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

Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com
Fri Jun 14 13:02:50 PDT 2019


On Fri, Jun 14, 2019 at 3:52 PM Richard Bennett <richard at bennett.com> wrote:

> The PARC Ethernet that immediately preceded Blue Book was 2.94 Mbps, not
> 3. The difference is greater than the bandwidth of ARPANET at the time. I
> think an even earlier prototype was 1 Mbps.
>
Right... in both cases.   One of the guys (Roger Bates IIRC), even
calculated the number of bit of storage in the PARC network >>wires<< at
one point.

These were both thin coax systems as thick net was a Blue Book
> designed-by-committee monstrosity with poor noise modeling.
>
Amen....

A question for you: Was the ARCnet you are describing from Datapoint, the
same technology as the 75 ohm coax ARCnet that was popular with Novell
networks in the mid to late 1980s?   I remember it was originally less
costly than the 'Blue Book' ethernet per port until NS and group came up
with 'CheaperNet' (running it across 50 ohm wire thin wire and using BNC
connectors).




>
> RB
>
> On Jun 14, 2019, at 6:43 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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>
>
>> Richard Bennett
> High Tech Forum <http://hightechforum.org> Founder
> Ethernet & Wi-Fi standards co-creator
>
> Internet Policy Consultant
>
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
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>
ᐧ
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