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

[Jorge Amodio]

Yup it is quite interesting how when one starts to dig about the history of
technology evolution (which is one of the main themes of our Museum) you
find a lot of connections and common actors.

We are quite familiar with Lamont's book, it is a great source of part of
the Datapoint story but according to some not 100% complete and accurate,
bit still a good reference. I really have the pleasure to be working with
people like Austin Roche the son of one of Datapoint founders and in
particular the founder of the Museum David Monroe (50+ patents) who started
at Datapoint as an intern to write code for the Datapoint 2200 and ended as
VP of Product Development departing the company in 1983.

I'm just getting started but we have a ton of Datapoint material in our
warehouse, including wire wrapped prototypes of some products and other
stuff that never materialized as a product, like an approach to put
together one of the first portable "laptop" computers.

There are many fascinating stories, and not trying to be cocky but one of
the goals of this program will be to restore the missing link in the
history of the personal computer evolution. I also have the benefit that I
was working at IBM when in 1981 they released the creation of the "Dirty
Dozen" that nobody in some areas of the company liked and believed it was a
waste of time and resources...

And there are other stuff more related to networking, such as an attempt to
have a metropolitan wireless network that was shutdown by the FCC not
granting the license to operate in the desired frequency.

More to come :-)

Cheers
Jorge


On Fri, Jun 14, 2019 at 7:43 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > 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
>
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