can be lackluster - c'est la vie I suppose!
- WalterBright 4y agoHaha, thanks for the kind words! I was going through another box of my dad's papers today, and found a DECWriter listing of probably my first non-trivial program circa 1976, an expansion of the old BASIC HAMMURABI game. I had thought that was long lost. I lost nearly all of my early code because I put it on a magtape which turned out to be unreadable.