35 ms·

There were almost two internets. Then, the CIA destroyed one

jasonvorhe 4y ago
I'm willing to bet that this video is more informative that the ones done by Mashable: https://youtu.be/RJLA2_Ho7X0 https://youtu.be/RJLA2_Ho7X0
fweimer 4y ago
Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is a good resource on this topic. The way it worked beginning in the 80s was that once you had your local in-country research network, you eventually felt compelled to hook it up to NSFNET (maybe after starting out with an email gateway into ARPANET/CSNET). So it's likely that there would have been just one Internet anyway.
thrown_22 4y ago
Does anyone actually have details about the project? Skimming the wikipage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn the networking side of things is rather primitive: a single master node talking to a number of child nodes with no other inter node communication. And a lot of software build in the master node to review what is happening in the child nodes. Nothing mentioned packets, routing, or any of the other more interesting bits of what made the original internet different. Down the wikihole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS seems like the arpanet not taken, 10 years before arpanet with the same design goals of inter node communication.
- _int3_ 4y ago
  There was communication network (500 telex machines) , and one mainframe computer. For internet you may also need packet switching.
  - deepdriver 4y ago
    My understanding is that the "network" was a manually-staffed telex operations room: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cybernetics_of_Governance_The_Cybersyn_Project_1971-1973 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cyberneti... >Serendipitously, we found a large number of spare telex machines in one of the state-owned enterprises. Their installation followed in plants and enterprises throughout the country, as well as in industrial committees, CORFO and other government offices. A telex room with tens of machines was installed at CORFO. In practice, it was an operations room for the state-owned industry that offered an incipient nervous system for the industrial economy; it was called Cybernet The telex itself was not invented in Chile, but rather ironically in 1930s Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development
    - _int3_ 4y ago
      This telex machines act like terminals if you connect them to computer. They did best with technology they had. (previous government didn't know how to use them). It is remarkable what they did. And very interesting. The title is misleading.
  - remram 4y ago
    So it was a single "Wide-Area Network"?
_9xrb 4y ago
This is a series of video essays about Chile's Project CyberSyn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn Link title massively overreaches. Cybersyn was a few hundred telex machines, aka glorified telegraphs, and one computer that aggregated daily economic statistics. It was in no way comparable to ARPANET or the Internet. The project was an interesting yet abortive effort at top-down socialist economic management. Since it never had a chance to succeed or fail on its own merits, and also since it had a really swanky-looking operations room, it's been the subject of a boatload of techno-utopian projection. Here are reflections by someone who was directly involved: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cybernetics_of_Governance_The_Cybersyn_Project_1971-1973 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cyberneti... >The emphasis of these reflections is in contrasting its rather limited achievements with its vision and relevance for our societies today. Its claims were large; it was presented as a project that achieved important results in a short period of time. The paper compares its actuality with these claims.
- chasil 4y ago
  The second video mentions a trucking strike, and that messages were passed between telex sites on alternate shipping options. Supposedly, this was instrumental in breaking the strike, which was not instigated by the workers, but by the owners of the trucking firms, in reaction to a move towards nationalization of some of them.
  - deepdriver 4y ago
    Yes, and telex machines were nothing new in 1972. They were invented in Germany in the 1930s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development When you boil it down to the details, Project Cybersyn really wasn't much. A lot of old telex stations, one mainframe, untested hand-wavey ideas about economic control theory, and some very nice Star Trek armchairs.
    - chasil 4y ago
      I agree, the network looks like a bunch of modems connected to a single host's tty driver.
baybal2 4y ago
[dead]
hyperman1 4y ago
One thing I learned from Cliff Stoll's the cuckoo's egg is that the internet was far from the only computer network. Every country was building one or more networks. There was some kind of cambrian explosion of network technologys going on. What the internet did was more subtle, but far more important: It standardized the technology, connecting these networks. Instead of tons of little private network, we got 1 global net owned by nobody. I have no problem believing chile had one of these little private networks.
- deepdriver 4y ago
  They didn't, though. They had a bunch of telex machines that were old even at the time. The title of this link is hyperbole to serve an ideological agenda. It's Teen Vogue tech history.
  - morsch 4y ago
    Before the Internet became widespread, people were using BBSs, and several large (for the time) networks of interconnections between them. Fidonet, and many more regional ones like Z-Netz. There were also networks for businesses and research institutions that were not the Internet. None of these were just a bunch of Telex machines, even if the network in the article was.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Also Telenet when I was a kid.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      > Before the Internet became widespread This is looking at things with blinders and assuming the public at large determines the significance of the Internet. The People were not using BBS, etc. A tiny vanishingly small minority of intrepid computer geeks were using BBS, etc. in the late 1970's, but Arpanet was already very well established by 1973.[1] Just because it was mainly limited to academics and corporations, this still vastly outmatched BBS use in the 1970's. BBS only came into popularity by the mid-1980's, when the Internet was already huge and stayed big, and BBS were effectively extinct within a few years of the invention of WWW. BBS use itself was never "widespread," unless we define widespread as a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population. Not to diminish the nostalgia for the unique fun of logging into a BBS, in reality, hardly anyone ever used them, which would be maybe tens of thousands at most among hundreds of millions. The number of academics at one large university attached to the Internet in 1978 could match the entire population of BBS users for it's entire existence. [1] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/ https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/
a-dub 4y ago
lol at the fake shape buttons on the chairs.
DonHopkins 4y ago
The most horrifying thing about the "Computer-generated image of Project CyberSyn operations room" on the Project Cybersyn Wikipedia page is that they're displaying the lyrics of RMS's Free Software Song (which he wrote in 1991) on the fake monitors in the "Close Up of the Data Feed": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn#/media/File:CyberSyn-render-102.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn#/media/File:C... SHARE THE SOFTWARE ## YOU'LL BE FREE JOIN US NOW AND SHARE THE SOFTWARE ## HACKER YOU'LL BE FREE HACKER YOU'LL BE FREE JOIN US NOW ## JOIN US NOW } } #### } #### YOU'LL BE FREE } JOIN US NOW AND SHARE THE SOFTWARE #### HACKER } #### } } ## YOU'LL BE FREE JOIN US NOW ## HACKER ## YOU'LL BE FREE ## HACKER ## JOIN US NOW ## YOU'LL BE FREE ## HACKER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw https://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.en.html https://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.en.html https://www.gnu.org/music/writing-fs-song.html https://www.gnu.org/music/writing-fs-song.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn The CyberSyn multimedia "reconstruction": https://web.archive.org/web/20070716014045/http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/cybersyn/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070716014045/http://www.cybers...
AlbertCory 4y ago
I have to point out the public telephone company one in France: the Minitel [1]. This really could have achieved global interconnectivity, but for the stupidity of telephone companies. Minitel was a terminal you could rent from the phone company, and its original intent was to reduce the need for human information operators. It was available in 1982. But it grew to have all sorts of services on it, even a dating service. It wasn't a "fraction of a fraction of a fraction" of the population, either - there were millions in use. I saw one in 1989. I even mention Minitel in The Big Bucks (https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks), only mildly satirically. They "solved" the money problem: the charges would appear on your monthly phone bill. The execs were actually embarrassed that there were things like dating services -- that wasn't their plan at all. So what do I mean by "the stupidity of telephone companies"? All the other phone companies in the world, who were already connected both physically and administratively (through CCITT) could have easily jumped on it and made their systems interoperate. They already did through phone calls and payments between each other. They didn't see it, or if they did, they let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There were infinitely many papers on the "proper" way to do "videotex." Would a global "internet" run by the phone companies be better than what we have? Discuss. [1] https://history-computer.com/minitel/ https://history-computer.com/minitel/
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  >Would a global "internet" run by the phone companies be better than what we have? Discuss. A global network run by The Phone Company (TPC) was the subject of "The President's Analyst": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President%27s_Analyst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President%27s_Analyst The President's Analyst - The Phone Company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2NNZdigSXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2NNZdigSXg The President's Analyst - Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V63yeIIEd6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V63yeIIEd6k Murder of a Movie - How J. Edgar Hoover Killed "The President's Analyst": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwM4Solrzes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwM4Solrzes
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Thanks. I've heard of the movie but never made the connection.

I'm willing to bet that this video is more informative that the ones done by Mashable: https://youtu.be/RJLA2_Ho7X0 https://youtu.be/RJLA2_Ho7X0

fweimer 4y ago

Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is a good resource on this topic. The way it worked beginning in the 80s was that once you had your local in-country research network, you eventually felt compelled to hook it up to NSFNET (maybe after starting out with an email gateway into ARPANET/CSNET). So it's likely that there would have been just one Internet anyway.

thrown_22 4y ago

Does anyone actually have details about the project? Skimming the wikipage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn the networking side of things is rather primitive: a single master node talking to a number of child nodes with no other inter node communication. And a lot of software build in the master node to review what is happening in the child nodes. Nothing mentioned packets, routing, or any of the other more interesting bits of what made the original internet different. Down the wikihole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS seems like the arpanet not taken, 10 years before arpanet with the same design goals of inter node communication.

_int3_ 4y ago
There was communication network (500 telex machines) , and one mainframe computer. For internet you may also need packet switching.
- deepdriver 4y ago
  My understanding is that the "network" was a manually-staffed telex operations room: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cybernetics_of_Governance_The_Cybersyn_Project_1971-1973 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cyberneti... >Serendipitously, we found a large number of spare telex machines in one of the state-owned enterprises. Their installation followed in plants and enterprises throughout the country, as well as in industrial committees, CORFO and other government offices. A telex room with tens of machines was installed at CORFO. In practice, it was an operations room for the state-owned industry that offered an incipient nervous system for the industrial economy; it was called Cybernet The telex itself was not invented in Chile, but rather ironically in 1930s Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development
  - _int3_ 4y ago
    This telex machines act like terminals if you connect them to computer. They did best with technology they had. (previous government didn't know how to use them). It is remarkable what they did. And very interesting. The title is misleading.
- remram 4y ago
  So it was a single "Wide-Area Network"?

_9xrb 4y ago

This is a series of video essays about Chile's Project CyberSyn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn Link title massively overreaches. Cybersyn was a few hundred telex machines, aka glorified telegraphs, and one computer that aggregated daily economic statistics. It was in no way comparable to ARPANET or the Internet. The project was an interesting yet abortive effort at top-down socialist economic management. Since it never had a chance to succeed or fail on its own merits, and also since it had a really swanky-looking operations room, it's been the subject of a boatload of techno-utopian projection. Here are reflections by someone who was directly involved: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cybernetics_of_Governance_The_Cybersyn_Project_1971-1973 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cyberneti... >The emphasis of these reflections is in contrasting its rather limited achievements with its vision and relevance for our societies today. Its claims were large; it was presented as a project that achieved important results in a short period of time. The paper compares its actuality with these claims.

chasil 4y ago
The second video mentions a trucking strike, and that messages were passed between telex sites on alternate shipping options. Supposedly, this was instrumental in breaking the strike, which was not instigated by the workers, but by the owners of the trucking firms, in reaction to a move towards nationalization of some of them.
- deepdriver 4y ago
  Yes, and telex machines were nothing new in 1972. They were invented in Germany in the 1930s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development When you boil it down to the details, Project Cybersyn really wasn't much. A lot of old telex stations, one mainframe, untested hand-wavey ideas about economic control theory, and some very nice Star Trek armchairs.
  - chasil 4y ago
    I agree, the network looks like a bunch of modems connected to a single host's tty driver.

baybal2 4y ago

[dead]

hyperman1 4y ago

One thing I learned from Cliff Stoll's the cuckoo's egg is that the internet was far from the only computer network. Every country was building one or more networks. There was some kind of cambrian explosion of network technologys going on. What the internet did was more subtle, but far more important: It standardized the technology, connecting these networks. Instead of tons of little private network, we got 1 global net owned by nobody. I have no problem believing chile had one of these little private networks.

deepdriver 4y ago
They didn't, though. They had a bunch of telex machines that were old even at the time. The title of this link is hyperbole to serve an ideological agenda. It's Teen Vogue tech history.
- morsch 4y ago
  Before the Internet became widespread, people were using BBSs, and several large (for the time) networks of interconnections between them. Fidonet, and many more regional ones like Z-Netz. There were also networks for businesses and research institutions that were not the Internet. None of these were just a bunch of Telex machines, even if the network in the article was.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Also Telenet when I was a kid.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > Before the Internet became widespread This is looking at things with blinders and assuming the public at large determines the significance of the Internet. The People were not using BBS, etc. A tiny vanishingly small minority of intrepid computer geeks were using BBS, etc. in the late 1970's, but Arpanet was already very well established by 1973.[1] Just because it was mainly limited to academics and corporations, this still vastly outmatched BBS use in the 1970's. BBS only came into popularity by the mid-1980's, when the Internet was already huge and stayed big, and BBS were effectively extinct within a few years of the invention of WWW. BBS use itself was never "widespread," unless we define widespread as a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population. Not to diminish the nostalgia for the unique fun of logging into a BBS, in reality, hardly anyone ever used them, which would be maybe tens of thousands at most among hundreds of millions. The number of academics at one large university attached to the Internet in 1978 could match the entire population of BBS users for it's entire existence. [1] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/ https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

a-dub 4y ago

lol at the fake shape buttons on the chairs.

DonHopkins 4y ago

The most horrifying thing about the "Computer-generated image of Project CyberSyn operations room" on the Project Cybersyn Wikipedia page is that they're displaying the lyrics of RMS's Free Software Song (which he wrote in 1991) on the fake monitors in the "Close Up of the Data Feed": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn#/media/File:CyberSyn-render-102.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn#/media/File:C... SHARE THE SOFTWARE ## YOU'LL BE FREE JOIN US NOW AND SHARE THE SOFTWARE ## HACKER YOU'LL BE FREE HACKER YOU'LL BE FREE JOIN US NOW ## JOIN US NOW } } #### } #### YOU'LL BE FREE } JOIN US NOW AND SHARE THE SOFTWARE #### HACKER } #### } } ## YOU'LL BE FREE JOIN US NOW ## HACKER ## YOU'LL BE FREE ## HACKER ## JOIN US NOW ## YOU'LL BE FREE ## HACKER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw https://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.en.html https://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.en.html https://www.gnu.org/music/writing-fs-song.html https://www.gnu.org/music/writing-fs-song.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn The CyberSyn multimedia "reconstruction": https://web.archive.org/web/20070716014045/http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/cybersyn/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070716014045/http://www.cybers...

AlbertCory 4y ago

I have to point out the public telephone company one in France: the Minitel [1]. This really could have achieved global interconnectivity, but for the stupidity of telephone companies. Minitel was a terminal you could rent from the phone company, and its original intent was to reduce the need for human information operators. It was available in 1982. But it grew to have all sorts of services on it, even a dating service. It wasn't a "fraction of a fraction of a fraction" of the population, either - there were millions in use. I saw one in 1989. I even mention Minitel in The Big Bucks (https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks), only mildly satirically. They "solved" the money problem: the charges would appear on your monthly phone bill. The execs were actually embarrassed that there were things like dating services -- that wasn't their plan at all. So what do I mean by "the stupidity of telephone companies"? All the other phone companies in the world, who were already connected both physically and administratively (through CCITT) could have easily jumped on it and made their systems interoperate. They already did through phone calls and payments between each other. They didn't see it, or if they did, they let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There were infinitely many papers on the "proper" way to do "videotex." Would a global "internet" run by the phone companies be better than what we have? Discuss. [1] https://history-computer.com/minitel/ https://history-computer.com/minitel/

DonHopkins 4y ago
>Would a global "internet" run by the phone companies be better than what we have? Discuss. A global network run by The Phone Company (TPC) was the subject of "The President's Analyst": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President%27s_Analyst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President%27s_Analyst The President's Analyst - The Phone Company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2NNZdigSXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2NNZdigSXg The President's Analyst - Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V63yeIIEd6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V63yeIIEd6k Murder of a Movie - How J. Edgar Hoover Killed "The President's Analyst": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwM4Solrzes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwM4Solrzes
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Thanks. I've heard of the movie but never made the connection.