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"The Internet, birthed as it was in the idealism of California tech" The moment CERN is transmogrified to California. One could argue the internet pre-WWW exis

"The Internet, birthed as it was in the idealism of California tech" The moment CERN is transmogrified to California. One could argue the internet pre-WWW existed (I joined the internet myself on IRC and NEWS) but then, who today was on the internet pre-WWW?

mooreds 2y ago
Gopher and Usenet forever!
- kgwgk 2y ago
  > Gopher From the University of Minnessota in California.
dpflan 2y ago
Agreed, found this to be a cute distillation. Give Utah some credit too…
blipvert 2y ago
<raises hand> If you haven’t used telnet on a Gandalf PAX via RAL SPAN gateway to get to a talker then you haven’t lived.
Karellen 2y ago
> I joined the internet myself on IRC and NEWS And email, right? You do have email, don't you? Which is not implemented over the WWW, and is pre-WWW by the best part of a decade. (RFC 821/822 are dated August 1982, and the first publicly documented version of HTTP 0.9 is, I think, 1991?) I think it's pretty safe to say "The Internet", without any other qualification, came into being with the publication of the IPv4 RFC 791 in September 1981, by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. Now, California might not be entirely accurate, as while a fair amount of the work on the Internet Protocols was done at UCLA and UC Berkley, MIT was also heavily involved along with co-ordination from DARPA's IPTO in Virginia (specifically, The Pentagon). But I think "California" is a much more accurate birthplace for The Internet than CERN. Edit: I'm guessing you also use the not-built-on-WWW DNS system from RFCs 882/883 published in 1983?
- e40 2y ago
  Don’t forget BBN. The TCP/IP code in BSD was originally from them. Let’s call it a prototype.
  - p_l 2y ago
    BBN got a lot of the initial work, as well as built the initial infrastructure including routers. BSD got a contract to port TCP/IP to Unix because DoD found themselves facing that the main system they worked with TCP/IP on was discontinued. Thus a grant to port the stack to Unix and make it available as wide as possible.
    - e40 2y ago
      I was on mobile and didn't want to type this out: I was there when Bill Joy, Sam Leffler, and Bob Henry (not Robert R Henry) were crowed around a huge HP terminal in the common area of the 5th floor of Evans Hall. I used the public/common terminals for my work and was sitting there one day when the trio walked in a were excitedly talking about the TCP/IP code from BBN. I have no idea what they were doing, but I think they were trying to build it.
      - p_l 2y ago
        Generally a lot of networking code evolved on the big 36bit machines. There were implementations for unix that predated BSD sockets, but AFAIK Berkeley got a grant to make an implementation that would be freely accessible when TOPS-20 future was indicated to be in jeopardy - or it might have been just because before AT&T being able to demand licensing fees, everyone was putting out clones of Unix on various hardware.
        e40 2y ago
        I'm pretty sure Berkeley (or UC?) had a System V license and was allowed to redistribute code based on it in BSD. That became a point of contention later, when the *BSDs started to become popular. This is all very old stuff so I might have the details wrong. It was definitely a fun time to be at UCB. I remember getting the early Sun workstations and porting stuff to them. It was a really good port of BSD, but that Motorola chip was a problem for some things. I ported the Franz Lisp compiler (liszt) to it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 2y ago
Some of us were.
gruturo 2y ago
Hmm I wasn't on the Internet but was active on BBSes since '87, and shortly after on the worldwide X25 network (tymnet, telenet, datapac etc), does it count?
tacon 2y ago
I spent the summer of 1972 programming via the ArpaNET. I had no school computing budget to use, so I rented a $12/mo 300 baud dialup modem and dialed into the UCLA TIP, which allowed me to spend the day programming PDP-10 assembly on Harvard's machine. Harvard had no (free) storage, so in the evenings I would send my files to Stanford's PDP-10, conveniently using the disk space of a professor on sabbatical.

mooreds 2y ago

Gopher and Usenet forever!

kgwgk 2y ago
> Gopher From the University of Minnessota in California.

dpflan 2y ago

Agreed, found this to be a cute distillation. Give Utah some credit too…

blipvert 2y ago

<raises hand> If you haven’t used telnet on a Gandalf PAX via RAL SPAN gateway to get to a talker then you haven’t lived.

Karellen 2y ago

> I joined the internet myself on IRC and NEWS And email, right? You do have email, don't you? Which is not implemented over the WWW, and is pre-WWW by the best part of a decade. (RFC 821/822 are dated August 1982, and the first publicly documented version of HTTP 0.9 is, I think, 1991?) I think it's pretty safe to say "The Internet", without any other qualification, came into being with the publication of the IPv4 RFC 791 in September 1981, by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. Now, California might not be entirely accurate, as while a fair amount of the work on the Internet Protocols was done at UCLA and UC Berkley, MIT was also heavily involved along with co-ordination from DARPA's IPTO in Virginia (specifically, The Pentagon). But I think "California" is a much more accurate birthplace for The Internet than CERN. Edit: I'm guessing you also use the not-built-on-WWW DNS system from RFCs 882/883 published in 1983?

e40 2y ago
Don’t forget BBN. The TCP/IP code in BSD was originally from them. Let’s call it a prototype.
- p_l 2y ago
  BBN got a lot of the initial work, as well as built the initial infrastructure including routers. BSD got a contract to port TCP/IP to Unix because DoD found themselves facing that the main system they worked with TCP/IP on was discontinued. Thus a grant to port the stack to Unix and make it available as wide as possible.
  - e40 2y ago
    I was on mobile and didn't want to type this out: I was there when Bill Joy, Sam Leffler, and Bob Henry (not Robert R Henry) were crowed around a huge HP terminal in the common area of the 5th floor of Evans Hall. I used the public/common terminals for my work and was sitting there one day when the trio walked in a were excitedly talking about the TCP/IP code from BBN. I have no idea what they were doing, but I think they were trying to build it.
    - p_l 2y ago
      Generally a lot of networking code evolved on the big 36bit machines. There were implementations for unix that predated BSD sockets, but AFAIK Berkeley got a grant to make an implementation that would be freely accessible when TOPS-20 future was indicated to be in jeopardy - or it might have been just because before AT&T being able to demand licensing fees, everyone was putting out clones of Unix on various hardware.
      - e40 2y ago
        I'm pretty sure Berkeley (or UC?) had a System V license and was allowed to redistribute code based on it in BSD. That became a point of contention later, when the *BSDs started to become popular. This is all very old stuff so I might have the details wrong. It was definitely a fun time to be at UCB. I remember getting the early Sun workstations and porting stuff to them. It was a really good port of BSD, but that Motorola chip was a problem for some things. I ported the Franz Lisp compiler (liszt) to it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

pjmlp 2y ago

Some of us were.

gruturo 2y ago

Hmm I wasn't on the Internet but was active on BBSes since '87, and shortly after on the worldwide X25 network (tymnet, telenet, datapac etc), does it count?

tacon 2y ago

I spent the summer of 1972 programming via the ArpaNET. I had no school computing budget to use, so I rented a $12/mo 300 baud dialup modem and dialed into the UCLA TIP, which allowed me to spend the day programming PDP-10 assembly on Harvard's machine. Harvard had no (free) storage, so in the evenings I would send my files to Stanford's PDP-10, conveniently using the disk space of a professor on sabbatical.