
A map of the entire internet as of May 1973 - doener
https://twitter.com/workergnome/status/807704855276122114
======
workergnome
Hi there—original tweeter here.

Some context for the picture—my father, Paul, was the business manager for the
computer science department at Carnegie Mellon at the time, and is a fabulous
record-keeper, so he kept all sorts of interesting things from that era.

He was also one of the founders of Three Rivers Computer as well as PERQ,
which were tech transfer spin-outs from the CS dept in the seventies.

~~~
beardicus
Thank you for posting this, and engaging here on HN. Do you think this
collection of interesting things would be a good candidate for digitizing and
getting up on the Internet Archive?

~~~
workergnome
Quite possibly—most likely the PERQ and Three Rivers Computer stuff is the
hardest to find, though I don't know how much of it is already out there.

~~~
peteri
bitsavers.org are probably the best bet to have a chat with about this sort of
stuff.

------
mhandley
This version from 1974 includes the first international link to UCL in London.
As no-one had budget for a dedicated transatlantic link, it was piggybacked on
a link via NORSAR in Norway that was intended for seismic monitoring of
nuclear tests.

[http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeo...](http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography//atlas/arpanet_june1974_large.gif)

~~~
lb1lf
...being a bit of a pedant (and Norwegian!) I'd like to point out that the
first international link was precisely the one to NORSAR at Kjeller; the link
over the North Sea to UCL was the second. :)

(Kjeller/NORSAR was hooked up in June 1973 using a blistering fast 9.6kbps
link, if memory serves)

~~~
mhandley
The history of this link is quite interesting:

[http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/internet-
history.html](http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/internet-history.html)

Anyway, I think we can agree to share the glory; although the first
international link was to the TIP at Kjeller, the first end host was the PDP-9
in London, which itself acted as a relay to the University of London CDC.

~~~
lb1lf
I think you are right; however, I will have to dig into my old copies of the
Norwegian engineering monthly Teknisk Ukeblad; I read a very interesting
feature there a few years ago, interviewing a couple of then NORSAR employees
who admitted that quite a lot of tinkering and exploring resulted once the
link was there - as you'd expect, given the nature of boffins...

Edit - I'd like to dig out the old feature not to dispute your suggestion;
only to share what was a very entertaining read. :-)

------
CPLX
One interesting aside is you can see from that even this early in the
evolution of what's still a very sparse network, how dense the resources are
in California, presaging the eventual concentration of the "internet business"
there. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions and such.

It's also interesting to note that the DC area is the #2 (arguably tied with
Boston) given how relatively inconsequential that community is now to what
we'd consider the tech sector. That was a slow process of course, given that
at one point AOL dominated the consumer internet from its offices near Tysons
Corner.

~~~
camiller
"It's also interesting to note that the DC area is the #2 (arguably tied with
Boston) given how relatively inconsequential that community is now to what
we'd consider the tech sector."

Remember, back then it was ARPAnet. ARPA was/is the Defense Departments
Advanced Research Projects Agency. If you think the defence department then or
now as not part of the tech sector you would be underestimating the investment
in technology research made by the DOD.

~~~
CPLX
But of course. California's nascent technology industry was also created by
Federal dollars, just look at Ames, Rand, etc, on the left side of the map.
The interesting question I was pondering is why the transition from public to
private/consumer sector happened in one place but not nearly so much in the
other.

~~~
user837387
I think at a certain point the question becomes very similar as asking why you
got a 6 in a dice roll instead of a 3. You can definitely explain it using
Newtonian physics but at a high enough level I'm not sure it really matters.

------
externalmodem
For a deeper dive into the history of ARPANET cartography, check out this
paper (many more maps inside!): Fidler, B., and M. Currie. “The Production and
Interpretation of ARPANET Maps.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 37,
no. 1 (January 2015): 44–55. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2015.16.
[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7057559/?arnumber=705755...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7057559/?arnumber=7057559)

------
dbg31415
For a geographic representation, try:

* ARPANET Maps || [http://som.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/history/arpamaps/](http://som.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/history/arpamaps/)

~~~
wolfgke
As you can read there, these maps come from "Heart, F., McKenzie, A.,
McQuillian, J., and Walden, D., ARPANET Completion Report". This text can be
obtained from [http://walden-family.com/bbn/arpanet-completion-
report.pdf](http://walden-family.com/bbn/arpanet-completion-report.pdf)

EDIT: For a less deep link go to [http://walden-
family.com/bbn/](http://walden-family.com/bbn/)

------
russellbeattie
Wikipedia has a similar image from 1977 on the PDP-10 page.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10)

------
gravypod
Make a high quality scan and blow it up so we can all print out our very own
internet map!

~~~
workergnome
No problem:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/2efes525sd9q5yg/1973%20ARPAnet%20P...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/2efes525sd9q5yg/1973%20ARPAnet%20PDF.pdf?dl=0)

(I'm assuming that doing this doesn't get my dropbox account suspended for
some reason...)

~~~
gravypod
Very nice! This'll look great hung over the microcomputer I've scavanged and
fixed up (and hopefully one day my collection of microcomputers I will have
scavanged and fixed up).

------
DanBC
See also RFC 4.

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4)

    
    
      7  Test messages between UCSB-SRI 11/15/69
    
       7a  Network configuration
    
               SRI .
                  |  .
                  |   .
                  |     .
                  |       .
                  |         .
                  ------------
               UCLA           UCSB

------
lordnacho
Which modern protocols even existed back then? IP? TCP? FTP?

~~~
DonHopkins
NCP, the Network Control Program, was the predecessor of TCP/IP. [1]

Host addresses were only 8 bits (zero was reserved), so there could only be up
to 255 hosts on the ARPANET.

NCP was a simplex protocol, not full duplex like TCP/IP, so each port=>port
connection transmitted data in only one direction, and applications would use
an even/odd pair of ports for two-way communication.

The parity of the ports at each end of the connection was required to be
different: you couldn't connect an even port to another even port, or an odd
port to another odd port. "Homosocketuality" was strictly forbidden by
internet protocols! NCP's mandatory "heterosocketuality" was called the "Anita
Bryant feature". [2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Control_Program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Control_Program)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422813)

~~~
saghm
> The parity of the ports at each end of the connection was required to be
> different: you couldn't connect an even port to another even port, or an odd
> port to another odd port. "Homosocketuality" was strictly forbidden by
> internet protocols! NCP's mandatory "heterosocketuality" was called the
> "Anita Bryant feature". [2] > ... > [2]
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422813)

Well, that's a whole distasteful part of computer history I was blissfully
unaware of before now. As someone fairly young (in my early 20s), it's
sometimes hard to remember that things like this are very recent history, so I
guess it helps to have some perspective every now and then.

------
hyperbovine
Surprised that Berkeley got online later than several others UCs and LBL.

------
sixothree
What do IMP and TIP stand for here?

~~~
mamadrood
IMP must be a Interface Message Processor [1], an Arpanet equivalent to our
routers. And TIP must be Terminal Interface Processor [2], not really sure of
their usage but basically they would allow remote sessions on the network, my
guess is that they were some early forms of modern modems.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip)

~~~
EvanAnderson
I went down this rabbit hole this morning myself. There's a nice document at
Bitsavers
([http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/bbn/imp/BBN1822_Jan1976.pdf](http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/bbn/imp/BBN1822_Jan1976.pdf))
that has details about the two different IMP models, and the TIP and Pluribus
IMP (an interesting multiprocessor IMP that I'd never heard about prior to
today).

The TIP was the "Terminal IMP" (per the linked document) that provided
connections to 64 terminals directly to the network through the IMP (with no
intervening host).

------
techplex
The ARPANet Completion Report is Fascinating; it includes maps of the US with
the ARPANet nodes indicated as the network grew. As well as additional logical
diagrams of the network. [http://walden-family.com/bbn/arpanet-completion-
report.pdf](http://walden-family.com/bbn/arpanet-completion-report.pdf)

------
_jomo
A very similar map from 1972 is included in RFC432: [PDF]
[https://tools.ietf.org/pdf/rfc432.pdf](https://tools.ietf.org/pdf/rfc432.pdf)

------
jtchang
It's kind of amazing how fast the internet evolved. Did the original people
who were hooking these boxes up ever imagine what it was eventually going to
be?

------
minikites
Does anyone know what some of the non-obvious locations are? I'm not sure what
RADC, ETAC, and a few of the others are.

~~~
cpr
RADC was Rome Air Development Center (from memory at the time; I got on the
network in the fall of '72 as a frosh at HARV-10), a big funder of ARPA-
related research.

I'm pretty sure RADC were the funding sources for much of the CS research
going on at the Harvard CRCT [Center for Research in Computing Technology] in
those days. My advisor, Tom Cheatham (RIP), was the head of the CRCT and the
PI for many of the funded research programs. (Great man.)

All from memory, the less obvious names:

MIT: LCS, AI, Arch. Machine group, Multics, etc.

Harvard: CRCT with a few machines (PDP-10, -1, etc.)

BBN: contractor that developed the original ARPANET technology

Aberdeen and Belvoir: I believe Army testing grounds

NBS: National Bureau of Standards

MITRE (Corp)

Lincoln (Labs)

LBL (Lawrence Berkeley Labs)

Xerox (MAXC was PARC's home-made PDP-10 clone)

SDC (Software Dev Corp)

We had fun back in the "open days" when most systems had open guest accounts,
telnetting from machine to machine to see how many "miles" we could go before
the whole thing broke down.

(Fun factoid: back in the early days of email, the mail delivery mechanism was
anonymous FTP to append to your recipient's mailbox file.)

Eventually (I'm vaguely remembering by 1973-74) there were enough troubles
with vandals that all the open accounts were turned off. (I remember watching
a TTY where Harv-10 was logging all typing from guest users, see what mischief
they were up to.)

"Those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end..."

------
atl4s
One of my old networks lecturers used to love trotting out this on a slide,
pretty sure he had the same map in his attic.

