[ih] what is and isn't the web, was Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol

[John Day]

I was thinking the same thing.  

Being the largest military contract on campus, we were being demonstrated against often and we were participating both to counter the arguments that were wrong and to support the ones that were right.  We fit right in. One of my favorite stories was when four of us left Urbana to go out to Philly to work on the machine. As we got off the plane in Chicago, the flight attendant said to me: “Are you guys in a band?”  ;-) I replied, no we are crypto-fascist lackeys of the military industrial state.  A phrase we heard often in the demonstrations. Our office was fire-bombed at one point but it didn’t go off. (You have to be pretty bad to make a Molotov cocktail that doesn’t work!)

Doing work for ARPA was a real concern, at an ARPANET pre-meeting there was a lot of reticence being expressed about taking their money. It is said that John Melvin got up and said, Guys, it is okay, our money is only bloody on one side!   Whether it is happened or not, I am not sure. But it was a good line.


> On Aug 22, 2016, at 10:52, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> 
> On 8/21/16 11:28 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Ofer Inbar wrote:
>>> SMTP and NNTP came with no auth or access control or any sort of
>>> security that I recall in the early days, and weren't they both
>>> designed consciously and deliberately for a distributed network
>>> with independent management of each node?
>> at the time smtp was defined, everyone who could make a tcp/ip
>> connection to you was trustworthy. government agencies and contractors
>> including universities. there was no reason to authenticate or secure it
>> at that stage. the idea of netcom or alternet where someone who could
>> make tcp/ip sessions toward your server might have nothing to lose (in
>> terms of their internet access or their government contract) was rarely
>> considered, and when it was considered, one set of folks said it was a
>> bad idea and the network should remain mostly closed, and another set of
>> folks said it was a great idea and we should not make the rest of
>> humanity jump through any special authentication hoops in order to
>> access our services. so, all of us were wrong, about everything, but
>> differently.
>> 
> 
> Somehow "trustworthy" and "universities" - in the late 60s - don't seem 
> together.  You know, there were these things called "students" floating 
> around, many of whom were spending a lot of their time in the streets 
> voicing distinctly anti-government and anti-military sentiments.  Also 
> the days when the MIT AI Lab handed out ITS accounts to all comers 
> (that's how I first got on the net, Fall 1971, a few weeks before Ray 
> Tomlinson sent the first ARPANET email - great timing on my part, a 
> front row seat for lots of things).
> 
> Miles Fidelman
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
> 
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