nanog mailing list archives
Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that
From: Gene LeDuc <gleduc () sdsu edu>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2020 09:38:52 -0800
I was a student worker at a computer lab at USC in the 70s and a buddy had a system operator job at ISI in Marina Del Rey. One day he connected to his office from my lab via a 300baud acoustic modem and then got on the ARPA-NET. From there he connected to a system called ATLAS in the UK. I had no idea what to do at the prompt so I typed
> ? to get list of commands. My global eyes were opened when the response was Pardon?instead of the usual rude or cryptic error message that I was used to. There was a big world out there and we were definitely not in Kansas anymore!
Gene On 2/16/20 1:25 PM, bzs () theworld com wrote:
Ok it's Sunday... The first time I got on the internet was around 1977. A friend dropped by the lab I worked in at Harvard and wondered if I had an MIT ITS account and I said no wasn't even sure what it was other than a time sharing system at MIT. So we had a modem and dumb terminal and dialed-in and one could create an account from the login prompt which I guess today seems mundane but really was totally unintuitive, getting logins on time shared systems generally required paper work and proof one should have access. And I became BARRYS@MIT-AI (no stinkin' dots back then.) He showed me some ARPAnet things and I was suitably amazed and explored more from home where I had my own dumb tty and modem. TBH I didn't really have much use for it at the time other than joining mailing lists or similar. Occasionally if someone was in the room I'd say "watch this!" and get to a login prompt at Stanford or UCL (London.) They were usually impressed. I did use the local area network to access MIT-MC to use MacSyma (a symbolic math package) which I did use in my work. I was fairly amazed that my files were visible on either machine. etc etc etc.
-- Gene LeDuc | A ship in port is safe, but that's not Technology Security | what ships are built for. San Diego State University | --Adm. Grace Hopper, USN
Current thread:
- Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that Mark Tinka (Feb 16)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that Mark Tinka (Feb 16)
- Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that Mark Tinka (Feb 16)
- Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that bzs (Feb 16)
- Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that Gene LeDuc (Feb 17)
- Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. (Feb 17)
- Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that Clayton Zekelman (Feb 17)
- Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that nanog08 (Feb 17)
- Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that Gene LeDuc (Feb 17)
- Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that Paul Ebersman (Feb 17)
- Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that bzs (Feb 16)
- Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that Brian (Feb 17)
- Re: Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that Ben Cannon (Feb 17)