Happy nights spent hacking in the Harvard graduate computer center next to the PDP-1/PDP-10 (Harv-1, Harv-10), getting calls on the IMP phone in the middle of the night from the BBN network operations asking me to reboot it manually as it had gotten wedged...
And, next to me, Bill Gates writing his first assembler/linker/simulator for the Altair 8080... (I tried talking him out of this microcomputer distraction -- we have the whole world of mainframes at our fingertips! -- without success.)
(Edit:) We also would play the game of telnet-till-you-die, going from machine to machine around the world (no passwords on guest accounts in the early days), until the connection died somewhere along the way.
Plus, once the hackers came along, Geoff Steckel (systems guy on the PDP-10) wrote a little logger to record all incoming guests keystrokes on an old teletype, so we could watch them attempting to hack the system.
PS: It is also amusing that an unmodified 1970s SMTP server can still deliver messages to gmail and receive responses back, given only the provision of a SPF record. Sadly, the coming mandatory requirement for DKIM will finally make this no longer a possibility.
PPS: It is much less amusing to attempt to read the gmail user's responses on a terminal.
Very useful for the few times I actually need to send email to mailing lists with strong opinions about newfangled MIME multipart messages :)
I did manage to avoid being Microsoft employee #12 or so (my buddy Bob Greenberg was #8, I think?, and encouraged me to come join them), and Adobe employee #8 (I knew Chuck Geschke from some earlier work done as an undergrad extending his PhD thesis to Harvard's extensible language ECL), due to various life circumstances. I guess God didn't want be to be a spoiled rotten billionaire.
Another near miss was co-consulting with Len Bosack at HP setting up Lisp Machine networking, and wondering how the heck the then-nascent Cisco was ever going to sell more than a few hundred routers (based on the same Sun-1 boards developed by Andy Bechtolstein at Standford that we used at Imagen, the first typeset-quality laser printers, a spinoff from Don Knuth's research at Stanford) to universities and government labs.
As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.
Well, I wasn't even close to the technology nexus that you describe, neither in time nor in place, but this really resonates with me.
I RELIABLY manage to "not get" stuff in my own bubble, not because I'm too far away from it or because I don't understand it, but the exact opposite.
For example, I clearly remember how in the early 2000s I thought/felt "well, of course Amazon/eBay/Google is a great business, but everyone is already using them anyway, so what's the upside" and similiar other Thoughts Of Great Wisdom And Foresight.
Wild! I had forgotten the LispMs had Impress support; I think that came out of the time when we worked with Janet Walker, head of documentation at Symbolics.
In the article Peter talks about the temporary import license for the original ARPAnet equipment. The delayed VAT and duty bill for this gear prevented anyone else taking over the UK internet in the early days because the bill would have then become due. But he didn't mention that eventually if the original ARPAnet equipment was ever scrapped, the bill would also become due.
When I was first at UCL in the mid 1980s until well into the 90s, all that equipment was stored disused in the mens toilets in the basement. Eventually Peter decided someone had to do something about it, but he couldn't afford the budget to ship all this gear back to the US. Peter always seemed to delight in finding loopholes, so he pulled some strings. Peter was always very well connected - UCL even ran the .int and nato.int domains for a long time. So, at some point someone from UCL drove a truck full of obsolete ARPAnet gear to some American Air Force base in East Anglia that was technically US territory. Someone from the US air force gave them a receipt, and the gear was officially exported. And there it was left, in the US Air Force garbage. Shame it didn't end up in a museum, but that would have required paying the VAT bill.
– the NPL couldn't set up a British inter-network because of pressure from GPO;
– they couldn't connect to ARPA via Norway because of the Foreign Office;
– then, UCL couldn't get funding from SERC;
– then, UCL couldn't get funding from DTI because it didn't have industrial interest (although, to be fair, it was the department of "industry")...
...and then nearly a decade later government bodies were trying to take it over.
(It looks like the IMP/TIP was literally funded by petty-ish £££ that the NPL superintendent could get his hands on without further approval. To be fair, GPO did fund the link to Oslo.)
That 5k GPB in 1973 is 77k in today's pound, or about 95k USD at current exchange rates.
support - engineer means "compatible, works with" govt means "aiding a cause"
business rules - engineer means logic, govt means literal rules that have force of law
If you want to get results, you have to be really careful - if you say you are supporting something, the govt people may think you are aiding a cause they or whoever appointed them oppose. If you talk about rules, govt people assume a 2 year fight, expensive process, and lots of hearings - so it gets weird.
My point: "Internet" wasn't very well-known "even" in 1988 outside of well-connected places.
Book: Scandinavian PC Systems, Valentino Berti: "Introduktion till datakommunikation"
What connection did the housing in the dorms at Kent have? I seem to remember serial ports in the rooms, but could have been ether?
Peter was also responsible for the UK using .uk instead of the ISO country code "gb" which it should have been according to "the rules". But Peter insisted on .uk, as the official name of the country was "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", and he thought GB was not properly inclusive of Northern Ireland. It took until 2021 for UK to replace GB on car number plates (and stickers for travelling abroad).
Same for Royal Holloway out in Egham when I went up, also in 1985.
I was foo@vaxa.rhbnc.ac.uk or uk!ac!rhbnc!vaxa@foo (or something like that).
At one point there was an outage of the Sprint connection to Sweden that the Nordic connection to the US went over, and the Nordic countries for several hours saturated connections throughout parts of Europe that were in no way at a scale suitable to be a functional backup for the traffic from the Nordic countries...
It was first later I realised how spoiled we'd been... Tens of Mbps FTP speeds to other Nordic countries was routine in 94/95, for example.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunet
https://internetmuseum.se/tidslinjen/nordunet-connects-the-n...
You could, with a tiny amount of password hacking, joyride around the system quite easily, at least as far as getting to a login message on a remote host, possibly logging on with a guest account and having a text chat with surprised people in other countries.
I had an account on the NRS host machine to administer our site info.
Boy, those scalliwags would have got into a lot of trouble if they had got caught.
https://archive.org/details/michigan-terminal-system-distrib...
If I recall correctly, the main workstation lab was B10A, where I spent a lot of time. Then there was a narrow room, B09 I think, that had mission control on the right hand side with a machine room behind it, and a second machine room on the left side. Can't remember which machine room the Pyramid was in.
And yes, Phil is still around.
Norway was the first country outside of USA to be connected to Arpanet in 1973 to share seismic data, but the universities did not gain general access until 1983.
I posted submitted a link to a story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655568
As far as I can tell, Finland first got ARPANET connection via NORDunet in 1988 [1][2][3], though possibly indirectly a few years before as there was a connection to Sweden a few years earlier.
[1] https://siy.fi/history-of-the-finnish-internet/
[2] https://csc.fi/en/news/funets-anniversary-40-years-of-action...
[3] From [2]: "On Thursday December 1st, 1988, the first routing test was carried out, allowing IP packets to pass from Finland via Nordunet to the USA, in effect the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET and Arpanet networks. This connected Finland to the international Internet via the Funet network. The following message can be seen as the beginning of the Finnish Internet."
I speak enough Norwegian to have gone around a few museums that tourists and other foreigners don't usually visit, and this is my understanding too.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
(which of course applies to your comments as well)
The article doesn't mention the Coloured Book protocols, but I'm pretty sure this phrasing isn't accidental: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols
Also, now I feel very old. "Little black book" was an ubiquitous term when I grew up, and so using the term would just be a synonym to "address book" that nobody would think twice about.
[1] E.g. The House and Home: A Practical Book - Volume 1 (1896): "And there is a little black book with red lettering seen on every writing-table and carriage-cushion wherein puzzled mater-familias finds her bearings annually among her cherished acquaintances, many of whom the little black book alone keeps in her recollection!"
[2] Guess you got back (Guess you got) To my name (To my name) In your little black book
Indeed, I'm aware of that meaning and its ubiquity. But amongst UK university computing staff at that time, knowledge of the Coloured Books was as embedded. Remember that JANET network addresses were the other way round, so rather than cam.ac.uk it used to be uk.ac.cam - the author of this piece will have been well aware of the double meaning.
It's that double meaning that gives the headline it's precise relevance and a dash of humour.
It still reads to me like just a synonym for "address book" to refer to a mapping.
The humour comes from a (non-risqué) double entendre.
I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that... After some searching I found the Conversation's RSS feed for technology[1] which says it was 2025 after searching the page for "internet" and looking through the results
<id>tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45404</id>
<published>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</published>
<updated>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</updated>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://theconversation.com/how-britain-got-its-first-internet-connection-by-the-late-pioneer-who-created-the-first-password-on-the-internet-45404"/>
<title>How Britain got its first internet connection – by the late pioneer who created the first password on the internet</title>
You seem to be confusing the date it was written with the date it was published.
I believe there are multiple works where that interval is over 50 years. I would not be surprised if a gap of a century has been surpassed.
I was using SRCnet in 1981, when Liverpool Physics had a dedicated link to Daresbury (national lab) whose speed I don't remember at that stage. Unfortunately the infamous PDP11 "terminal concentrators" for interactive use then were horribly unreliable. RJE to the cloud, where analyses ran, worked well.
http://9ol.es/nuclear-myth.html
A bit more:
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15035/did-the-co...
The UK and telecoms don't make a happy pairing - we always seem to do the wrong thing:
https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
Dr Cochrane knew that Britain's tired copper network was insufficient: "In 1974 it was patently obvious that copper wire was unsuitable for digital communication in any form, and it could not afford the capacity we needed for the future."
He was asked to do a report on the UK's future of digital communication and what was needed to move forward.
"In 1979 I presented my results," he tells us, "and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort - that spanned in six years - involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation.
"In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop".
His most preferred model of funding work was to have 9/10ths of it done or a sure-fure thing, and then use the funding to work on the next idea, so he was guaranteed to have goods to deliver at the end of the project. He didn't always carry it off but when it worked it was superlative. I was on at least one OSI (protocol) project with 6 partners across industry and research in Europe, and the work was very unequal. That said, very fine dinners. I have fond memories of INRIA canteen food having wine and fresh fruit. UCL had baked beans and pies, the staff club had the same baked beans and pies but you could eat them under a superb Stanley Spenser oil painting of the resurrection.
The first Cisco Router turned up one day, it had annoyingly noisy fans which blew air a useless direction compared to the rest of the racks. As Mark Handley has pointed out below the basement was full of trash: a fantastic Prism-wedge shaped digital copying stand used with the British Library to photograph rare works, and an unbelievably expensive CCD digital camera attached gathering dust, a BBN Butterfly (it was a heap of crap frankly) running pre-BGP routing, a BLIT terminal and depraz mouse, the first Dec and Sun workstations.
We ran a project with the slade school of art doing digital arts design with them, lovely people. I still have some of the reject works.
Peter liked inviting people to come and be at UCL. During my time Bob Braden (SATNET) was there, and Mike Lesk (UUCP) -and they were also very nice and approachable. Tiny tea-room, I caused a kurfuffle washing out the most disgustingly stained coffee mug there, the owner of which was bulding the patina both to see how thick it got, and to discourage others from using his cup.
Peter had one standing rule you did NOT break: If there was an inter-departmental meeting with the people from ULCC (at that time down at Lambs Conduit St) he expected you to "vote against" any proposal they brought to the table without question: Departmental politics ran deep.
Peter was a committed skier, he was hardly young when I got there and he was still avidly visiting the alps as often as possible.
UCL ran the gateway from JANET (X.25 based non internet) to the ARPANet which required you to login to a unix jump host and use kermit to connect across, and lodge FTP requests using JANET "grey book" FTP protocol to talk to the FTP client through a conversion script. The gateway got hacked every now and then. Some of us were a bit unkind and said it used Kermit because Peter, who was somewhat small, frog-like and had thick glasses he peered through, appreciated the joke that he was Kermit personified.
Edit: in HN titles, if you see a year at the end in parens, that indicates the year that the article originated. If you see a year that's not at the end in parens, that's part of the article title, meaning it's probably about something that happened that year. That's the convention anyhow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom
Pipex was established in 1990 and began providing dial-up Internet access in March 1992, the UK's first commercial Internet service provider (ISP).
That's about the same time it became available in the U.S. I got home internet service (dial-up) in the mid-1990's.
I know reading the article is very much out of fashion, but all the dates given in the article are in the 1970s.
Just like the dates in the Wikipedia article you linked.