The internet is 50 years old today. I suppose there are other notions of when the internet first started but this was one of the milestones along the way.
Check out the Today Show in 1994 with the hosts trying to explain what the internet is.
So it’s interesting to look back at a start that was nothing but a single message sent on the high tech equivalent of tin cans on a string. I wonder, has anyone found a use for this internet thing yet?
Tales of the Internet.
First, it was called ARPANET for a long time. ALL CAPS was popular back then. Most of us have gotten past that.
Started using that in 1977. Had to go down to the med school’s computer lab since we weren’t wired up to it yet.
There used to be a book that listed (sort of) all the people on ARPANET. Names, email, addresses. It was a good day when the edition with my name in it first came out. I was somebody!
ARPANET was quite restricted. A lot of CS departments weren’t on it at first. Then CSNET began, evolving into NSFNET. All with connections to each other. So it became an inter … net.
In 1972 a professor of mine said that the purpose of the Arpanet was for people at MIT to send “foo” to people at Stanford and for them to send “bar” back.
My first use was in 1974 at Illinois, where we logged into Stanford to play with the Parry paranoid person simulator.
And my Lockheed SUE microcode simulator and assembler got sent to BBN. The SUE was the minicomputer used as the IMP. I don’t know if they ever used them, but I like to think they did.
I was using something in 1981, but I don’t think it was the internet. My coauthor in Cleveland used something called Tymnet to connect to a Canadian carrier called Datapac and then was able to sign on to my account at McGill and thus we could exchange files. In late 1984 we got email on something called Bitnet and I think that was part of the internet.
BITNET (ah, ALL CAPS again!) was never part of the Internet. It was sort of a DIY networking thing that ran separately. It used a different protocol and was in fact a store-and-forward thing. So an email, for example, would sit at the originating site’s server until it dialed into another server and passed it along. Then that server would hold onto it until it contacted the next one, etc. It could take several days for an email to reach its destination. (UUCP also worked this way.)
BITNET in the US didn’t last long but it survived in Russia for a remarkably long time due to being a cheap way of networking.