Where Did the Internet Really Come From? (slate.com) 150
Where did the internet come from? When students are asked that by an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, some mention ARPANET or Silicon Valley — and "no fewer than four students have simply written, 'Bill Gates....'"
But even beyond that, "The best-known histories describe an internet that hasn't existed since 1994..." argues Kevin Driscoll "the intersection of hundreds of regional, national, commercial, and cooperative networks." So in an excerpt from his new book, Driscoll describes exactly how "a mixture of commercial online services, university networks, and local community networks mutated into something bigger, more commercial, and more accessible to the general public..."
And what's often left out is the pre-web "modem world": Whereas ARPANET was created by professional researchers in university and government labs, the modem world was driven by community-oriented amateurs and entrepreneurs — hobby radio groups, computer clubs, software pirates, and activist organizations. Despite their shared interest in computer networking, these were, with rare exception, distinct spheres of social and technical activity. The predominant form of PC networking was the bulletin board system, or BBS.... The ARPANET family of networks ran on a fundamentally different infrastructure from consumer-oriented BBS networks, and relatively few people were expert users of both. BBSs were not so much ignored by institutions of power as they were overlooked....
Between 1994 and 1995, the World Wide Web — and not the BBS — became the public face of cyberspace. On television and in print, journalists touted graphical browsers like NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator as the internet's future. As hype mounted, investment capital flooded the data communications industry. But instead of BBSs, the money and attention flowed to firms linked to the nascent Web. Finally, when a moral panic over "cyberporn" threatened to burst the dot-com bubble, BBSs provided a convenient scapegoat. BBSs were old and dirty; the Web was new, clean, and safe for commerce. To avoid the stigma, enterprising BBS operators quietly rebranded. Seemingly overnight, thousands of dial-up BBSs vanished, replaced by brand-new "internet service providers." In the United States, the term BBS fell out of use.
The people who built the modem world in the 1980s laid the groundwork for millions of others who would bring their lives online in the 1990s and beyond. Along with writing code and running up their phone bills, BBS operators developed novel forms of community moderation, governance, and commercialization. When internet access finally came to the public, former BBS users carried the experience of grassroots networking into the social Web. Over time, countless social media platforms have reproduced the social and technical innovations of the BBS community.
Forgetting has high stakes. As the internet becomes the compulsory infrastructure of everyday life, the stories we tell about its origins are more important than ever. Recovering the history of the modem world helps us to imagine a world beyond — or perhaps after — commercial social media, mass surveillance, and platform monopolies. Endlessly modifiable, each BBS represented an idiosyncratic dream of what cyberspace could be, a glimpse of the future written in code and accessible from your local telephone jack. Immersing ourselves in this period of experimentation and play makes the internet seem strange again. By changing how we remember the internet's past, we can change our expectations for its future.
But even beyond that, "The best-known histories describe an internet that hasn't existed since 1994..." argues Kevin Driscoll "the intersection of hundreds of regional, national, commercial, and cooperative networks." So in an excerpt from his new book, Driscoll describes exactly how "a mixture of commercial online services, university networks, and local community networks mutated into something bigger, more commercial, and more accessible to the general public..."
And what's often left out is the pre-web "modem world": Whereas ARPANET was created by professional researchers in university and government labs, the modem world was driven by community-oriented amateurs and entrepreneurs — hobby radio groups, computer clubs, software pirates, and activist organizations. Despite their shared interest in computer networking, these were, with rare exception, distinct spheres of social and technical activity. The predominant form of PC networking was the bulletin board system, or BBS.... The ARPANET family of networks ran on a fundamentally different infrastructure from consumer-oriented BBS networks, and relatively few people were expert users of both. BBSs were not so much ignored by institutions of power as they were overlooked....
Between 1994 and 1995, the World Wide Web — and not the BBS — became the public face of cyberspace. On television and in print, journalists touted graphical browsers like NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator as the internet's future. As hype mounted, investment capital flooded the data communications industry. But instead of BBSs, the money and attention flowed to firms linked to the nascent Web. Finally, when a moral panic over "cyberporn" threatened to burst the dot-com bubble, BBSs provided a convenient scapegoat. BBSs were old and dirty; the Web was new, clean, and safe for commerce. To avoid the stigma, enterprising BBS operators quietly rebranded. Seemingly overnight, thousands of dial-up BBSs vanished, replaced by brand-new "internet service providers." In the United States, the term BBS fell out of use.
The people who built the modem world in the 1980s laid the groundwork for millions of others who would bring their lives online in the 1990s and beyond. Along with writing code and running up their phone bills, BBS operators developed novel forms of community moderation, governance, and commercialization. When internet access finally came to the public, former BBS users carried the experience of grassroots networking into the social Web. Over time, countless social media platforms have reproduced the social and technical innovations of the BBS community.
Forgetting has high stakes. As the internet becomes the compulsory infrastructure of everyday life, the stories we tell about its origins are more important than ever. Recovering the history of the modem world helps us to imagine a world beyond — or perhaps after — commercial social media, mass surveillance, and platform monopolies. Endlessly modifiable, each BBS represented an idiosyncratic dream of what cyberspace could be, a glimpse of the future written in code and accessible from your local telephone jack. Immersing ourselves in this period of experimentation and play makes the internet seem strange again. By changing how we remember the internet's past, we can change our expectations for its future.
Al Gore and Ted Stevens (Score:5, Funny)
Al Gore took the initiative to build the internet and Ted Stevens helped him install a series of tubes that are the internet as we know it today.
Lame (Score:3, Funny)
That's not even a good troll. Try doing better than repeating Rolling Stone's brutal misquote.
Re:Lame (Score:5, Informative)
The internet as we know it originated with the introduction of IPv4 in 1982.
But it wasn't really until DNS was introduced that it was feasible for "normal" users.
Re:Lame (Score:4, Insightful)
The internet as we know it originated with the introduction of IPv4 in 1982.
No. The internet as we know it originated with the IPO of Google in 2004 and the introduction of Facebook in the same year. The internet may have been in use before then, but it was nothing like corporate owned data harvesting hellhole it is now "as we know it".
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but it's still Al Gore's fault!
(The FP was the joke I was looking for. But it's the jokes you aren't looking for that are generally funnier.)
Re: Lame (Score:2)
You're right, Al Gore took initiative in creating the internet, he didn't build it. Those were his words. In reality of course more money was thrown at Arpanet after it was already established and Al Gore had jack shit to do with creating anything. Indeed, while the money thrown at Arpanet was useful for further establishing private US government networks, it had little to nothing to do with the world wide web.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Jon Postel was murdered
The "internet" didn't come from anywhere... (Score:2, Insightful)
... it was an inevitability of electronics 101. Every the internet is just once giant circuitboard, so the last 200 years of us laying copper wire and fibre over the surface of the earth for phones and TV, when you plug computers into it, you get an internet. Who would have thought it?
The need for researchers to talk to mainframe computers in the 60's and 70's made networking computers together necessary, not to mention phone equipment to switch from mechanical based switching to electronic relays.
The in
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More stupidity.
Re:The "internet" didn't come from anywhere... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: The "internet" didn't come from anywhere... (Score:2)
I often heard the telegraph system being refered to as the "Victorian Internet"
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I often heard the telegraph system being refered to as the "Victorian Internet"
It would be somewhere in between that and Victorian UUCP, since it was message switched and not packet switched. (UUCP was really batch switched, but you could set it up to send immediately.)
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Don't forget Minitel [wikipedia.org], in France.
Re:The "internet" didn't come from anywhere... (Score:4)
That is what every advancement in technology looks like in hindsight. While it is true, technology advances could be said to be innate and we discover them more so than 'invent' them the search pool is so insanely large that we will never fully explore it.
I'm just impressed they cleverly dodged even once mentioning that ARPA was DARPA at the time and that it was and is still the Department of Defense research wing. The whole thing was a military project but there isn't slightest hint of that in this summary.
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It's dangerous to go alone, take this, noob [umich.edu]
TL;DR: The military, university employees, and Al Gore created the internet
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Could you rephrase that in English?
I think the point being made is that the modern internet has ruined basic communications. Access to a global communications network has led to the destruction of the global language in the same way that the "information age" begat the age of lies.
Re: The "internet" didn't come from anywhere... (Score:2)
The Internet broke English? I think English was already broken before the Internet TBH.
Where Did the Internet Really Come From? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Where Did the Internet Really Come From? (Score:5, Funny)
There is no way humans could create 32 bit IP addresses on their own. They had to have help. It would take human decades to count to 4 billion, and that's assuming nobody interrupts or distracts them.
Re:Where Did the Internet Really Come From? (Score:5, Funny)
Are you suggesting the internet was Intelligently Designed? That is easily disproven by the fact we ran out of IP addresses.
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Divide and conquer. If a little over half of the world's population were given a number to say out loud, we could count to 4.2 billion in parallel in just a couple of seconds.
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True, that. 8-bit (and later 16-bit) processors and memory wouldn't have been any help at all. Unless you did your 32-bit inter number construction the hard way, which was pretty SOP with assembly language in those days.
I don't think you'd want to use math processors, given their buggy nature back in The Day :-)
Found the originating IP (Score:4, Funny)
127.0.0.1
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I actually route all 127.0.0.0 network traffic to a my big brother server so I can monitor my network and know everything that is going on on my network. I wonder why 3 letter agencies haven't thought of it yet, I never heard about anybody else doing this before.
route add 127.0.0.0/8 gw mybigbrotherserver, easy enough. I also allows me me to spoof replies!
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The internet started with 1 bit addressing, IPv0. Then a third person wanted in and they had to use 2 bit addressing. Then the spammers showed up.
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127 is a class A network. For example, 127.88.44.123 is a valid IP address that points at the local machine. It's rather unfortunate that we still limit ourselves to just 127.0.0.1 when binding service ports.
Oh boy (Score:2)
Those rabid folks who want to watch all movies in 60+ hz streaming on their phone aren't going to give a flying fsck about this.
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There is airborne file system checking now? Wooooow!
Again? (Score:3)
How many times does this bullshit have to be rehashed?
Seriously, you might as well have an essay about how C/Python/Java/Rust/Go is the a superior programming language because just as much will have been accomplished. Should we start rehashing who made the first computer too? Who has to be murdered at Slate/Vice/etc. so that we never have to revisit this discussion like it's unknown?
Re:Again? (Score:5, Insightful)
You may have lived through it, and I was running a BBS back in the day, but for every kid that replies "Bill Gates invented the internet" there needs to be a resource that chronicles the true beginnings of the internet, or at least the "world wide web" portion of it. Most of the people starting their college years have never heard of a BBS, The Source, QuantumLink, Prodigy, Compuserve, and maybe just tangentially AOL.
I guess many people studying electrical engineering also don't know much about Westinghouse, Edison, or Tesla either.
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As for people who think Bill Gates invented it, that's no surprise as Gates is well known publicly as a founder of Microsoft, and millions of people use Microsoft products daily to access the Internet (think IE and Edge on Wi
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
You just gave many reasons why it's okay not to capitalise the internet, namely that the adoption of lower case in proper nouns is common once the proper noun takes an unambiguous form in the language.
We no longer capitalise the internet for the same reason we no longer capitalise the world, in both cases when we write it lower case the reader knows what is being talked about.
And while it certainly "has been" The Internet, you are speaking English here which means that absolute nothing "always will be" as i
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You DO realize that there is a difference between internet and intranet, right?
The reason why The Internet is capitalized is to distinguish between the one Internet that everyone is connected to and a generic internet.
Stop dumbing down the English language with your ignorance.
Re: Again? (Score:2)
Online services acted as "the internet" for years going back to the 70s (I think Compu$erve was around in the late 60s) before the internet proper became available to the general public. Really just mega BBSes but it was a harbinger to what was to become the modern internet.
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...for every kid that replies "Bill Gates invented the internet" there needs to be a resource that chronicles the true beginnings of the internet, or at least the "world wide web" portion of it.
Bill Gates sure as hell wasn't the one purporting he invented the internet. Takes more than a mere "resource" sometimes to school the ignorant who clearly believe anything they're told. I'm trying to even fathom how people came to that conclusion, and I can't. Even a basic search of internet history would prove that false.
I guess many people studying electrical engineering also don't know much about Westinghouse, Edison, or Tesla either.
Why would those studying EE today, have any less of a chance to know about Westinghouse, Edison or Tesla? Those guys weren't exactly in the EE graduating class of 2002.
Either the 100+
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If we were teaching it 20, 30, or 40 years ago, then I fail to see why we're not teaching it today.
If you want to learn history, study history. You don't need to learn history to deal with engineering problems of today or tomorrow. I guarantee you 40 years ago they were still teaching the maths and physics behind the operation of vacuum tubes, something that isn't part of a standard modern EE degree.
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For every kid who thinks Bill Gates invented the Internet, there ought to be a clue-stick, hastily and uncompromisingly applied that lays out how, in fact, Bill Gates and Microsoft did everything they could to kill off the Internet, but dramatically failed to do so, and how (arguably) that was the start of the "Great Choice" in which the world no longer had to buy from Microsoft to get its computing hits.
For extra bonus points, you could also teach kids how Microsoft (in their attempts to kill the Internet)
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BBS systems weren't really "networks" for the most part, though they did evolve to talk to each other. They existed separately from the emerging internet (arpanet and the others). Though perhaps they did influence the home computer usage for the more modern internet, such as discussion "boards" and the like. Though that mirrors what USENET did, and probably did better, which was inter-networked from the start.
I Was Dreading This Day (Score:5, Funny)
Well, okay, I guess you folks are finally old enough.
You see, when a man and a woman love each other very much, they feel compelled to display that love to the rest of the world. Once upon a time, this was accomplished via an ancient technology called the "VHS Tape", but one day they realized it would be far more efficient if people could view their love without ever leaving home, and that's when the stork delivered the Internet.
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You see, when an oligarchic psuedo-democracy and an oligarchic psuedo-communism hate each other very much, they make a cold war, and then we decide we need a network which can continue operating during a nuclear one...
"Professor of media studies confirms stereotype" (Score:5, Insightful)
Says internet came from BBSs, which is BS. Has a book out that he's trying to advertise.
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Agreed. The BBS thing was very different from the Internet, or even internets. Before FidoNET they weren't really networked, though some did link into USENET. It was kind of expensive in the early days, you needed a modem and a computer where were still high priced. And if you were at a university or a tech company you often had access to the actual pre-Internet anyway which was much better. However I think the home user usage on a BBS probably influenced what the WWW became - sharing files, sending me
Stupid Article about (Score:4, Interesting)
Another article and another book from some bozo who "grew up with the internet' and studied media, so he thinks he knows how it works. It looks like all he understands is social media crap and thinks that's what the internet is. That's horseshit. Social media exists in a concept called the world wide web linking information together, riding on a backbone of communication networks called the internet. Inter-network. A switching network had to be invented, queue C, Unix, TCP/IP, routers, DNS, etc. etc. etc. The networks have been added to and their technology enhanced, but the backbone is still there.
And the world wide web would not exist if the internet backbone had not been allowed to carry commercial traffic, which was granted by a number of legislative driven primarily by Al Gore and a few others (and no, Al Gore never said he invented the internet, that was a misquote by a lazy or stoned Rolling Stone reporter... the only other option is that he was a fucking moron, so I'm being generous). And unfortunately now we keep hearing "internet history" from so so-called technology experts who aren't experts at all, just power users of their phone apps. What actually bugs my ass lately is when I've keep being told I "know nothing about the internet" by smirking twats who told me they grew up on it and the world wide web so know it better. They lose the smirk when I reply, my generation actually did create it, and have lived with it since it was commercialized. When I ask them if they can program anything to actually run with dynamic content, or as an application across the internet, of course almost all say no. But boy they know TicToc. wtf This bozo who wrote this 'book' is undoubtedly one of them, Oh he'll probably show something he did that is the equivalent of the modern day spinning flaming skull gif, but his knowing all the social media apps is more a reason not to listen to him.
I just found this blurb on him from the university he works at. It pretty much confirms what I said:
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Not reading the article I can understand, but shooting off your mouth without having read the book? Seriously? He goes in depth to how bulletin board systems provided the earliest social networking services and all the other services of the internet we take for granted today, and how the larger among them eventually became early ISPs after the first commercial internet exchanges opened up. I'd say that puts him slightly ahead of someone who just wanted a chance to spout off.
Now log off. Someone important
Re: Stupid Article about (Score:2)
âoeNO CARRIERâ
Now shut up everyone else, because we have an edgelord in the house.
Re:Stupid Article about (Score:4, Funny)
That's one of the things I kinda miss about the early days of the internet, some of the good jokes don't work any more because nobody gets them. Like that one:
What do an internet addict and a F-18 pilot have in common?
Both break out in hives when their screen shows NO CARRIER.
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The F-18's only been retired for a couple of years, so some people might still get it.
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Just to show how old the joke is.
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Best of the unexpected jokes I wasn't looking for, even if it's an oldie.
But it gives me the excuse to trot out my favorite in the genre:
Yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip.
*BANG*
NO TERRIER
Re:Stupid Article about (Score:5, Insightful)
Not reading the article I can understand, but shooting off your mouth without having read the book? Seriously? He goes in depth to how bulletin board systems provided the earliest social networking services and all the other services of the internet we take for granted today, and how the larger among them eventually became early ISPs after the first commercial internet exchanges opened up. I'd say that puts him slightly ahead of someone who just wanted a chance to spout off.
If you change the definition of what a thing is, then you change the history of that thing. The Internet is a specific thing, and basically if it wasn't interconnected via TCP/IP, it was pre-Internet. Those BBSes weren't early ISPs because ISP is Internet Service Provider... unless they were one of the late era BBSes that were accessible via TCP/IP from... the Internet. They weren't the origin.
Now, it's safe to say that BBSes were precursors to social media. But not the Internet. And that's why this guy's "alternate history" is on verging on "alternative facts".
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My first ISP was a BBS. Could dial in with a terminal program, do the usual BBS stuff or drop to a shell with Lynx or dial in with a SLIP connection and do the usual (at the time) internet stuff, email, newsgroups, Gopher and the Web.
The larger more commercial BBS's were well situated to make the jump to being ISP's
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You were dialing into an access point. The access point is not the internet, just the 'door' to it.
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TCP/IP was developed side by side with the 'internet'. The packet switching network developed and functional by the early 1970s required a protocol and that is where TCP/IP came from. But sure, TCP, came from NCP around 1974 and was created by basically the same person (and probably a few others) as Network Control Protocol. And then followed IP shortly after (late 70s) but not really; it was originally baked into TCP and was really just split into its own layer and improved. But all resulted from the creat
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Social media is not the Internet. Now say it again. OK, here is another one: ISPs are not the internet, they are ACCESS POINTS. ISPs may also provide internet infrastructure, but not always (e.g. see Techsavvy in Canada, or other purchasers of wholesale bandwidth access a.k.a. disaggregated bandwidth, around the world). I actually went to school for computer science and was using the internet before it was commercialized. So shut the fuck up and let people who know what they are talking about speak. But tha
Re: Stupid Article about (Score:2)
I bet they don't know the first web browser was merely a command line tool, and almost nothing like a modern web browser.
advert (Score:3, Interesting)
"So in an excerpt from his new book, Driscoll describes"
So, this is just an advert for his new book.
hmm facebook ? (Score:2)
no one said that facebook is the internet ?
Ah the good old days (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in a science lab that was part of a multi-university (something like 30 of them) research study that ran for 4-5 years bracketing 1990. Our group was on Bitnet, other groups were on other systems. I vaguely remember the tortuous way you had to send messages - you had to include the other group's address, of course, but you also had to figure out what gateways existed between your chosen network and their chosen network and include that as part of the "to" address. Even then, half the time it seemed like the gateways were down or there were other problems.
Ah, and acoustically coupled modems, reel-to-reel tape drives for backups, four or five different implementations of current loop connectors... no I don't miss those days.
Now if you young people will excuse me, it's time for my nap.
Re: Ah the good old days (Score:2)
Early Usenet address headers went something like whatshisname!uucp!something or another (if memory serves me correctly).
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That was UUCP addressing where you need to know your path to some "well known machine" and then the recipients path from that machine. It was then routed along the path.
That allowed then the kremvax spoof to be made by and admin to mcvax, that was one of the "well known machines" by programming so that any mail addressed though that machine to kremvax went to his mailbox instead..
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If you weren't in the map you had to bang a path from a host that was. I got into UUCP too late to get mapped so I was scruz.ucsc.edu!deeptht [armory.com]!drink@inkpot
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I got into UUCP too late to get mapped so I was scruz.ucsc.edu!deeptht!drink@inkpot
In a way, it's too bad the web wasn't around then - because it would be hilarious to see how the people who like to obfuscate their addresses approach this. If you think it's annoying now, just imagine seeing a page full of stuff like scruz [dot] ucsc [dot] edu [bang] deeptht [bang] drink [at] inkpot (combined with all the individual idiosyncrasies various people follow).
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Whether it was Internet-origin or not, I think there were a growing number of internetworking systems which were internet like. There were local dialup systems that allowed access to at least national corporate and university systems (sort of a proto-telnet). And I'm sure that IBM, DEC and others had proprietary internetworking communications for on-site multimachine access as well as wide area communications (AFAIK, mostly access and low-volume communication).
I only remember one pre-Internet BBS "network
bitnet, usenet-- the good old days (Score:3)
Yeah, I think BITnet should be remembered as part of the history of the internet ("Because It's Time network").
And usenet was, I'd say, was an early predecessor to the development of modern social media, at least as important as the various bbs, and international in scope where the first bbs were very local.
But the article is insightful: ARPAnet was there, but it wasn't the only input into the modern internet.
Hobbes' Internet Timeline (Score:3)
Robert H Zakon has been documenting the history of the Internet since 1993
https://www.zakon.org/robert/i... [zakon.org]
Coming and going (Score:2)
The Internet was created by RFCs. It was destroyed by port 443.
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Re:Coming and going (Score:4, Insightful)
It was Built for Hatred (Score:2)
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It has always been about communication, information at your leisure.
The content of course depends on the source, and the interpretation lies with the receiver.
Where didn't it come from? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ask "Students" Anything (Score:5, Informative)
Early copies of Windows 95 needed an additional download for TCP/IP support because Gates was still holding out against the internet then. His staff had to persuade him to include it by default.
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Early copies of Windows 95 needed an additional download for TCP/IP support
You mean Chicago Beta? It wasn't called Windows 95 yet. And I doubt it was because TCP/IP wasn't going to come with it. Even at TGV we* didn't have that story, we were only making a stack for 95 before it even came out because Microsoft's was shitty. (The TGV stack on Windows 3.11 was fast enough that you could use it as an office router... though you wouldn't.)
* I didn't go to work for TGV until it was part of Cisco
Wow beautifully masked... (Score:5, Informative)
ARPANET was DARPANET. The D stands for Defense because ARPA is the research funding arm of the US Dept of Defense (they added the D in 1972 and removed it again in 1996). While there were indeed many civilian contractors working on the DoD's dime it is rather preposterous that this summary of where the internet comes from doesn't even mention that the true creator of the internet was the US Military.
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ARPANET was DARPANET. The D stands for Defense because ARPA is the research funding arm of the US Dept of Defense (they added the D in 1972
But ARPAnet was initiated in 1966, and university nodes up in 1969 [networkencyclopedia.com], and declared operation in 1971 [wikipedia.org], All of these date well before ARPA was renamed DARPA.
...and removed it again in 1996). While there were indeed many civilian contractors working on the DoD's dime it is rather preposterous that this summary of where the internet comes from doesn't even mention that the true creator of the internet was the US Military.
Because everybody already knows that. This is the well-known creation myth of the internet, the story told by our nerd forefathers around the warm glow of the servers. What this article is emphasizing is that ARPANET was not the only thread of the creation of the modern web, just one of the progenitors.
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"Because everybody already knows that."
Not everyone does know that. The general public is not even aware of DARPA. Keeping it that way is the reason for the rename in the first place.
"What this article is emphasizing is that ARPANET was not the only thread of the creation of the modern web, just one of the progenitors."
I'm well aware the article is trying to change the narrative from that passed down by the 'nerd forefathers around the warm glow of servers' who were actually there. That is why they chose to
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Except what you say "nobody knows" really is the conventional story that everybody knows.
In the garden (Score:2)
We found it under a cabbage leaf.
ARPAnet and IPSS (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, there's two parts to this. There's ARPAnet and NSFnet within the US. That part of history is reasonably well documented, even if most kids don't read. It, that is. (That's obvious, given that Bill Gates' only connection to the Internet was accusing it of being a fad. Trumpet TCP/IP was the first working TCP/IP driver for
Windows, Microsoft didn't have one for another few YEARS, and even then it was buggy and unreliable. *grumblegrumblewhinemoan*)
But that's not really the Internet we know and love, the ubiquitous network. At the same time as NSFnet existed, much of the rest of the world was already connected up but using a mishmash of other protocols.
ARPAnet had the protocol, but the Internet we know today - the international network - started life within the International Packet Switch Stream (IPSS) hardware. That provided your satellite links and cabling. NSFnet initially hooked into IPSS, which was X.25 to start off with, but Europe et al didn't lay new cables (at that time) just for NSFnet. New cables were eventually laid, we're not still using the old hardware, but initially the federation of networks used nodes that translated between protocols. At some point, the IPSS networks started being able to run TCP/IP natively, and thus what had been largely an American-specific network became an international protocol.
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In the latter 80's I attended a lecture at UTSA (University of Texas San Antonio) where ARPAnet was discussed. I remember a story of a RAM failure in an IMP (interface message processor) which caused a particular block of memory to fail and read back all zeroes. Because the computer it was running on didn't include odd parity, everything read
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UK's Manchester University managed a black hole router in 1995, devouring traffic across the UK. I'm guessing something similar, as it took a couple of weeks to fix.
No no no... (Score:2)
It is only fitting that we create idiotic conspiracies by some anonymous comments detailing how the Internet REALLY was created and WHY it was created!
No narratives are allowed to make the reader feel like the gullible idiot they are but attempt to border on being like a condescending joke then it'll be just stupid enough to work.
Begin!
Re: (Score:2)
I assure you that cats had nothing to do with connecting up the cables on the early Internet, no matter what is claimed in Steven Levy's book "Hackers".
BBS are alive and well (Score:2)
Ask questions like a 4 year old... (Score:2)
Get an answer worthy of a 4 year old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The Internet killed the BBS. BBS's didn't build it (Score:5, Interesting)
I was a sysop of a popular bulletin board system from back around 1986 through 1993. (Technically, my BBS changed software packages multiple times and went through a few re-names/re-brandings. But I had one running consistently through that time-frame.)
Over the years as as the technology improved, I expanded it from a single phone line to 4 phone lines for dialing in, and eventually connected it to the Internet via a 128K ISDN modem.
The last couple of years I ran it though, there was a definite shift starting to happen. I still had something like 800 regular callers, but more and more? They started asking if/when I was going to get "Internet access" so they could ftp files via the BBS dial-in, or read Usenet newsgroups on it. Especially for the college age crowd, they were all getting experience using the Internet via Unix shell accounts provided to them free as part of their tuition, so they learned about these possibilities and expected a good dial-in BBS would offer the same. Essentially, they started changing their expectations of a BBS from being its own self-contained entity to being a no-cost on-ramp to the Internet that didn't require someone to be signed up for college courses to use it.
At the very end, I had an uptick of people wanting to use telnet to access the BBS *from* their Internet connection they were already on, because it had already flip-flopped. (If you're going to tie up your phone line with your 56K dial-up modem using it, you may as well just be connected to one of these ISPs instead of only one specific BBS at a time.)
The *only* scenario I see where one could argue that BBS's helped build the modern Internet would be the guys who decided to start their own ISP rather than continuing to run their multi-node BBS. One of my friends did that, and it was the way I was able to connect my BBS to the Internet. (He offered me a cheap connection with my ISDN modem to his systems. I remember when he first got his ISP going, the telco literally installed one of their switches in his basement. They put a metal "cage" around it and locked it so he couldn't mess with it, but they wanted it there to provide him the service he needed most cost-effectively.)
To be honest, I don't know where this author gets his claim that a moral outrage over cyberporn threatened to burst the dot-com bubble though? Seems really odd he attributes that as the reason the BBS was "made a scapegoat". There were always a few BBSs dealing in porn and as that became general knowledge, you had some outrage. The random BBS here or there was raided by the FBI for suspected dealing in child porn or alleged copyright violations sharing commercial porn content they didn't own the rights to. But pretty sure this happened without any regard to the popularity of the Internet.
The Soviet Union .. (Score:2)
Porn upset the dot-com? (Score:2)
Really? And not a ton of people starting companies that had no idea what to do with the Web, other than take money from investors, and put up a slick website?
Utter drivel (Score:3)
I was there for all of it. BBSs were not a network, end of story. BBSs were/are more like say Facebook groups, except over a slow modem with only text. The closest analogy is that BBSs were like a very slow website. The network was the existing copper phone system.
What BBSs can be credited with is creating a culture. A culture where it became normal to interact via computer. A culture whose biggest contribution was the emoji.
The first dot-com (Score:2)
FYI for the young whipper-snappers out there (also, get off my lawn), the first dot-com name was for a company called Symbolics in Massachusetts in 1985. .edu domain was also created that year and lots of universities got connected to it. There was also USENET since 1979 which was eventually reachable at the university level with all manner of newsgroups allowing people to discuss anything an
But the issue is how one defines "the internet". Technically, ARPANET connected locations around the country. The
Ooh, ohh, I know... (Score:2)
Do I get a prize or is it just another slow news day? You know, those "journalists" could stop regurgitating whatever press releases get thrown at them ("churnalism") & actually leave their comfy offices & start cultivating some sources, dig into some records, & find some real news for a change. I'm sure that what they really want to do if only their CEOs would let them.
Re:I'm going to have to call bullshit.... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you only knew how many of us sysops moved into work around the "modern" internet and social networks.
Y'all probably have no idea what FIDO nodes were.
Go look it up. I won't wait.
Then look up who coded that and where they ended up.
Take a couple of history lessons maybe?
Re:I'm going to have to call bullshit.... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's half the problem, though... history was written by a bunch of carpetbaggers who came after sysops had already built the first commercial internet service providers and were too busy actually running the place to notice history being rewritten around them. I've actually got a copy of the book in question and from someone who was there at the time it's a good start (although admittedly I'm only two chapters in so my opinion could change later). In any event the history you're talking about is history most people simply don't know... which is the whole point of the book.
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely! People who were "doing it" either had no time or inclination to chronicle what was going on.
We're not a part of an era that journals or keeps diaries.
What we ARE awash in is
"TL:DR" aka "key? iginition?? I don't want to hear all that confusing shit! I just want to go!!!!"
So we get bogus "histories" chronicled by people with some agenda
Like most of history
sigh
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure that once they've all had a chance to finish a few more tests, and organize their notes; the effort to produce the full documentation will soon begin.
Re: I'm going to have to call bullshit.... (Score:2)
I've used BBSes that had web access through the Lynx web browser back in the mid 90s. Sometimes you even had a limited unix account to play with.
Of course this was the exception rather than the norm. Many BBSes could be accessed through telnet though saving on phone charges
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure why this is modded down, since it's true.
But Berners-Lee already gets a lot of credit-- possibly too much credit, since the part he contributed was only the design of the modern "web" interface to the internet. The internet itself was around long before he put "www" in front of it. This article is talking about all the other contributions between the (very limited) ARPAnet and the modern worldwide web.