[ih] AOL in perspective

[Vint Cerf]

I had forgotten about that!

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On Thu, Sep 4, 2025, 19:57 John Day via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> In the very early days, the NMC at UCLA did something similar. If you
> connected to a particular well-known socket, it would print a ASCII map of
> the current ARPANET and which hosts were up or down. It was discontinued
> when it would no longer fit on one page.
>
> Take care,
> John
>
> > On Sep 4, 2025, at 10:42, Lars Brinkhoff via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> > 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.)
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