[ih] Early use of the "Internet" term (1977)

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Jorge Amodio

    > Thank you so much for your detailed response

Indeed, it was a fantastic and fascinating glimpse into a too-little-known
corner of computing history.

For those who would like to know more, in addition to online sources, I can
recommend "Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal
Computer Revolution", by Lamont Wood. (I'm not sure if those who were there,
like Mr. Peterson, would consider it accurate, but it seemed to be to be quite
good.)

Typical nugget: the Intel 8008 was not a descendant of the Intel 4004
(although the production chips did use technology developed for the 4004), as
commonly thought at one point; rather, it was developed for Datapoint
(although they wound up building their own CPU out of discrete components).
The 8008 developed into the 8080, and then the 8086... and I expect many of us
are reading this on its descendants.

    > I'll follow up on a private message so I don't get the rest of the list
    > bored with details.

Bored? Never! :-)


    >> On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 6:18 PM Gordon Peterson <gep2 at terabites.com> wrote:

    >> (...and, at the time, Ethernet.... which wasn't a released product yet...
    >> was running at just 2 megabits

Minor nit - 3.

    >> "Oh, Gordon," my colleagues told me.  "It's a good system, but you're
    >> crazy... big businesses will never give up their mainframes and run their
    >> processing on networks of little computers."
    >> I grinned at them and replied, "You just WATCH!"   :-)

I suspect many people on this list have had similar experiences! (In my case,
circa mid-80s, telling my now-wife that one day everyone would have
email... :-)

It would be interesting to collect stories about when we got glimpses of the
future. I am particularly thinking of Craig's story about Swedish train
timetables; my equivalent was going home to Bermuda at one point and seeing
URL's painted on commercial vehicles.

      Noel