[ih] AOL in perspective

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Speaking of.  Marc Seriff was one of the co-founders of AOL.  He had
previously been part of the MIT Dynamic Modeling group.  He (along with
Bob Metcalfe and others) had a hand in making the ARPANET "SURVEY"
program, which would probe network hosts to see if they were up.  Marc
told me this:

  "I tell the story of SURVEY all the time.  For a few days, the whole
  ARPANET was pissed at me since, in those days, all the systems logged
  every connection attempt - typically to a model 33 teletype machine
  sitting in front of the PDP/10 or whatever.  A decent system since the
  few computers on the network at the time weren't likely to get more
  than a few connections a day.  All of sudden, I'm poking them once a
  minute or so.  System managers would come in in the morning to find
  paper piled behind the teletype and, frequently, ink ribbons that had
  been torn to shreds!"

They program has been recovered and seems to be working, lacking only an
ARPANET to survey.  Watch your teletypes!

Survey results were stored on the Datacomputer (also located in MIT's
Tech Sq building.)