14 ms·

How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)

169 points by samizdis 2y ago

dang 2y ago
[stub for offtopicness]
- xp84 2y ago
  I’m happy that you Brits finally got the Internet in 2018. It took a while, but I hope it was worth the wait.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - louthy 2y ago
    > I hope it was worth the wait It’s awful, what’s wrong with having a chat, in person, over a nice cup of tea?
- crankyOldGuy 2y ago
  Sorry if I'm unclear on what 2018 is supposed to mean (understand it's an approximation). But internet service is much older than that. According to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom Pipex was established in 1990 and began providing dial-up Internet access in March 1992, the UK's first commercial Internet service provider (ISP). That's about the same time it became available in the U.S. I got home internet service (dial-up) in the mid-1990's.
  - jlund-molfese 2y ago
    Some of the other comments are joking around, but 2018 refers to the original date the article was published :)
  - philipkglass 2y ago
    2018 is the estimated year of the article, not the events described in the article.
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    > Pipex was established in 1990 I know reading the article is very much out of fashion, but all the dates given in the article are in the 1970s. Just like the dates in the Wikipedia article you linked.
dang 2y ago
I've put 2018 as an approximation above because the intro says "a few years before he died" in 2020. If anybody can figure out the actual year, we can change it. Edit: in HN titles, if you see a year at the end in parens, that indicates the year that the article originated. If you see a year that's not at the end in parens, that's part of the article title, meaning it's probably about something that happened that year. That's the convention anyhow.
- hildenae 2y ago
  It says it was newer published (before now), so would not 2025 be correct?
  - dang 2y ago
    We usually try for the year that the article originated.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 2y ago
  "The impact of the internet on our way of life in its first 40 years has been immeasurable. It has expanded and developed in a way none of us envisaged in 1975", suggesting 2015?
  - dang 2y ago
    Not sure how literally to take the 40 but that's at least more precise than "a few" so I've switched to 2015 above. Thanks!
lysace 2y ago
So I was just reading through a 1988 Swedish popular book on "data communications". Not a single word on Arpanet/etc. Many other network technologies and attempts at global networks described. My point: "Internet" wasn't very well-known "even" in 1988 outside of well-connected places. Book: Scandinavian PC Systems, Valentino Berti: "Introduktion till datakommunikation"
- kjellsbells 2y ago
  The inter-networking part of Internet was specialist knowledge restricted to those researchers actively working in the space. But countries had rich national networks back then, e.g. UK universities had a thing called JANET (joint academic network) that allowed, say, someone at the University of Kent to send files to someone at the University of Durham. The hosts were heterogeneous but the protocols were kinda sorta in place (there was a lot of X.25 leased lines and UUCP dialup, if I recall). Kent sticks in my memory because they could do commercial email in the old path!to!destination style if you knew the right guy to call. And Durham because they had this incredibly wacky mainframe OS, Michigan Terminal System, which I have never seen anywhere except there and at Newcastle (a town 40km up the road from Durham).
  - Kye 2y ago
    It looks like Archive.org has it. https://archive.org/details/michigan-terminal-system-distribution-documentation-and-files https://archive.org/details/michigan-terminal-system-distrib...
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    Any idea when JAnet connected to the Internet? When I first used it ~1994 I remember they had a single 2Mbps connection to the USA for the whole of JAnet. What connection did the housing in the dorms at Kent have? I seem to remember serial ports in the rooms, but could have been ether?
    - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
      JANET went live in 1984. Before then, UK universities were connected by X.25 links with ARPAnet gateways to Rest of World. (Such as it was then - basically the US and Scandinavia.) You could, with a tiny amount of password hacking, joyride around the system quite easily, at least as far as getting to a login message on a remote host, possibly logging on with a guest account and having a text chat with surprised people in other countries.
cpr 2y ago
That March 1977 map always brings back a flood of memories to this old-timer. Happy nights spent hacking in the Harvard graduate computer center next to the PDP-1/PDP-10 (Harv-1, Harv-10), getting calls on the IMP phone in the middle of the night from the BBN network operations asking me to reboot it manually as it had gotten wedged... And, next to me, Bill Gates writing his first assembler/linker/simulator for the Altair 8080... (I tried talking him out of this microcomputer distraction -- we have the whole world of mainframes at our fingertips! -- without success.) (Edit:) We also would play the game of telnet-till-you-die, going from machine to machine around the world (no passwords on guest accounts in the early days), until the connection died somewhere along the way. Plus, once the hackers came along, Geoff Steckel (systems guy on the PDP-10) wrote a little logger to record all incoming guests keystrokes on an old teletype, so we could watch them attempting to hack the system.
- ManuelKiessling 2y ago
  Dear Sir, could you just, you know, continue writing? I just love these stories, would love to hear more!
  - mromanuk 2y ago
    Yes, please! I love these comments on HN, this is blog material.
  - coffeecantcode 2y ago
    If this man wrote a book I’d read it.
  - cpr 2y ago
    Nah, it'd come out too much as "almost famous". I did manage to avoid being Microsoft employee #12 or so (my buddy Bob Greenberg was #8, I think?, and encouraged me to come join them), and Adobe employee #8 (I knew Chuck Geschke from some earlier work done as an undergrad extending his PhD thesis to Harvard's extensible language ECL), due to various life circumstances. I guess God didn't want be to be a spoiled rotten billionaire. Another near miss was co-consulting with Len Bosack at HP setting up Lisp Machine networking, and wondering how the heck the then-nascent Cisco was ever going to sell more than a few hundred routers (based on the same Sun-1 boards developed by Andy Bechtolstein at Standford that we used at Imagen, the first typeset-quality laser printers, a spinoff from Don Knuth's research at Stanford) to universities and government labs. As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.
timthorn 2y ago
> The little black book of the internet The article doesn't mention the Coloured Book protocols, but I'm pretty sure this phrasing isn't accidental: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols
- gnufx 2y ago
  Red book was particularly interesting (modulo lack of security) long before "the Grid"; it worked between various computer centres.
- vidarh 2y ago
  While it could be, "little black book" commonly refers to an address book, and has since long before the internet. While it's hard to established when it became a commonly understood term for that, -as it was used in a more general sense before that, and often simply referred to small notebooks -, it has seen use to refer to address books since at least the 19th century[1]. (EDIT: It's also mentioned in Aretha Franklin's "Runnin' Out of Fools[2] from 1964) Also, now I feel very old. "Little black book" was an ubiquitous term when I grew up, and so using the term would just be a synonym to "address book" that nobody would think twice about. [1] E.g. The House and Home: A Practical Book - Volume 1 (1896): "And there is a little black book with red lettering seen on every writing-table and carriage-cushion wherein puzzled mater-familias finds her bearings annually among her cherished acquaintances, many of whom the little black book alone keeps in her recollection!" [2] Guess you got back (Guess you got) To my name (To my name) In your little black book
  - timthorn 2y ago
    > "Little black book" was an ubiquitous term when I grew up, and so using the term would just be a synonym to "address book" that nobody would think twice about. Indeed, I'm aware of that meaning and its ubiquity. But amongst UK university computing staff at that time, knowledge of the Coloured Books was as embedded. Remember that JANET network addresses were the other way round, so rather than cam.ac.uk it used to be uk.ac.cam - the author of this piece will have been well aware of the double meaning. It's that double meaning that gives the headline it's precise relevance and a dash of humour.
sourraspberry 2y ago
Time-sharing is interesting. The same kind of thing is happening now with AI.
gnufx 2y ago
The trouble was that it was quite unclear to a researcher, even in one of the research council networking hubs, how to get access to the gateway, and it may have cost. I gave up trying before going to work in Oak Ridge for the summer (where I was taken aback by the primitive computing, at least "outside the fence"). For some time (mid-80s to early 90s? I don't remember) we were generally dependent on the infamous BITNET email gateway to communicate with the rest of the world from the well-developed UK network. It was "interesting" to deal with code in a Swedish 6-bit character set sent through the EBCDIC gateway to ISO 646-GB. (The Fortran Hollerith formats were added interest...)
nxobject 2y ago
The most hilari-depressing part of the story was the funding politics and grantwriting headaches that have never changed: – the NPL couldn't set up a British inter-network because of pressure from GPO; – they couldn't connect to ARPA via Norway because of the Foreign Office; – then, UCL couldn't get funding from SERC; – then, UCL couldn't get funding from DTI because it didn't have industrial interest (although, to be fair, it was the department of "industry")... ...and then nearly a decade later government bodies were trying to take it over. (It looks like the IMP/TIP was literally funded by petty-ish £££ that the NPL superintendent could get his hands on without further approval. To be fair, GPO did fund the link to Oslo.)
- mhandley 2y ago
  Peter once told me that in 1973, the only two organizations permitted to do telecommunications were the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense. So to legally connect UCL to the ARPAnet, he needed an exception clause. Somehow he got both the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense to sign off that they were not interested in computer-to-computer communications, in perpetuity, so that UCL could do so instead. He said he never tried to hold them to it later.
- Full_Clark 2y ago
  Spot on. Would be interesting to see what sort of hoops you'd have to jump through in an academic lab today to secure similar money. That 5k GPB in 1973 is 77k in today's pound, or about 95k USD at current exchange rates.
- indymike 2y ago
  Every time I have a meeting with government, especially regulatory agencies about getting something done, it isn't easy because these words have very different meanings, which can lead you into bad places quickly: support - engineer means "compatible, works with" govt means "aiding a cause" business rules - engineer means logic, govt means literal rules that have force of law If you want to get results, you have to be really careful - if you say you are supporting something, the govt people may think you are aiding a cause they or whoever appointed them oppose. If you talk about rules, govt people assume a 2 year fight, expensive process, and lots of hearings - so it gets weird.
ChildOfChaos 2y ago
Peter Kirstein died in January 2020, likely around the time when the internet finally reached Wales. Context: https://x.com/vizcomic/status/457192728770510848 https://x.com/vizcomic/status/457192728770510848
- junto 2y ago
  Context: - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viz_(comics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viz_(comics) - https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/south-wales-branch/history-of-computing/what-did-south-wales-ever-do-for-computing/ https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-comm... - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies
mhandley 2y ago
I worked for Peter Kirstein for many years - he always had wonderful stories to tell. In the article Peter talks about the temporary import license for the original ARPAnet equipment. The delayed VAT and duty bill for this gear prevented anyone else taking over the UK internet in the early days because the bill would have then become due. But he didn't mention that eventually if the original ARPAnet equipment was ever scrapped, the bill would also become due. When I was first at UCL in the mid 1980s until well into the 90s, all that equipment was stored disused in the mens toilets in the basement. Eventually Peter decided someone had to do something about it, but he couldn't afford the budget to ship all this gear back to the US. Peter always seemed to delight in finding loopholes, so he pulled some strings. Peter was always very well connected - UCL even ran the .int and nato.int domains for a long time. So, at some point someone from UCL drove a truck full of obsolete ARPAnet gear to some American Air Force base in East Anglia that was technically US territory. Someone from the US air force gave them a receipt, and the gear was officially exported. And there it was left, in the US Air Force garbage. Shame it didn't end up in a museum, but that would have required paying the VAT bill.
- nxobject 2y ago
  If only it could have disappeared into a vault until now... the bill could have been inflated away!
ggm 2y ago
I had the great fortune to work at UCL in the early 1980s, just as SATNET came to an end as a project. I worked on what became ISODE, and related stuff as well as doing operations bits and pieces. I was far too junior to figure in Peter's planning but I will say, he was a very interesting HoD: he didn't suffer fools gladly (and I am one) but at the same time could be quite forgiving, if you were at least entertaining about your foolishness. His most preferred model of funding work was to have 9/10ths of it done or a sure-fure thing, and then use the funding to work on the next idea, so he was guaranteed to have goods to deliver at the end of the project. He didn't always carry it off but when it worked it was superlative. I was on at least one OSI (protocol) project with 6 partners across industry and research in Europe, and the work was very unequal. That said, very fine dinners. I have fond memories of INRIA canteen food having wine and fresh fruit. UCL had baked beans and pies, the staff club had the same baked beans and pies but you could eat them under a superb Stanley Spenser oil painting of the resurrection. The first Cisco Router turned up one day, it had annoyingly noisy fans which blew air a useless direction compared to the rest of the racks. As Mark Handley has pointed out below the basement was full of trash: a fantastic Prism-wedge shaped digital copying stand used with the British Library to photograph rare works, and an unbelievably expensive CCD digital camera attached gathering dust, a BBN Butterfly (it was a heap of crap frankly) running pre-BGP routing, a BLIT terminal and depraz mouse, the first Dec and Sun workstations. We ran a project with the slade school of art doing digital arts design with them, lovely people. I still have some of the reject works. Peter liked inviting people to come and be at UCL. During my time Bob Braden (SATNET) was there, and Mike Lesk (UUCP) -and they were also very nice and approachable. Tiny tea-room, I caused a kurfuffle washing out the most disgustingly stained coffee mug there, the owner of which was bulding the patina both to see how thick it got, and to discourage others from using his cup. Peter had one standing rule you did NOT break: If there was an inter-departmental meeting with the people from ULCC (at that time down at Lambs Conduit St) he expected you to "vote against" any proposal they brought to the table without question: Departmental politics ran deep. Peter was a committed skier, he was hardly young when I got there and he was still avidly visiting the alps as often as possible. UCL ran the gateway from JANET (X.25 based non internet) to the ARPANet which required you to login to a unix jump host and use kermit to connect across, and lodge FTP requests using JANET "grey book" FTP protocol to talk to the FTP client through a conversion script. The gateway got hacked every now and then. Some of us were a bit unkind and said it used Kermit because Peter, who was somewhat small, frog-like and had thick glasses he peered through, appreciated the joke that he was Kermit personified.
msla 2y ago
Here's a debunking and a history of the myth the ARPANET/Internet was designed to survive nuclear war: http://9ol.es/nuclear-myth.html http://9ol.es/nuclear-myth.html A bit more: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15035/did-the-cold-war-affect-the-development-of-the-internet https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15035/did-the-co...
justinl33 2y ago
let's thank him for making some absolutely god-mode architectural calls (protocol layering, manufacturer agnosticism, etc.)
numberless 2y ago
> (2018) I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that... After some searching I found the Conversation's RSS feed for technology[1] which says it was 2025 after searching the page for "internet" and looking through the results <id>tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45404</id> <published>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</published> <updated>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</updated> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://theconversation.com/how-britain-got-its-first-internet-connection-by-the-late-pioneer-who-created-the-first-password-on-the-internet-45404"/> <title>How Britain got its first internet connection – by the late pioneer who created the first password on the internet</title> [1] https://theconversation.com/uk/technology/articles.atom https://theconversation.com/uk/technology/articles.atom
- pxeger1 2y ago
  The preface says it was originally written "a few years before [the author] died", but never published (until now - having been (re)edited), so the (2018) makes sense.
- lproven 2y ago
  > I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that You seem to be confusing the date it was written with the date it was published. I believe there are multiple works where that interval is over 50 years. I would not be surprised if a gap of a century has been surpassed.
ryao 2y ago
I really hope cable management has improved at LLNL since the 70s when that picture was taken.
DrBazza 2y ago
> he was prevented from extending his project outside the lab by pressure from the British Post Office, which then held a monopoly on telecommunications. The UK and telecoms don't make a happy pairing - we always seem to do the wrong thing: https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784 https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost... Dr Cochrane knew that Britain's tired copper network was insufficient: "In 1974 it was patently obvious that copper wire was unsuitable for digital communication in any form, and it could not afford the capacity we needed for the future." He was asked to do a report on the UK's future of digital communication and what was needed to move forward. "In 1979 I presented my results," he tells us, "and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort - that spanned in six years - involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation. "In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop".
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  BT let me off a £2,000 bill 'cus my dialer.exe got hijacked and I was calling a Seychelles premium line. I'd turned off the sound on my 56k? modem and didn't spot the extremely long beeps and boops. That's what got me started on basic security...zone alarm (pre-shitty-ness), proxomitron, hosts files (and other blocking lists/ banner blockers), autoexec.bat to delete histories, being caught out by dark patterns etc. Fun times....'cus the internet was fun at the time, too. Nowadays, despite a trove of bookmarks, I visit very, very, very few new-to-me sites.
nickdothutton 2y ago
The story has it all. Government stupidity and shortsightedness. Nonsensical self-harming bureaucracy. A plucky, persistent, woefully underfunded Brit who eventually succeeded in spite of the state.
gnufx 2y ago
Not relevant to the article, but for the history of UK academic networking mentioned in various comments, Wikipedia's account looks about right, though I'm not sure it's up-to-date concerning the regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET I was using SRCnet in 1981, when Liverpool Physics had a dedicated link to Daresbury (national lab) whose speed I don't remember at that stage. Unfortunately the infamous PDP11 "terminal concentrators" for interactive use then were horribly unreliable. RJE to the cloud, where analyses ran, worked well.

169 points by samizdis 2y ago

dang 2y ago

[stub for offtopicness]

xp84 2y ago
I’m happy that you Brits finally got the Internet in 2018. It took a while, but I hope it was worth the wait.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- louthy 2y ago
  > I hope it was worth the wait It’s awful, what’s wrong with having a chat, in person, over a nice cup of tea?
crankyOldGuy 2y ago
Sorry if I'm unclear on what 2018 is supposed to mean (understand it's an approximation). But internet service is much older than that. According to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom Pipex was established in 1990 and began providing dial-up Internet access in March 1992, the UK's first commercial Internet service provider (ISP). That's about the same time it became available in the U.S. I got home internet service (dial-up) in the mid-1990's.
- jlund-molfese 2y ago
  Some of the other comments are joking around, but 2018 refers to the original date the article was published :)
- philipkglass 2y ago
  2018 is the estimated year of the article, not the events described in the article.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  > Pipex was established in 1990 I know reading the article is very much out of fashion, but all the dates given in the article are in the 1970s. Just like the dates in the Wikipedia article you linked.

dang 2y ago

I've put 2018 as an approximation above because the intro says "a few years before he died" in 2020. If anybody can figure out the actual year, we can change it. Edit: in HN titles, if you see a year at the end in parens, that indicates the year that the article originated. If you see a year that's not at the end in parens, that's part of the article title, meaning it's probably about something that happened that year. That's the convention anyhow.

hildenae 2y ago
It says it was newer published (before now), so would not 2025 be correct?
- dang 2y ago
  We usually try for the year that the article originated.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 2y ago
"The impact of the internet on our way of life in its first 40 years has been immeasurable. It has expanded and developed in a way none of us envisaged in 1975", suggesting 2015?
- dang 2y ago
  Not sure how literally to take the 40 but that's at least more precise than "a few" so I've switched to 2015 above. Thanks!

lysace 2y ago

So I was just reading through a 1988 Swedish popular book on "data communications". Not a single word on Arpanet/etc. Many other network technologies and attempts at global networks described. My point: "Internet" wasn't very well-known "even" in 1988 outside of well-connected places. Book: Scandinavian PC Systems, Valentino Berti: "Introduktion till datakommunikation"

kjellsbells 2y ago
The inter-networking part of Internet was specialist knowledge restricted to those researchers actively working in the space. But countries had rich national networks back then, e.g. UK universities had a thing called JANET (joint academic network) that allowed, say, someone at the University of Kent to send files to someone at the University of Durham. The hosts were heterogeneous but the protocols were kinda sorta in place (there was a lot of X.25 leased lines and UUCP dialup, if I recall). Kent sticks in my memory because they could do commercial email in the old path!to!destination style if you knew the right guy to call. And Durham because they had this incredibly wacky mainframe OS, Michigan Terminal System, which I have never seen anywhere except there and at Newcastle (a town 40km up the road from Durham).
- Kye 2y ago
  It looks like Archive.org has it. https://archive.org/details/michigan-terminal-system-distribution-documentation-and-files https://archive.org/details/michigan-terminal-system-distrib...
- qingcharles 2y ago
  Any idea when JAnet connected to the Internet? When I first used it ~1994 I remember they had a single 2Mbps connection to the USA for the whole of JAnet. What connection did the housing in the dorms at Kent have? I seem to remember serial ports in the rooms, but could have been ether?
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    JANET went live in 1984. Before then, UK universities were connected by X.25 links with ARPAnet gateways to Rest of World. (Such as it was then - basically the US and Scandinavia.) You could, with a tiny amount of password hacking, joyride around the system quite easily, at least as far as getting to a login message on a remote host, possibly logging on with a guest account and having a text chat with surprised people in other countries.

cpr 2y ago

That March 1977 map always brings back a flood of memories to this old-timer. Happy nights spent hacking in the Harvard graduate computer center next to the PDP-1/PDP-10 (Harv-1, Harv-10), getting calls on the IMP phone in the middle of the night from the BBN network operations asking me to reboot it manually as it had gotten wedged... And, next to me, Bill Gates writing his first assembler/linker/simulator for the Altair 8080... (I tried talking him out of this microcomputer distraction -- we have the whole world of mainframes at our fingertips! -- without success.) (Edit:) We also would play the game of telnet-till-you-die, going from machine to machine around the world (no passwords on guest accounts in the early days), until the connection died somewhere along the way. Plus, once the hackers came along, Geoff Steckel (systems guy on the PDP-10) wrote a little logger to record all incoming guests keystrokes on an old teletype, so we could watch them attempting to hack the system.

ManuelKiessling 2y ago
Dear Sir, could you just, you know, continue writing? I just love these stories, would love to hear more!
- mromanuk 2y ago
  Yes, please! I love these comments on HN, this is blog material.
- coffeecantcode 2y ago
  If this man wrote a book I’d read it.
- cpr 2y ago
  Nah, it'd come out too much as "almost famous". I did manage to avoid being Microsoft employee #12 or so (my buddy Bob Greenberg was #8, I think?, and encouraged me to come join them), and Adobe employee #8 (I knew Chuck Geschke from some earlier work done as an undergrad extending his PhD thesis to Harvard's extensible language ECL), due to various life circumstances. I guess God didn't want be to be a spoiled rotten billionaire. Another near miss was co-consulting with Len Bosack at HP setting up Lisp Machine networking, and wondering how the heck the then-nascent Cisco was ever going to sell more than a few hundred routers (based on the same Sun-1 boards developed by Andy Bechtolstein at Standford that we used at Imagen, the first typeset-quality laser printers, a spinoff from Don Knuth's research at Stanford) to universities and government labs. As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.

timthorn 2y ago

> The little black book of the internet The article doesn't mention the Coloured Book protocols, but I'm pretty sure this phrasing isn't accidental: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols

gnufx 2y ago
Red book was particularly interesting (modulo lack of security) long before "the Grid"; it worked between various computer centres.
vidarh 2y ago
While it could be, "little black book" commonly refers to an address book, and has since long before the internet. While it's hard to established when it became a commonly understood term for that, -as it was used in a more general sense before that, and often simply referred to small notebooks -, it has seen use to refer to address books since at least the 19th century[1]. (EDIT: It's also mentioned in Aretha Franklin's "Runnin' Out of Fools[2] from 1964) Also, now I feel very old. "Little black book" was an ubiquitous term when I grew up, and so using the term would just be a synonym to "address book" that nobody would think twice about. [1] E.g. The House and Home: A Practical Book - Volume 1 (1896): "And there is a little black book with red lettering seen on every writing-table and carriage-cushion wherein puzzled mater-familias finds her bearings annually among her cherished acquaintances, many of whom the little black book alone keeps in her recollection!" [2] Guess you got back (Guess you got) To my name (To my name) In your little black book
- timthorn 2y ago
  > "Little black book" was an ubiquitous term when I grew up, and so using the term would just be a synonym to "address book" that nobody would think twice about. Indeed, I'm aware of that meaning and its ubiquity. But amongst UK university computing staff at that time, knowledge of the Coloured Books was as embedded. Remember that JANET network addresses were the other way round, so rather than cam.ac.uk it used to be uk.ac.cam - the author of this piece will have been well aware of the double meaning. It's that double meaning that gives the headline it's precise relevance and a dash of humour.

sourraspberry 2y ago

Time-sharing is interesting. The same kind of thing is happening now with AI.

gnufx 2y ago

The trouble was that it was quite unclear to a researcher, even in one of the research council networking hubs, how to get access to the gateway, and it may have cost. I gave up trying before going to work in Oak Ridge for the summer (where I was taken aback by the primitive computing, at least "outside the fence"). For some time (mid-80s to early 90s? I don't remember) we were generally dependent on the infamous BITNET email gateway to communicate with the rest of the world from the well-developed UK network. It was "interesting" to deal with code in a Swedish 6-bit character set sent through the EBCDIC gateway to ISO 646-GB. (The Fortran Hollerith formats were added interest...)

nxobject 2y ago

The most hilari-depressing part of the story was the funding politics and grantwriting headaches that have never changed: – the NPL couldn't set up a British inter-network because of pressure from GPO; – they couldn't connect to ARPA via Norway because of the Foreign Office; – then, UCL couldn't get funding from SERC; – then, UCL couldn't get funding from DTI because it didn't have industrial interest (although, to be fair, it was the department of "industry")... ...and then nearly a decade later government bodies were trying to take it over. (It looks like the IMP/TIP was literally funded by petty-ish £££ that the NPL superintendent could get his hands on without further approval. To be fair, GPO did fund the link to Oslo.)

mhandley 2y ago
Peter once told me that in 1973, the only two organizations permitted to do telecommunications were the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense. So to legally connect UCL to the ARPAnet, he needed an exception clause. Somehow he got both the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense to sign off that they were not interested in computer-to-computer communications, in perpetuity, so that UCL could do so instead. He said he never tried to hold them to it later.
Full_Clark 2y ago
Spot on. Would be interesting to see what sort of hoops you'd have to jump through in an academic lab today to secure similar money. That 5k GPB in 1973 is 77k in today's pound, or about 95k USD at current exchange rates.
indymike 2y ago
Every time I have a meeting with government, especially regulatory agencies about getting something done, it isn't easy because these words have very different meanings, which can lead you into bad places quickly: support - engineer means "compatible, works with" govt means "aiding a cause" business rules - engineer means logic, govt means literal rules that have force of law If you want to get results, you have to be really careful - if you say you are supporting something, the govt people may think you are aiding a cause they or whoever appointed them oppose. If you talk about rules, govt people assume a 2 year fight, expensive process, and lots of hearings - so it gets weird.

ChildOfChaos 2y ago

Peter Kirstein died in January 2020, likely around the time when the internet finally reached Wales. Context: https://x.com/vizcomic/status/457192728770510848 https://x.com/vizcomic/status/457192728770510848

junto 2y ago
Context: - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viz_(comics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viz_(comics) - https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/south-wales-branch/history-of-computing/what-did-south-wales-ever-do-for-computing/ https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-comm... - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies

mhandley 2y ago

I worked for Peter Kirstein for many years - he always had wonderful stories to tell. In the article Peter talks about the temporary import license for the original ARPAnet equipment. The delayed VAT and duty bill for this gear prevented anyone else taking over the UK internet in the early days because the bill would have then become due. But he didn't mention that eventually if the original ARPAnet equipment was ever scrapped, the bill would also become due. When I was first at UCL in the mid 1980s until well into the 90s, all that equipment was stored disused in the mens toilets in the basement. Eventually Peter decided someone had to do something about it, but he couldn't afford the budget to ship all this gear back to the US. Peter always seemed to delight in finding loopholes, so he pulled some strings. Peter was always very well connected - UCL even ran the .int and nato.int domains for a long time. So, at some point someone from UCL drove a truck full of obsolete ARPAnet gear to some American Air Force base in East Anglia that was technically US territory. Someone from the US air force gave them a receipt, and the gear was officially exported. And there it was left, in the US Air Force garbage. Shame it didn't end up in a museum, but that would have required paying the VAT bill.

nxobject 2y ago
If only it could have disappeared into a vault until now... the bill could have been inflated away!

ggm 2y ago

I had the great fortune to work at UCL in the early 1980s, just as SATNET came to an end as a project. I worked on what became ISODE, and related stuff as well as doing operations bits and pieces. I was far too junior to figure in Peter's planning but I will say, he was a very interesting HoD: he didn't suffer fools gladly (and I am one) but at the same time could be quite forgiving, if you were at least entertaining about your foolishness. His most preferred model of funding work was to have 9/10ths of it done or a sure-fure thing, and then use the funding to work on the next idea, so he was guaranteed to have goods to deliver at the end of the project. He didn't always carry it off but when it worked it was superlative. I was on at least one OSI (protocol) project with 6 partners across industry and research in Europe, and the work was very unequal. That said, very fine dinners. I have fond memories of INRIA canteen food having wine and fresh fruit. UCL had baked beans and pies, the staff club had the same baked beans and pies but you could eat them under a superb Stanley Spenser oil painting of the resurrection. The first Cisco Router turned up one day, it had annoyingly noisy fans which blew air a useless direction compared to the rest of the racks. As Mark Handley has pointed out below the basement was full of trash: a fantastic Prism-wedge shaped digital copying stand used with the British Library to photograph rare works, and an unbelievably expensive CCD digital camera attached gathering dust, a BBN Butterfly (it was a heap of crap frankly) running pre-BGP routing, a BLIT terminal and depraz mouse, the first Dec and Sun workstations. We ran a project with the slade school of art doing digital arts design with them, lovely people. I still have some of the reject works. Peter liked inviting people to come and be at UCL. During my time Bob Braden (SATNET) was there, and Mike Lesk (UUCP) -and they were also very nice and approachable. Tiny tea-room, I caused a kurfuffle washing out the most disgustingly stained coffee mug there, the owner of which was bulding the patina both to see how thick it got, and to discourage others from using his cup. Peter had one standing rule you did NOT break: If there was an inter-departmental meeting with the people from ULCC (at that time down at Lambs Conduit St) he expected you to "vote against" any proposal they brought to the table without question: Departmental politics ran deep. Peter was a committed skier, he was hardly young when I got there and he was still avidly visiting the alps as often as possible. UCL ran the gateway from JANET (X.25 based non internet) to the ARPANet which required you to login to a unix jump host and use kermit to connect across, and lodge FTP requests using JANET "grey book" FTP protocol to talk to the FTP client through a conversion script. The gateway got hacked every now and then. Some of us were a bit unkind and said it used Kermit because Peter, who was somewhat small, frog-like and had thick glasses he peered through, appreciated the joke that he was Kermit personified.

msla 2y ago

Here's a debunking and a history of the myth the ARPANET/Internet was designed to survive nuclear war: http://9ol.es/nuclear-myth.html http://9ol.es/nuclear-myth.html A bit more: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15035/did-the-cold-war-affect-the-development-of-the-internet https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15035/did-the-co...

justinl33 2y ago

let's thank him for making some absolutely god-mode architectural calls (protocol layering, manufacturer agnosticism, etc.)

numberless 2y ago

> (2018) I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that... After some searching I found the Conversation's RSS feed for technology[1] which says it was 2025 after searching the page for "internet" and looking through the results <id>tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45404</id> <published>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</published> <updated>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</updated> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://theconversation.com/how-britain-got-its-first-internet-connection-by-the-late-pioneer-who-created-the-first-password-on-the-internet-45404"/> <title>How Britain got its first internet connection – by the late pioneer who created the first password on the internet</title> [1] https://theconversation.com/uk/technology/articles.atom https://theconversation.com/uk/technology/articles.atom

pxeger1 2y ago
The preface says it was originally written "a few years before [the author] died", but never published (until now - having been (re)edited), so the (2018) makes sense.
lproven 2y ago
> I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that You seem to be confusing the date it was written with the date it was published. I believe there are multiple works where that interval is over 50 years. I would not be surprised if a gap of a century has been surpassed.

ryao 2y ago

I really hope cable management has improved at LLNL since the 70s when that picture was taken.

DrBazza 2y ago

> he was prevented from extending his project outside the lab by pressure from the British Post Office, which then held a monopoly on telecommunications. The UK and telecoms don't make a happy pairing - we always seem to do the wrong thing: https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784 https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost... Dr Cochrane knew that Britain's tired copper network was insufficient: "In 1974 it was patently obvious that copper wire was unsuitable for digital communication in any form, and it could not afford the capacity we needed for the future." He was asked to do a report on the UK's future of digital communication and what was needed to move forward. "In 1979 I presented my results," he tells us, "and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort - that spanned in six years - involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation. "In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop".

Ylpertnodi 2y ago
BT let me off a £2,000 bill 'cus my dialer.exe got hijacked and I was calling a Seychelles premium line. I'd turned off the sound on my 56k? modem and didn't spot the extremely long beeps and boops. That's what got me started on basic security...zone alarm (pre-shitty-ness), proxomitron, hosts files (and other blocking lists/ banner blockers), autoexec.bat to delete histories, being caught out by dark patterns etc. Fun times....'cus the internet was fun at the time, too. Nowadays, despite a trove of bookmarks, I visit very, very, very few new-to-me sites.

nickdothutton 2y ago

The story has it all. Government stupidity and shortsightedness. Nonsensical self-harming bureaucracy. A plucky, persistent, woefully underfunded Brit who eventually succeeded in spite of the state.

gnufx 2y ago

Not relevant to the article, but for the history of UK academic networking mentioned in various comments, Wikipedia's account looks about right, though I'm not sure it's up-to-date concerning the regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET I was using SRCnet in 1981, when Liverpool Physics had a dedicated link to Daresbury (national lab) whose speed I don't remember at that stage. Unfortunately the infamous PDP11 "terminal concentrators" for interactive use then were horribly unreliable. RJE to the cloud, where analyses ran, worked well.