[ih] AOL in perspective

[Barbara Denny]

 I have been trying quite a while to remember whether I used a tip or a tac to get back to cmua from BBN (or perhaps something else?  Somehow I associate Rob Gurwitz with this).  My friends, who were working in the cs department at CMU, let me keep my account when I started to work at BBN (Not all undergrads had access to cmua. I worked as a programmer for the grad cs department so I had accounts on various machines). I used to go up to a computer room at BBN to do this. I don't remember having a way to do it from my office.  If the command set was different between the access mechanisms, I might be able to figure out which I was using.
Actually having access to the network was one of the reasons I chose BBN for work after graduation.  I didn't really know much about networking at the point.  My part-time job in the CS department was a project called Gandalf which was a software engineering research project involving integrated programming environments.  
BTW,  in searching for information on cmua,  I found this write-up on the coke machine. I thought people might be interested in reading it if this hasn't been posted before.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt
barbara
    On Friday, September 5, 2025 at 11:15:47 AM PDT, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
 Telenet was before my time at BBN.  I don't recall ever hearing much 
about it other than it was an offshoot from BBN.

But your timeline seems skewed.  Terminal access to ARPANET began by 
using TIPs, which were an IMP with a multi-line TTY controller 
attached.   TIPs became TACs when TCP was added to them, which IIRC was 
done by Bob Hinden.

There was also a mechanism called "TIP Login", and a follow-on called 
"TACACS", which provided a way for humans to "log in to the network" by 
supplying their name and password.   Most host computers on the ARPANET 
had some kind of scheme for their users to log in to their machines - if 
only to know what account to charge their CPU time to.

I recall that Bob Kahn was especially interested in DLE - Double Login 
Elimination, with mechanisms to be added to TIP Login and/or TACACS.  
The idea was that once you logged in to the ARPANET, the network could 
tell your computer who you were, so you didn't have to log in again 
after opening a Telnet connection.  I don't recall how much, if any, of 
that was implemented.

There was a battle brewing between the resource owners, who wanted to 
know who was using their stuff, and the users, many of whom valued 
privacy and anonymity more.

But whether or not any of those terminal access mechanisms were used in 
AOL, or who did it -- I have no idea.

Jack