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The Internet Network Networking

50 Years Ago, the Internet Was Born In Room 3420 (fastcompany.com) 43

Posted by msmash from the blast-from-the-past dept.
harrymcc writes: On October 29, 1969, a graduate student in a UCLA computer science lab logged into a computer hundreds of miles away at the Stanford Research Institute. It was the first connection via ARPANET, which -- after 20 years as a government and academic network -- evolved into the modern internet. Over at Fast Company, Mark Sullivan marked the anniversary by visiting the room where the historic login took place and talking to three of the people who made it happen.
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50 Years Ago, the Internet Was Born In Room 3420 More

50 Years Ago, the Internet Was Born In Room 3420

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  • Comment removed (Score:4)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @11:16AM (#59358684)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Skynet (Score:5, Funny)

      by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @11:35AM (#59358788) Homepage

      Except that in our timeline, the moment Skynet became self-aware...
      it got immediately distracted by a giant collection of video of dancing kittens.

    • But the Internet exists: therefore our time- travelling, would- be heroes have failed their mission. Maybe we can launch a massive Rickroll attack and fuse its circuits before it's too late?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )
        We can't handle this lightly, we need to call upon our greatest "ass"et... the goatse pic!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
          I believe this problem can be solved simply with either 2 guys and a horse, or 2 girls and a cup.
    • That'll never work though. It never does. The reason being, our intrepid time-travellers never reach their destination, since the Earth is moving through space at a fair old clip, they all end up suffocating in the void light years away from where they think they're supposed to be. This sad parade of expiring time-o-nauts will, unfortunately, continue until someone comes up with a machine that is capable of movement in time and the relative dimension in space.
  • Then we can go back and fix it, both technologically and sociologically.
    Same goes for 'junk mail', you know, all that waste paper in your snailmailbox all the time? In fact if we could put the kibosh on that as soon as it was thought of, we probably would never have had spam email in the first place -- or at least, there would have been precedent to say 'HELL, NO!' to it as soon as someone tried it.

    • Junk mail and bulk advertising is what keeps the post office operating.

      • I'd rather pay a dollar to mail a standard #10 envelope than have to continually walk waste paper from my mailbox directly to the recycle bin.
        Also I'd much rather not have to have ever-growing SPAM filters on my email.

    • Re:Time machine, please? (Score:4)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @11:58AM (#59358900)
      The problem with a lot of technology, computing and otherwise, is that often created for a particular job for particular equipment and infrastructure. Overtime the scope on the Job and Infrastructure changes where the technology has been gradually changed overtime to accommodate it, but is no longer optimal for the current purpose, but is widely used because it has been used already and by a lot of users, and it is easier to get people to use a hacked version then something new. These early packets design was around a network designed to take an atomic hit in the country and the network will work around it. This isn't so much the case anymore, because to improve speed and reliability they are a few critical routing gateways. Also with modern switches and routing the reliability is much better then back then, so packet loss is much smaller than ever. Then we have security concerns which wasn't the case back then. So we keep on doing little tricks to the protocol to make it useful. TCP/IP is really bad for streaming media, but we use it anyways. We can say the same thing about HTTP and the Web. Today HTTP and HTML are closer to a GUI Interface Layer to applications than a formatted document with links to other articles.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      (Arnold accent) "Are you Laurence Canter or Margaret Seigel?"

      "Y-yes?"

      BLAM!

  • Aaaah, look at that cute little packet!

  • A story about Al Gore!!!

    • A story about Al Gore!!!

      I can't wait for the scene where he gets inspiration for inventing the internet whilst single-handedly saving a whale caught in a fisherman's net.

    • Beware of certain Ethnicities trying to re-write history. TFA reeks of ethnic historiological revisionism. [HINT: Every d@mned time...]

    • Re:Internet, Al Gore early victim of 'Fake News' (Score:4, Informative)

      by shoor ( 33382 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @05:19PM (#59359968)
      From the wikipedia(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology:/ [wikipedia.org] ):

      Gore became the subject of controversy and ridicule when his statement "I took the initiative in creating the Internet"[53] was widely quoted out of context. It was often misquoted by comedians and figures in American popular media who framed this statement as a claim that Gore believed he had personally invented the Internet.[54] Gore's actual words, however, were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."[55]...Jim Wilkinson, who at the time was working as congressman Dick Armey's spokesman, also helped sell the idea that Gore claimed to have "invented the internet."

      Dick Armey was a Republican Politician, so his boy, Jim Wilkinson, helped engineer this urban legend to help the Republicans. Good Old Fake News and people are still falling for it.

    • I seen that the first message was Lo. A typo. So, the internet was started with a typo. Wonder what the current Grammar/spelling Nazi's would have had to say back then?

  • Btw, this happened in the US (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @11:38AM (#59358806)
    And it wouldn't have happened in a country where the government decides what is and is not hate speech.

    I don't understand why we're supposed to apologize for America when (1) all the pharmecuetical research is done here due to the other's countries ax to grind with their profits (by the way, finding new medicines for people who are sick is a good thing, (2) the US is the top ranked country for places where immigrants listed they would like to live (by FAR), (3) your average American has higher household income than any other place on earth.

    Btw, did you know Trump just killed the #1 terrorist in the world (which the Washington Post called and later walked back that he was an "austere religious scholar" (and pedophile among other things).

    Instead of apologizing for America, people should look to America for guidance about how they could make their country great again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

      finding new medicines for people who are sick is a good thing,

      Milking them for their life's savings isn't.

      • You're saying people who contribute to the economy and those who don't should have equal access to medicine?

        I don't see that motivating anyone. It's called "work" for a reason, right?

        Innovation comes at a price. If you really hated rich people (which btw you shouldn't), wouldn't you want THEM to be the ones funding it?

  • 12 years after Sputnik, Moon walk and internet (Score:3, Insightful)

    by shoor ( 33382 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @01:20PM (#59359016)

    The article mentioned Sputnik and the fear of the Russians trumping us in science. Same with the 'Race to the Moon'. It's interesting to me that both the 1st Moon Landing and this 'birth of the internet' happened the same year. One got a lot of attention, but the other has had more effect on our daily lives.

  • Was reading this list [popularmechanics.com] of influential websites throughout history. Nice to remember the golden years... I guess we don't slashdot websites anymore.

  • The Internet was created by Al Gore in the early 90s. Any "evidence" of a longer history has been faked by Ajit Pai to tempt our faith! Your feeble efforts to suppress the truth with "500 Internal Server Error" and "502 Bad Gateway" messages will not succeed!

    • The whole "Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet" meme is one of the sillier, more dreary ones. I wonder if in 50 years people will actually believe he claimed to have done so?

  • While I wasn't there until the fall of '73, 4 years after the date referenced in the article, the 3rd floor was the home to all sorts of weird computer science types. We had the ESUC (Engineering Society of University of California) food lounge there on the 3rd, and the ESUC HQ was out on the outer 3rd floor overlooking the bone yard. So many engineering students (and more than a few quasi-dropouts, but had nowhere else to go, I think) hung out there. Heady times and most of us didn't know WTF was going on.

  • For another good reference on the history of networking and it's early development, I recommend Where the Wizards Stay Up Late [amazon.com]. Solid read.

    Will

  • also relevant (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eaglesrule ( 4607947 ) <eaglesrule@nospam.pm.me> on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @05:21PM (#59359986)

    Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

    Zuck: Just ask.

    Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

    [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

    Zuck: People just submitted it.

    Zuck: I don't know why.

    Zuck: They "trust me"

    Zuck: Dumb fucks.

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