[ih] First file transfer on ARPANET

[Ofer Inbar]

John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
> Our biggest problem was that our vision quickly outstripped the 
> capability of the computers of the day.  (NLS was a very good example 
> of working beyond the ragged edge)  Our model was that the Net should 
> be a virtual OS that we could just use.  Too bad those ideas were 
> abandoned and we haven't moved very far in the last 35 years.
> 
> It really is too bad that the Internet ended up being more like DOS 
> than a real OS.

My impression in the few years after I got on the net at the beginning
of 1990 was that distributed computing using the net as you describe
was out there and slowly progressing, and that stuff started dying or
getting blocked in the mid to late 90s due to security problems as the
net got bigger and more public and everyone started reflexively
turning off their RPC services and similar things.  How does that
correlate to the impressions of people who'd seen the 80s on the net?
  -- Cos