Internet
 

re some recent comments:
If anyone wants to discuss how the Arpa/Darpa/Internet really got started & people like Jon Postel, Vint Cerf, & Steve Crocker we can.

Lets just say I remember when there were 220 nodes, what the % sign is for in SMTP

ps was sending international eMails in 1968.

I have no idea what Arpa/Darpa is, but I am curious. Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that before the current method of using a web browser for communicating/information transfer, it was necessary to directly link two computers via phone lines in order to send emails and other information.

DARPA = Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense that is responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.

Originally known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the agency was created on February 7, 1958, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik 1 in 1957. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA

A lot of personal computer and Internet technology was developed (at least in part) at this agency.

When I was in 5th grade in about 1966, my school had a dialup modem connection to a mainframe computer that was located at a university about 50 miles away. It ran at 150 baud, so not very fast. :) We could communicate with the university, and we learned some beginning programming in Basic language. I suppose it was pretty advanced stuff for elementary kids at that time.

Am a little older than most, played first video games in 1957. First digital comm was at 66 wpm (words per minute) then went to 100 wpm. Used Baudot (baud) encoding. Learned electronics (told was last class to learn vacuum tubes) in USAF in 60's. Lost track of computer languages but now both Ebcdic (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) and American Standard (ASCII). First coding was pure machine code then moved up to Assembly Language in 70s.

Consequently find it funny when people talk about the Internet starting in '90s and the Web (port 80, https port 443) being everything. Suspect can still send eMail (port 25) with telnet, is just RFC 821.

Can go for a few hours on the early daze.

IN 1988, I had a list of all the "knowable" IP addresses in the known world. 12 pages, single spaced. I hated computer classes in college, and now its my profession. UGH.

Al Gore started the internet in the 80’s. Anyone that disagrees is a sexist, racist homophobic, xenophobic anti vax, meat eating, environment denying, spaceship hiding at area 51, ham sandwich eating old white guy!
Sorry, coffee got the best of me

I see all of you are having fun now. Good thread for it.

I also was involved (as a student) in the earlier days of the computer as a home accessory. My son was playing with a computer when he was 3 years old.
My wife and daughter have far more knowledge on the computer vs me.

MY BASIC KNOWLEDGE ON A COMPUTER IS WITH FORCED INDUCTION WORK AND
SIMULATIONS VS DYNO DATA.

So I am not in the loop with you people. BUT I do remember carrying my box with
all of the cards in precise order over to the computer building so that I could run
HOPEFULLY the most basic computer problem in college Computers 101.

Sometimes the card boxes would get dropped or the cards installed improperly and it would take hours and hours to trouble-shoot the issue. We were hooked up with the people from MIT and Standford as well as the U of Michigan.

Tom V.

I remember going on a tour of Samford University when I was a junior in high school around 1974. They had a "computer room" that had to be 2000 square feet full of whirring big blue refrigerator sized machines and a couple of big rotating card files. The Jetson's would have been proud.

I suspect my current Casio wristwatch has about the same computing power.

But they made good room heaters and was the only place that had good AC. To a south Floridian that was important. Do you remember the Magic Markers ?

Here is some info on the computer system I used in Computer Science Classes.

Digital Equipment Corporation DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family[1] manufactured beginning in 1966[2] and discontinued in 1983.[3][4][5][self-published source?] 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especially as the TOPS-10 operating system became widely used.[6]

The PDP-10's architecture is almost identical to that of DEC's earlier PDP-6, sharing the same 36-bit word length and slightly extending the instruction set (but with improved hardware implementation). Some aspects of the instruction set are unusual, most notably the byte instructions, which operated on bit fields of any size from 1 to 36 bits inclusive, according to the general definition of a byte as a contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits.

The PDP-10 is the machine that made time-sharing common, and this and other features made it a common fixture in many university computing facilities and research labs during the 1970s, the most notable being Harvard University's Aiken Computation Laboratory, MIT's AI Lab and Project MAC, Stanford's SAIL, Computer Center Corporation (CCC), ETH (ZIR), and Carnegie Mellon University. Its main operating systems, TOPS-10 and TENEX, were used to build out the early ARPANET.

We had a PDP-6 computer which was upgraded to the PDP-10 a few years later.
36 bit word length. That was a LONG time ago.

Tom V.

I believe that people who were in their 20's at around 1991, like me, will fondly remember that time as when the internet as we know it became widely available.
Sure it was around long before that, but not at the consumer level. I still remember it being called the "information superhighway". Who would have known that for all its benefits, it would have caused so much trouble as well.

Easy to predict. If it can be corrupted, humans will...

My dorm room at the University of Minnesota was directly upstairs from a card reader room that was hooked up to the main computer over at the Electrical Engineering building. It was pretty annoying listening to that chunka-chinka-chunka noise when some kid would decide to run his cards at 1am.

" card boxes would get dropped or the cards installed improperly and it would take hours and hours" Hnt: what the magc marker was for.

To draw a diagonal line across the edge of the card deck?

In my current database manipulation job, I keep reminding people that the data is only as good as the dumbest person with access to it. That elicits a cringe, usually.

I remember when I first started writing for High Performance Pontiac back in 1988, Padgett was a columnist and encouraged people to contact him through his Prodigy account and I remember thinking, "WTF is that?"

Padgett is definitely an early adopter and his Prodigy account introduced me to the internet.

I remember in the late 80's how our telcom engineering department got a PC funded by corporate. It just appeared one day. They put it on a special table in the room for all to use. Nobody knew how to use it.

Thank you Don, retirement is mostly boring but has its moments. Plodigy was back in the daze of dial up BBS servers & 2400 baud modems. Had my own domain because providers were changing about daily, .us domain is one of the earliest.
To me the internet is people not things, web is Tim Berners-Lee and port 80 and the flaws in early https (443) think I have a copy of Mosaic here.....somewhere. Before the web we had Archie and Veronica. Back in the '80s and '90s it was the wild wild west, the Internet was defined by "Requests for Comments" and were discussed. And now Win 11 is being fun, fun, fun (some of the CPUs on The List don't work).

ps in 1984 when I came to work at Martin & trundled in my Columbia VP1600 (amber screen) was consternation. IBM PCs were to connect to the mainframe and the province of managers, something I always avoided.

I was in the first computer math class offered at my high school in 77-78 we used what I believe were apple ll computers. Boring as hell as I remember. No internet of course so just a bunch of letters and numbers. Later I thought I'd try it again and bought an IBM compatible commadore colt. Still found it boring. Computers didn't get fun for me until 96-97. Now if course I'd be bored without one and a lot less accomplished in most everything I enjoy doing.