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The Internet origin story you know is wrong
- willnonya 4y agoIt's no coincidence that the popular version of the internet origin story is government centric.
- anon946 4y agoKind of depends on what we mean when we use the word "Internet". If we mean internet as a social/economic revolution, then sure, BBSs were relevant. If we mean Internet as a set of protocols, software that implements them, and hardware to run them on, then I don't see that BBSs had a lot of relevance (though they used sliding window protocols for file transfer such as ZMODEM/YMODEM).
- bane 4y agoThere was a brief period where BBSs also offered various gateway services into the Internet a long with the normal BBS services like doors. I received my first ever email address from a huge local BBS back in the early early 90s by paying a token fee every month. I had nobody I knew with email addresses until a few years later so it was kind of pointless, but it did work. On a larger scale, when AOL started offering internet services through their network is sort of the same thing until they eventually just become an ISP.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- msla 4y agoBig networks were gated in and out of the Internet, such as UUCP and BITNET. (UUCP for Unix systems, BITNET for IBM mainframes.) This had interesting effects on email addresses: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/the_hideous_name/ http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/the_hideous_name/ Make sense of this one: research!ucbvax!@cmu-cs-pt.arpa:@CMU-ITC-LINUS:dave%CMU-ITC-LINUS@CMU-CS-PT Sourceforge still has Ifmail, an Internet to Fidonet email gateway: http://ifmail.sourceforge.net/ http://ifmail.sourceforge.net/ FidoNet is a network of BBSes which has email and Usenet-like discussion boards called echoes.
- easrng 4y agoIs that email address even real? I can understand some of it but not all. Looks like UUCP to research, UUCP to ucbvax, somehow send to cmu-cs-pt.arpa, idk what's up with CMU-ITC-LINUS, email to dave%CMU-ITC-LINUS@CMU-CS-PT, which forwards to dave@CMU-ITC-LINUS
- bane 4y agoThat's really interesting! Just to be clear in my post I'm referring to bog standard email addresses not fidonet...which was also very common at the time. I'm not aware of any fidonet<--> internet bridges during that time period but I suppose their could have been. AFAIK fido relays all occurred via POTS sync calls between BBSs
- msla 4y agoOnce you drag BBSes into it, you're not talking about the Internet, you're talking about computer networking in general. Oh, well. I guess we should be happy they're not insisting the Internet was invented at CERN in 1995.
- bluedays 4y agoThis reads like a college student who was assigned a book review assignment and wrote it an hour before class.
- iratewizard 4y agoDon't most of these tabloid-tier rags?
- tomcam 4y agoThat is absolutely insulting—to procrastinating college kids. Most modern journalism feels like it was scraped five minutes ahead of time from another site and barely changed.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoI've met their chief editor and he seemed pretty decent, but this is surprisingly low effort writing.
- antijava 4y agoNot one mention of FIdoNet?
- gerikson 4y agoI believe Fidonet was more popular outside the USA and it's usually missing from US-centric discussions on history.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lkrubner 4y agoThere are other aspects of the origin story that seem to be myth. For instance, the idea that the Internet was designed to route around damage, and could also treat censorship as a form of damage, and therefore it was resistant to censorship. I once spent a long weekend reading through the early RFCs. What I found was the obvious recognition of the fact that AT&T, which at the time had a monopoly on telephone services in the USA, was circuit-switched, whereas IP was being designed to be packet-switched, and clearly a packet-switched technology could be more decentralized than a circuit-switched technology. But that is the only shred of evidence I could find in favor of something like an ideology of decentralization. I could not find anything explicit in the design documents of the 1970s and 1980s. As near as I can tell, the more grandiose claims of decentralization don't show up till the late 1990s, and those claims are not especially made by the technologists themselves (with the exception of Bob Metcalfe). It's mostly techno-utopians and libertarians who begin to make the bolder claims about how the Internet is fundamentally decentralized and resistant to censorship. People like Kevin Kelly, writing in Wired Magazine in the 1990s, made the most utopian claims about the decentralization of the Internet. I've looked, and I've had trouble finding evidence of bold claims of decentralization, being made in the 1970s or 1980s, except in the very obvious case case that a packet-switched network is less necessarily centralized than a circuit-switched network. The myth gets built in the 1990s, and is then retro-imposed on the 1970s and 1980s.
- throwaway193948 4y agomaybe all the arpanet design docs are not public?
- kragen 4y agoWell, a lot of the early RFCs have been lost.
- dredmorbius 4y agoInteresting, I wasn't aware of that. Checking manually, I found many of the low-numbered RFCs are present, though there are some higher in range which turn up 404. E.g., RFC 1 is online: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1 But here's a list of missing HTML pages from the first 1024 RFCs: 8, 9, 14, 26, 51, 92, 159, 201, 220, 244, 248, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 272, 275, 277, 279, 284, 337, 341, 358, 375, 380, 383, 397, 418, 424, 427, 428, 444, 465, 481, 484, 502, 507, 517, 530, 536, 540, 541, 554, 558, 564, 572, 575, 583, 598, 605, 639, 641, 646, 648, 649, 650, 664, 665, 668, 670, 673, 676, 682, 693, 709, 710, 711, 715, 723, and 853. For anyone who wants to verify: wget --spider --force-html $( for i in {1..1024}; do echo "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc${i}"; done ) 2>&1 | egrep '(https.*rfc|awaiting response)' | grep -B1 '404 Not Found' | grep -v '404 Not Found' Above RFC-2000 or so, the pattern of omissions starts to look more deliberate, suggesting reserved values: 8, 9, 14, 26, 51, 92, 159, 201, 220, 244, 248, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 272, 275, 277, 279, 284, 337, 341, 358, 375, 380, 383, 397, 418, 424, 427, 428, 444, 465, 481, 484, 502, 507, 517, 530, 536, 540, 541, 554, 558, 564, 572, 575, 583, 598, 605, 639, 641, 646, 648, 649, 650, 664, 665, 668, 670, 673, 676, 682, 693, 709, 710, 711, 715, 723, 853, 1061, 1182, 1260, 1839, 1840, 3100, 3200, 3223, 3328, 3333, 3350, 3399, 3400, 3500, 3699, 3799, 3800, 3889, 3899, 3900, 3907, 3908, 3999, 4000, 4099, 4100, 4199, 4200, 4232, 4299, 4300, 4399, 4400, 4499, 4500, 4599, 4600, 4637, 4658, and 4699.
- kjsthree 4y agoThe story I learned from Where Wizards Stay Up Late and The Dream Machine is wrong?
- user3939382 4y agoLove that book. I got this sense reading it like I was there.
- II2II 4y agoIt is a click-bait title. Judging from the first paragraph it is a book review and the author of the article was conflating the Internet with the web. Scanning the rest of the article, it looks like the author tries to prop up their claims by arguing that the social aspects of the Internet had their foundations in BBSes. Even if this is true, it isn't what most people mean by the origins of the Internet as infrastructure. (Though it probably isn't true. Even for social elements that didn't originate with the Internet, one has to consider that there was more to the online world than BBSes and the Internet anyway. Even then one has to consider that things popularised by BBSes probably found their inspiration elsewhere, including from the Internet.)
- RappingBoomer 4y ago
- joezydeco 4y agoOooh cool, time to paste the link again. https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt Al Gore and the Internet: By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf "Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."
- jjulius 4y ago>The history of the internet is repeatedly reduced to the story of the singular Arpanet. But BBSs were just as important—if not more. I mean, even the sub-heading feels wrong to me. Arpanet and BBSs are both a key part of the history of the internet. I'm 35 and both have been discussed, in a historical context, ad nauseam my entire life.
- beaned 4y agoI'm 36 and I've only ever known the Arpanet story, and I'm techy enough to be here.
- infofarmer 4y agoSounds like you weren’t as techy through the 90s :-)
- beaned 4y agoNo, I was a kid.
- m463 4y agoI remember using pc pursuit - I think it used something like x.25 to allow you to access modem banks in other cities to connect to BBSs there. EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago"This work is still being done on platforms like Facebook and Reddit. But unlike the sysops who enabled the flourishing of early online communities, the volunteer moderators on today's platforms do not own the infrastructures they oversee." Volunteer moderators on Facebook. Perhaps I am misunderstanding this sentence. There have been a few documentaries showing how Facebook does moderation. It is done by low paid workers, e.g, in the Phillipines or Ireland, not volunteers. The first line moderation work is contracted out. There is actually profound lack of moderation because (a) moderators are overwhelmed and cannot keep up and (b) the priority of Facebook is what attracts the most traffic ("engagement") not meeting standards. If some group page is getting lots of traffic then it goes into a special category. The moderators cannot delete it without approval from FTEs at Facebook. The number one priority is traffic,^1 not upholding any standard for content. Any standards enforced are only created in response to complaints. Section 230 shields Facebook from most of the potential legal liability. 1. Under the guise of soundbites such as "connecting the world" and "giving everyone a voice". People can be connected and have a voice and still only "engage" with Facebook periodically/sporadically. Overall, low traffic. But without both high traffic and ads, Facebook's days are numbered. Hence, ever more indignant, angry, extreme content is required to draw "engagement". Edit: Thank you @LamdaComplex. I think that explains it.
- LambdaComplex 4y agoEach Facebook Group has its own set of admins/moderators, appointed by whomever created the group--i.e. normal users who are trying to create an online community on a platform that they have no real control over (just like subreddit moderators on Reddit). I assume that's what it's talking about.
- yessirwhatever 4y agoAuthor seems to miss one major point that many tech-journalists seem to miss these days which is the internet is different than the web. I had actually bookmarked the book before but now it doesn't seem very interesting to read. PS: What the hell is the point of writing a title as aggravating as this? It's almost as if they go out of their way to be insulting! Sheesh!
- ajb 4y agoTo answer the PS: it's the clickbait equivalent of a "neg" from "pick up artist" theory - put the other person in a position of low status where they have something to prove/gain. When I see such a title, I always look at the comments first, as I don't want to rewards this behaviour with a click unless the rest of the article is really worthwhile.
- dboreham 4y agoPerhaps it would be accurate to say that Arpanet provided the vision and ultimately protocols to create one unified network, while the online communities (BBS seems the wrong term to me) created many of the _applications_ (in concept, no code survived) that would eventually run on that unified network. Even that's not really true because NNTP was a strictly Internet thing and SMTP email existed before most online communities did. Heck you may as well throw in Prestel and Minitel while you're at it. Honestly the online communities seem like the Dodo of the modern internet, not the Coelacanth. For example I was able to get through those decades without using any of them (save for a little bit of CIS required because something...something...Microsoft developer...something needed it).
- jgaa 4y ago> The Internet origin story you know is wrong No it is not. The BBS community pioneered some of the services that later become popular on Internet, but not at scale, and with very different motivation. It was never the origin story of Internet. At the prime of the BBS area, still years before Internet became commercially available, I remember a friend showing me experimental C code for his BBS for "email", via gateway to Internet. I used to run a multi-user BBS in Norway with a pool of phone-modems, running under an early (pirated) version of QNX on a 8086 PC. The software, CrCs, was homegrown, written in C, mostly at night, while I worked several day jobs to pay for my BBS hobby. Eventually coding and software design became my profession.
- high_5 4y agoI guess the author isn't aware of the magazine's own role in the narratives about the Internet. Wired giveth and taketh away.
- dredmorbius 4y agoOr in BBSes: The WELL.
- TuringTest 4y ago> If there is a future after Facebook, it will be led by a revival of the sysop, a reclamation of the social and economic value of community maintenance and moderation. This is a major point of the article, more key than whether or not the history of BBSs was important in the construction of today's technology. Current major participation platforms define how information is disseminated in our open societies, which has affected our democratic processes. Returning to a structure of self-managed online communities could help us regain control of what information flows you want to follow in your social group, rather than ceding that control to large companies seeking to maximize attention.
- erlend_sh 4y ago> People aren’t the problem. The problem is the platforms. Literally none of us were going around thinking we were the problem.
- dredmorbius 4y agoFor a vastly better take on the origin story of the Internet, based on the work of someone who was there at the time, documenting it at the time, I'd recommend without reservation John Quarterman's The Matrix. First published in 1990, just as the WWW was emerging (and failing to make the book), it was revised in 1997 (the link I'm giving here). The earlier book does discuss extensive sets of networks of which ARPANET, formally decomisssioned in 1990 after spawning the then-nascent Internet, was only one instance. The introduction includes earily prescient discussion of the role early computer networks played in the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre of 1989. https://www.worldcat.org/title/matrix-computer-networks-and-conferencing-systems-worldwide/oclc/246254726 https://www.worldcat.org/title/matrix-computer-networks-and-...