[ih] History from 1960s to 2025

[Karl Auerbach]

On 12/18/25 12:21 PM, John Day via Internet-history wrote:
> And some of us thought, it was the continuation of building a resource-sharing network.  ;-)

In the mid 1980's I spent a year or more at the Livermore Labs working 
on the MFE (magnetic confinement fusion energy) project. (Playing tennis 
with a multi-million degree ball of plasma as the ball was kinda fun.)

I wasn't involved in the networking part but I certainly overheard a lot 
of expressed desire to share not only our simulations and measurements 
(we had a couple of seriously-gigantic fusion vessels across the road 
from my office) as well as our boatload of Cray machines and data libraries.

The folks at the labs were pretty good a jury rigging things and it is 
my understanding that they created some duct-tape-and-bailing-wire 
systems to do that kind of sharing.

Also, in the 1970's when I was at SDC I heard many tales about the Q7 
and Q32 computers, and the desire to time share the latter among 
research institutions.  But I have no real memory of what was said in 
those tales.

     --karl--