40th Anniversary of the Net - October 29, 1969

[kpete]

Run time: 06:02 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7duyl0ZZ5BQ   Posted on YouTube: October 28, 2009 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: October 31, 2009 By DU Member: kpete Views on DU: 505

 
pretty fascinating stuff?
kp

[unc70]

1. Not really as fascinating as they make it to be. Large networks already existed

While this was one of a large number of efforts that led to what we now call the Net, there were many others going back many years, several where I was involved. It is easy for those of you not around back then to be unaware of the large timeshare computer networks that were in regular operations long before any of the ARPANET or other "official" parents of the Internet. If you are under 40, what you think you "know" about early computing is probably as wrong as what you know about Vietnam or the Civil War. I was there for early computing and for Vietnam; the Civil War for me is second hand.

The DARPA work 40 years ago, while important, was just one of many networking projects, many having begun much earlier and were already in daily operation. Even the "packet switching" aspect was included in some of these already-existing systems. BBN, which implemented the IMPs, was one of many suppliers of timesharing and related networks. If I remember correctly, the initial IMPs were based on existing designs already in use for TS work.

Consider this example from over forty years ago here in North Carolina, the TUCC network supported the three primary universities (UNC, Duke, NC State), IBM, several other businesses, and a total of 45 colleges around the state through the NCECS network (North Carolina Educational Computing Service). While some of these schools might have just remote card reader/printer sites and a few had little more than a few Teletype terminals, other locations had extensive computer-to-computer networks. It would take quite a number of years before the initial ARPANET work would function at the level of the every-day production 1969 NCECS network.

While most of the connections of the NCECS were typical of 1960's time-shared or batch operations, there were a number of specialized devices on these networks (e.g. CalComp plotters). In 1968, I added support for a bit-mapped graphics device (the CC-30) -- quite slow over a modem and not very good resolution either. (That was using BTAM on 2701 controller; in 1969-70 I did animations on a CC-30 channel-attached to a PDP-8.)

Read about timesharing (e.g. DTSS) and networks (e.g. Burroughs Poll-Select/Contention) and you might be surprised at what existed in the late 1960's. You might even find email and markup languages long before HTML. Try looking at some of the early NCECS articles with authors like Brooks, Gallie, or Freeman.

BTW all these things predated things like Unix and C by many years. It is a shame that so much valueable experience was discarded by universities and professors without a clue what they were doing. But that is for another really long rant.

[unc70]

2. Let me clarify slightly that those actually involved discuss the larger context

They readily discuss how this first use of IMPs outside BBN did not seem all that big a deal to them at the time. That was true for most of us; if we had realized the importance of what we were doing, we would have preserved a few more of the important systems. I regret I let a few machines slip from my grasp, though I still have all the software and almost all the machines.