

Happy Birthday ARPANET - 1st msg sent Oct 29 1969 - jedwhite
http://www.sri.com/about/timeline/arpanet.html

======
cpr
Hey, you kids, get off my lawn! ;-)

I remember enjoying the very early ARPAnet (about 10-15 hosts) when a frosh in
1972 at Harvard (I had talked my way into taking grad courses as a freshman
since all the undergrad CS courses were pretty babyish, so had access to the
grad computing center--nirvana). Back then, the ARPAnet was completely wide
open, had only a few hundred users across those hosts in total, and was an
absolute blast.

For example, every system had a well-publicized guest account you could log in
with and poke around. Many of the systems were TOPS-10 and TENEX systems (both
based on DEC-10 hardware), but some were IBM 360-based, and some were custom
hardware-based. The most fun were things like SRI's (Doug Englebart's) NLS
system, which was almost useable over the network with a CRT (which were
pretty new-fangled themselves back then) and UCSB's symbolic math system
(forget its name now). One could learn a lot by just poking around those early
systems.

We used to telnet from host to host around the world, to see how many we could
hop through before the connection crashed. (Plus, it was danged near
impossible to "escape" your way back to any particular host to close the
connection, anyway, since you'd have to remember how many escape/quote telnet
sequences to send before the "real" escape you wanted to send.)

I was also on the first mailing list on the ARPAnet, hosted at BBN, which was,
appropriately meta-ly, about mail software and mailing lists. That was a lot
of fun, bikeshedding about header formats, email address canonicalizations,
etc. (Back, then addresses were just user@host, no domains; I think mine was
67,377@harv-10. (TOPS-10 systems used octal programmer,project pair codes for
login, each 18 bits).

And, back then, mail systems delivered mail by (pre-TCP) ftp'ing into your
system and appending to your (world-write) mailbox file in your home
directory. One could have lots of fun with that.

I remember sitting by the HARV-IMP (a Honeywell minicomputer with custom
hardware, talking to HARV-10 and HARV-1 (a DEC PDP-1 that the first spacewar
was written on), and the phone would ring in the middle of the night, asking
whoever was around to reboot the IMP because it had crashed and they couldn't
remotely reboot it. That IMP had a couple of high-speed 56Kb links to several
other nodes, one down Mass Ave at MIT, and one out to the Air Force base out
in Lincoln (?) MA. The super-high-speed cross-country links were 256Kb.

Ah well, sic transit gloria mundi.

~~~
cpr
Perhaps the most surprising thing about most of us who grew up with the
ARPAnet then Internet was just how much we took it for granted, never thinking
a thing about it, especially not its commercial potential. It was just the air
one breathed with mail, ftp, etc. (this is all pre-web), part of the fabric of
life.

(I think Gates admitted to the same problem in his famous "we've gotta catch
up with the Internet" memo.)

I remember doing some Lisp Machine consulting at HP Labs in the early 80's (I
had become an idiot savant about MIT Chaosnet integration with DEC-20's while
working for the MIT EECS dept), bumping into Len Bosak (then of Stanford) and
hearing about his plans to start up a router company (Cisco), and being
honestly baffled as to who (outside of a few military/industrial complex
companies like HP) would buy a router? (I think it surprised Bosak as well.)

------
rauljara
The best part is what the first message was: "LO"

Short for LOGIN. They only got through the l and the o before the system
crashed.

~~~
simonsarris
So if we baked it a birthday cake, it would have just two bytes!

------
jgrahamc
ARPANET makes me feel old. It's younger than me.

~~~
alexophile
"How old are you uncle Johnny" "Let's just say I'm older than the Internet"
"whooooooaaaaa"

Also: <http://www.xkcd.com/647/>

------
nkassis
For those wanting to learn the history check out:

Where the wizards stay up late, [http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-
Late/dp/06848326...](http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-
Late/dp/0684832674/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1288378191&sr=8-1)

Also, check out this, a true gem on google video:

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4989933629762859961#>

------
Volscio
Here's some scans of the IMP Log:

<http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~lk/LK/Inet/1stmesg.html>

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

------
edw519
I wonder if tomorrow's front page will have:

Happy Birthday SPAM - 1st spam sent Oct 30 1969

------
callmeed
According to a couple friends from UCSB, the school is now quite behind in
terms of offering useful online courses and services to students. Ironic.

~~~
britta
Not really, since anyone working at the school in 1969 has long retired or
moved on to other things, mostly forgotten by now. A lot changes in forty
years. I wrote a thing about why UCSB even ended up as the third node:
[http://jeweledplatypus.org/cgi-
bin/blosxom.cgi/text/ucsbnet....](http://jeweledplatypus.org/cgi-
bin/blosxom.cgi/text/ucsbnet.html) \- they pretty much just happened to have
the budget for it and a person working on interesting related stuff.

------
akolosov
Also, first map of the Internet.

------
charlesju
Go UCLA! :D

