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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 attemp

• 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.
      • gnufx 2y ago
        Yes, SRCNET/SERCNET/JANET were great as a physics researcher, despite what people have said about X.25. A potentially interesting point is that TCP/IP on JANET originally ran over X.25 until X.25 was finally phased out.
      • rjsw 2y ago
        You could also connect to JANET hosts from commercial machines over X.25. I had an account on the NRS host machine to administer our site info.
    • gnufx 2y ago
      The "fat pipe" didn't look so fat at that stage! (I don't remember when you could first easily interact with the Internet.)
    • vidarh 2y ago
      I have fond memories of the Nordic university network (NORDUnet) when the US<-->Sweden link was upgraded to 34Mbps in '95 (NORDUnet kept 24Mbps of the cable initially). At the time the fastest connection between the US and elsewhere in Europe was 6Mbps, according to the NORDunet 25 year report.... At one point there was an outage of the Sprint connection to Sweden that the Nordic connection to the US went over, and the Nordic countries for several hours saturated connections throughout parts of Europe that were in no way at a scale suitable to be a functional backup for the traffic from the Nordic countries... It was first later I realised how spoiled we'd been... Tens of Mbps FTP speeds to other Nordic countries was routine in 94/95, for example.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• euroderf 2y ago
  IIRC Finland was connected by then.
  • lysace 2y ago
    I do understand your urge to turn this into a competition - but let's not.
    • dang 2y ago
      Far be it from me to step between Sweden and Finland but this might be a moment to mention from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." (which of course applies to your comments as well)
      • lysace 2y ago
        Fair.
        • lysace 2y ago
          But I think we had it handled.
  • vidarh 2y ago
    By '73? My understanding is the only other country outside the US to have a connection at that point was Norway, and only NORSAR and maybe one other location. NORSAR only because it was a critically important seismic array used by NATO to monitor Soviet missile tests. As far as I can tell, Finland first got ARPANET connection via NORDunet in 1988 [1][2][3], though possibly indirectly a few years before as there was a connection to Sweden a few years earlier. [1] https://siy.fi/history-of-the-finnish-internet/ https://siy.fi/history-of-the-finnish-internet/ [2] https://csc.fi/en/news/funets-anniversary-40-years-of-action-and-35-years-in-internet/ https://csc.fi/en/news/funets-anniversary-40-years-of-action... [3] From [2]: "On Thursday December 1st, 1988, the first routing test was carried out, allowing IP packets to pass from Finland via Nordunet to the USA, in effect the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET and Arpanet networks. This connected Finland to the international Internet via the Funet network. The following message can be seen as the beginning of the Finnish Internet."
• nonrandomstring 2y ago
  I was in the basement of UCL computer science (in the Pearson building) in 1988. Our lab had a very special yellow (Don't ever touch that!!) cable that ran across the ceiling between joists, then off under UCH toward Telecom tower. Of course we hung bits of origami on it with cotton. Apparently that was JANET. I never heard anyone say "The Internet" back then, but we did have a coms lecture where "inter-networking" was a thing. Nice to read some old names in that piece.
  • grumblepeet 2y ago
    Until relatively recently I worked with JANET (or Janet - lower case - as it is now) as part of Jisc, the UK's NREN. I also worked with the wider European org, GEANT, that runs the academic networks across Europe. We were (and still are ) very proud of Janet.
    • nonrandomstring 2y ago
      Thanks for your service. I did not know JANET was formed in April 1984. Then I was still at school, and we had a teletype that you could send emails. Of course those days no one had email so we had a class of kids sending emails to each other to print out on tty paper. I think the broader implications may have been lost in that lesson. It wes probably a BBS rather than JANET.
  • mhandley 2y ago
    I was also in one of those basement labs in the Pearson building in 1988. Not exactly the nicest place to work, but some great equipment. I particularly remember that year coding a graphical application in NeWS (Sun's original network window system, long before it became X/NeWS) on a Sun Workstation there, which was an amazing piece of kit for its time. Also remember the DecStation 3100s we had down there that would periodically catch fire.
    • nonrandomstring 2y ago
      Nice to meet you. Yeah the smell of overcooked circuits down there was something eh? I forget my room number now but there was something called the Pyramid next door that was mysterious and hush-hush. Phil Treleaven was my prof (saw him outside Waterstones last time I was around ULU so he must still be there).
• qw 2y ago
  I think knowledge was more localised to certain universities or researchers. Norway was the first country outside of USA to be connected to Arpanet in 1973 to share seismic data, but the universities did not gain general access until 1983. I posted submitted a link to a story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655568