[ih] "40 years on, the Internet transmits every aspect of our lives" (SF Chronicle / SFGATE)

Brian E Carpenter brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com
Sun Aug 28 13:04:16 PDT 2016


On 28/08/2016 22:50, John Day wrote:
> Yea, not to play one-upmanship, But in 1951 Illinois had a contract with the US Army to build a machine that was called ORDVAC, a vacuum tube machine.   The contract allowed them to build a copy for themselves which was called Illiac I.  (It and Illiac II, a transistor machine, used asynchronous logic.)
> 
> I was really surprised to read (on the Illiac I wiki page) that between delivering ORDVAC and getting Illiac I built they had a leased line to ORDVAC for time on the machine at night.

Good going. Of course, the SIGINT people had transatlantic data links going by 1944, so
I guess the idea was in the wind in the military computing community.

    Brian

> 
> I have no idea what that means!  Was it for transferring paper tape that an operator then took and entered into the machine or what! ;-) Or was it directly loaded to the machine?  No idea.  But everyone was trying to do it fairly soon.
> 
> John
> 
>   
>> On Aug 28, 2016, at 00:15, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 28/08/2016 09:18, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>>> JANET only started in 1984*, but years before that UK physicists were telecommuting
>>> to CERN. 
>>>
>>> JANET's predecessor was called SRCnet aka SERCnet and was active from 1974.
>>> Its CERN link started before May 1975**.
>>
>> ... in 1972, in fact:
>>
>> "Computing by telephone
>> ...
>> The CERN link which can be used
>> by UK teams who are involved in
>> experiments at the PS and ISR is
>> obviously more costly being of the
>> order of £14 000 per year.
>> ...
>> 'Dial a computer' seems to be
>> with us."
>>
>> - CERN Courier, Vol. 12 No. 12, p421-422, Dec. 1972.
>>
>> That was a remote login and RJE connection to the 360/195 at Rutherford Lab in
>> the UK. A SERCnet (pre-JANET) packet switch was installed at CERN in 1982,
>> according to the Rutherford Lab report:
>> http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/ca/literature/annual_reports/p018.htm
>>
>> I see that SRCnet apparently interconnected to ARPANET in 1975, too:
>> http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/cisd/literature/p002.htm
>>
>> Enough Googling for one day.
>>
>>   Brian Carpenter
>>
>>>
>>> I just discovered a very interesting PhD thesis: "From Diversity to Convergence:
>>> British Computer Networks and the Internet, 1970-1995", Dorian James Rutter,
>>> University of Warwick, 2005.
>>> wrap.warwick.ac.uk/1197/1/WRAP_THESIS_Rutter_2005.pdf
>>>
>>> Lots of gems in there.
>>>
>>>    Brian Carpenter
>>>
>>> * http://jam.ja.net/marketing/janet30years/
>>>
>>> ** I can't find an exact date but I did find a CERN archive document stating that
>>> a Philips cassette recorder went missing from "Rutherford Link Bldg. 513 ( S S )"
>>> in May 1975. That would be the modem room in the basement of the computer centre,
>>> which was part of my job responsibility ten years later.
>>>
>>> Regards
>>>   Brian
>>>
>>> On 28/08/2016 07:59, John Day wrote:
>>>> Does this qualify for internetworking?  I may have beat you by a few months.  ;-)
>>>>
>>>> In late June of 1976, I moved to Houston so my wife could post-doc at Baylor College of Medicine. I was still working at Illinois with the ARPANET group there. (I even have a t-shirt that says University of Illinois at Houston.) ;-) I rented a DecWriter and dialed-in to Telenet, connected to Multics and from their connected to Illinois over the ARPANET.  ;-)  Did that daily for about 2 years, except when I would go back up to Urbana for a couple of days. I was definitely one of the earliest telecommuters but not the first. I think that was John Melvin.
>>>>
>>>> Take care,
>>>> John Day
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Aug 27, 2016, at 15:25, Paul Vixie <paul at redbarn.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> richard bennett and i were quoted here (published today).
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/40-years-on-the-Internet-transmits-every-aspect-9187484.php
>>>>>
>>>>> (sent in partial recompense for my recent off-topic postings here.)
>>>>>
>>>>> -- 
>>>>> P Vixie
>>>>> _______
>>>>> internet-history mailing list
>>>>> internet-history at postel.org
>>>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______
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>>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>>>>
>>
> 
> 





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