[ih] Telnet

[Miles Fidelman]

Silly observation perhaps, but given that it's all caps, and there's no 
acronym expansion given in the early specs - could it simply be 
somebody's idea of a cool sounding name (or maybe just a convenient one)?

Miles


On 8/22/16 3:45 PM, Alex McKenzie wrote:
> It is my recollection that Telnet is an abbreviation of "Teletype 
> network."  (I know I'm getting old and my recollections are suspect.)
>
> Cheers,
> Alex
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net>
> *To:* dcrocker at bbiw.net
> *Cc:* internet history <internet-history at postel.org>
> *Sent:* Monday, August 22, 2016 11:00 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [ih] what is and isn't the web, was Rise and Fall of 
> the Gopher Protocol
>
> Well, I kind of new you were making a joke and I agree that 
> ‘telecommunication network’ always sounded to cumbersome to me too. It 
> might have been 'telecom network.’  Looking for it this morning, it 
> certainly looked like it got lost pretty early. There is a lot of talk 
> about it being process-to-process or terminal-to-terminal, but nothing 
> that would get you Telnet.
>
> And of course, it go very confusing when they spun out Telenet.
>
> As for the eunuchs, that even goes to “2nd order’ use! Unix is of 
> course a castrated Multics. And in 1975, when we put the first Unix up 
> on the Net on our PDP-11/45, the next thing was to strip it down to 
> make it fit on an LSI-11, which of course we called eunix. ;-)
>
> Then there was the Burros MCP. The lowest level languages on the 
> machine were Algol and an extension of Algol for writing OSs called 
> ESPOL.  So all programs looked like procedures.  The OS was just a 
> process with a stack and user processes were simply procedures given 
> their own stack (it was called a cactus stack). The uses process was 
> set up to on completion simply return back to the OS stack. The 
> procedure in the OS that created user jobs was of course called 
> Motherforker.  The schedule queue was called the sheet. So of course 
> there were variables related to it called stackofsheet and pileofsheet.
>
>
> > On Aug 22, 2016, at 10:12, Dave Crocker <dhc2 at dcrocker.net 
> <mailto:dhc2 at dcrocker.net>> wrote:
> >
> > On 8/22/2016 6:31 AM, John Day wrote:
> >> I always heard that Telnet stood for "telecommunications network.”
> >
> >
> > Well, I meant to be a bit ironic, but didn't work hard enough at it (or
> > proofread well enough.)  Over the years, I've repeatedly heard that the
> > origin of the word was lost and that people debated it's meaning.
> >
> > My own inclination is to be that it really did mean telephone network,
> > since it directly replaced terminal dial-up service.  Besides that,
> > something like 'telecomunications network' strikes me as more 
> cumbersome
> > terminology than folks were using for naming on Arpanet stuff.[*]
> >
> >
> > d/
> >
> >
> > [*] And 'cumbersome naming' triggers a memory of some naming games
> > played at the UCLA project in the late 60s, which did an o/s, somewhat
> > comparable to Tenex.  And since my morning caffeine hasn't kicked in
> > enough yet, residual disinhibitions lead to this recitation: The team
> > building it included Vint, my brother Steve, Jon Postel and others. 
> They
> > decided on an 'urban' model for naming. One day my brother asked our
> > father for help naming one item they were stuck on, describing it as 
> the
> > component that allocated time to a process and ended the allocation 
> when
> > the time was up. With no hesitation, our father said "that's the 
> madam".
> >  I'm told that one member of the team got quite irritated by the
> > continuing effort to come up with clever names and demanded "Let's call
> > a spade a space".  So the team renamed the effort the Spade Working
> > Group.  The computer they were building for was an XDS Sigma 7, so the
> > operating system became the Sigma Executive, with the obvious acronym.
> > When I got hired, one of my tasks was to document this effort.  The
> > result was the SEX Manual. The system was always memory bound and the
> > team located some additional memory for sale, asking ARPA for the 
> money.
> >  Instead ARPA said we should get an access computer -- the first
> > versions of ANTS and ELF were available -- and use resources around the
> > net.  The version 2 efforts for both access systems were problematic in
> > various ways, but eventually we installed a new o/s that came out of
> > Bell Labs.  So ARPA took our SEX away and gave us Unix.  Predictably 
> the
> > initial superuser password was indeed eunuchs.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> >  Dave Crocker
> >  Brandenburg InternetWorking
> >  bbiw.net
> > _______
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-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

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