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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 netw

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/
    - morsch 4y ago
      If you say so. I don't have any hard numbers (I would love to see them, either way), but I think there was a brief moment around 1990 when BBS usage was more widespread than the Internet. I wouldn't (and didn't) say BBS usage was widespread in absolute terms. Nor did I say anything about the significance of anything.
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        I don't have hard numbers on BBS, but on the internet-history@ mailing list, someone estimated there were around a million people worldwide on the Internet in 1990. This is a pretty informed estimate. You think BBS was more than that?
        morsch 4y ago
        Apparently, there were close to 7000 Fidonet nodes in 1990[1]. What's a reasonable average for distinct user accounts per node? I don't know. If it's 100, that's 0.7 million already. Compuserve had 380000 users in 1987[2], when it was basically US-only. Now, I don't want to argue that Compuserve is a BBS (though I suppose you could). But it's evidence people were using their modems to connect to things that weren't the internet. And Compuserve in 1987 apparently had no ability to exchange information with the Internet proper; when I used it as a child, a couple of years later, I used Compuserve -- its groups, pages, whatever they were called, and did not use it for Internet access. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes.PNG https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes... almost 40000 at its peak in 1996 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share
        AlbertCory 4y ago
        I wouldn't dispute any of your numbers. It sounds like they were roughly comparable. At least that's the best we can say 34 years later.
        icedchai 4y ago
Karellen 4y ago
Isn't that the point? The Internet is an "inter-network", a network of networks. But it wasn't even "The Internet", singular, to begin with. Any network of networks is "an internet". It's just when all the networks (or internetworks) are connected together (because Metcalfe's Law - the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users) that it becomes "The Internet".
kqr 4y ago
A believe a large portion of this is thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, CERN, and the web. That was the free technology that made it immediately apparent how valuable a global internet is. (Unfortunately, with social networks and chat systems and such opting out of federation and defaulting to closed ecosystems, I think we are moving toward independent corporate-sponsored networks, this time built on top of the global one.)
- hyperman1 4y ago
  True. The web was built on top of the internet, which gave it a huge boost. Today, it's hard to separate the www and the internet, they seem almost 1 combined entity. I wasn't there, but the internet presumably had value before the www, by having email, ftp and usenet. It also demonstrates how futile nationalistic feelings are on computers. We invented the internet says the USA. We invented the www, says Europe. Both are irrelevant to the point they are almost wrong. The tech got valuable only because a planet worked together.
  - macintux 4y ago
    > I wasn't there, but the internet presumably had value before the www, by having email, ftp and usenet. Don’t forget telnet and multi—player games. The Internet was a pretty cool place before ad networks conquered it.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    They did but the cracks are showing. China with their great firewall. Even Western countries censoring stuff. Russia making sure they can function independently because they'll probably be sanctioned one day. It's far from one happy family.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    > I wasn't there, but the internet presumably had value before the www, by having email, ftp and usenet. As someone who was barely there, it was largely a standardized client problem. That's why NSCA Mosaic and later Netscape Navigator were so important. The Internet provided transport... but for what? To GP's standardization point, the Internet wouldn't have been successful if every server required you to have a different client to talk a different protocol. (The landscape was very different than that in which mobile apps now live) Web protocols + a client browser that understood them = palatable UX

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/
  - morsch 4y ago
    If you say so. I don't have any hard numbers (I would love to see them, either way), but I think there was a brief moment around 1990 when BBS usage was more widespread than the Internet. I wouldn't (and didn't) say BBS usage was widespread in absolute terms. Nor did I say anything about the significance of anything.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      I don't have hard numbers on BBS, but on the internet-history@ mailing list, someone estimated there were around a million people worldwide on the Internet in 1990. This is a pretty informed estimate. You think BBS was more than that?
      - morsch 4y ago
        Apparently, there were close to 7000 Fidonet nodes in 1990[1]. What's a reasonable average for distinct user accounts per node? I don't know. If it's 100, that's 0.7 million already. Compuserve had 380000 users in 1987[2], when it was basically US-only. Now, I don't want to argue that Compuserve is a BBS (though I suppose you could). But it's evidence people were using their modems to connect to things that weren't the internet. And Compuserve in 1987 apparently had no ability to exchange information with the Internet proper; when I used it as a child, a couple of years later, I used Compuserve -- its groups, pages, whatever they were called, and did not use it for Internet access. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes.PNG https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes... almost 40000 at its peak in 1996 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share
        AlbertCory 4y ago
        I wouldn't dispute any of your numbers. It sounds like they were roughly comparable. At least that's the best we can say 34 years later.
      - icedchai 4y ago

Karellen 4y ago

Isn't that the point? The Internet is an "inter-network", a network of networks. But it wasn't even "The Internet", singular, to begin with. Any network of networks is "an internet". It's just when all the networks (or internetworks) are connected together (because Metcalfe's Law - the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users) that it becomes "The Internet".

kqr 4y ago

A believe a large portion of this is thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, CERN, and the web. That was the free technology that made it immediately apparent how valuable a global internet is. (Unfortunately, with social networks and chat systems and such opting out of federation and defaulting to closed ecosystems, I think we are moving toward independent corporate-sponsored networks, this time built on top of the global one.)

hyperman1 4y ago
True. The web was built on top of the internet, which gave it a huge boost. Today, it's hard to separate the www and the internet, they seem almost 1 combined entity. I wasn't there, but the internet presumably had value before the www, by having email, ftp and usenet. It also demonstrates how futile nationalistic feelings are on computers. We invented the internet says the USA. We invented the www, says Europe. Both are irrelevant to the point they are almost wrong. The tech got valuable only because a planet worked together.
- macintux 4y ago
  > I wasn't there, but the internet presumably had value before the www, by having email, ftp and usenet. Don’t forget telnet and multi—player games. The Internet was a pretty cool place before ad networks conquered it.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  They did but the cracks are showing. China with their great firewall. Even Western countries censoring stuff. Russia making sure they can function independently because they'll probably be sanctioned one day. It's far from one happy family.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > I wasn't there, but the internet presumably had value before the www, by having email, ftp and usenet. As someone who was barely there, it was largely a standardized client problem. That's why NSCA Mosaic and later Netscape Navigator were so important. The Internet provided transport... but for what? To GP's standardization point, the Internet wouldn't have been successful if every server required you to have a different client to talk a different protocol. (The landscape was very different than that in which mobile apps now live) Web protocols + a client browser that understood them = palatable UX