[ih] Article about Peter Kirstein

[Brian E Carpenter]

> They were moving large files from CERN to RAL to Illinois

That was before I joined the networking group at CERN, but the CERN-RAL link was 9.6 kbaud and installed during 1972 [0]. Apparently it cost about £14,000 a year. When it first came to my attention (in 1984) it was running the JANET Coloured Book protocols.

Peter Kirstein was always a friend of CERN - he'd actually worked at CERN in 1959 to 1963, the real pioneering days [1]. There's a paper [2] about access control of the London ARPANET node, and one of its authors, David Bates, later worked at CERN too (but not on networking).

[0] Rutherford: Computing by telephone, CERN Courier 12(12), pp 421-422, December 1972, https://cds.cern.ch/record/1729427
[1] P. T. Kirstein, The design of injection systems with application to the CERN storage ring mode, CERN-62-04, 1962, http://dx.doi.org/10.5170/CERN-1962-004
[2]A. V. Stokes, D. L. Bates, P. T. Kirstein, Monitoring and access control of the London node of ARPANET, AFIPS '76, 1976, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1499799.1499882

Regards
    Brian Carpenter

On 11-Jan-25 09:29, John Day wrote:
> Yes, an excellent article.  It is amazing how much resistance there was in the UK to doing this! Unbelievable.
> 
> Just a minor follow-up, the connection to RAL became quite useful (and illegal). ;-)  We were the Univ of Illinois node at the time. The physics dept at Illinois was working closely with Argonne National Laboratory on the south side of Chicago and with the development of FermiLab. They were moving large files from CERN to RAL to Illinois and then driving them up to Argonne  It has been too many years but we were either the largest ARPANET user of the RAL machine, or flat out the largest user. (I think they were running some programs at RAL as well.) The illegality?  There was not supposed to be any ‘international traffic’ through the TIP.) ;-)
> 
> (I remember sitting at my desk in Champaign and connecting to 360/195 no password required. So far as I know, there were no passwords on the TIPs in the US. Although use of the timesharing systems on the ARPANET required passwords (no those weren’t Telnet passwords, they were the system's passwords). So the only real point of the passwords was to keep UK users off and to satisfy the bureaucrats. IOW, to hurt themselves.)  ;-)
> 
> It was a very useful connection to have and I am sure others made a lot of use of it.  But it is truly unbelievable how many obstacles the UK government and GPO created to either keep it from happening or make it hard to use.
> 
> Take care,
> John
> 
>> On Jan 10, 2025, at 14:35, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>> What an excellent article; I would have expected nothing less from Peter.
>>
>> Regards
>>    Brian Carpenter
>>
>> On 10-Jan-25 16:06, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote:
>>> Forwarded for Barbara
>>>> ----- Forwarded Message -----
>>>> From: Barbara Denny <b_a_denny at yahoo.com>
>>>> To: Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
>>>> Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2025 at 06:20:09 PM PST
>>>> Subject: Article about Peter Kirstein
>>>>
>>>> Link provided by Steve Berson.
>>>>
>>>> https://theconversation.com/how-britain-got-its-first-internet-connection-by-the-late-pioneer-who-created-the-first-password-on-the-internet-45404
>>>>
>>>> barbara
>>>>
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