
And 'Lo!': How the internet was born - alexanderdmitri
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49842681
======
atarian
One of my favorite quotes about the Internet by Alan Kay:

    
    
      The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean,
      rather than something that was man-made.

~~~
abvr
Great one.

I really do miss the old Internet though.

------
maldeh
Also recommended: "Lo and behold! Reveries of the connected world" by Werner
Herzog.

~~~
fossuser
I would counter recommend this - I couldn’t make it through it on Netflix.

It seemed like the director had no idea what he was talking about and a lot of
the interviewees were non technical people that said things that made no sense
(actually no sense - indistinguishable from words strung together to sound
profound that were actually meaningless).

~~~
sgt
I would counter that counter recommendation. One has to keep in mind that this
is still a Werner Herzog creation - and he's quite an eccentric guy. Think
"40% David Lynch".

------
gumby
On that last map, the three nodes with a T in a circle represented TIPs --
basically dialup access points. The TIP had a tiny command line that let you
specify which machine you wanted to connect to.

Long distance (which could be within your state) calls were expensive in those
days so being close to a TIP was a big deal.

~~~
cpr
Even better, you didn't log in to a TIP--as long as you knew the phone number,
you were all set. And phone numbers were generally available.

~~~
elliekelly
I’m curious how that worked? Was the line “busy” for everyone else once you
connected? Did a TIP have several phone numbers so multiple people could
connect at once?

~~~
cpr
Yes, the number connected to a rolling bank of lines.

------
jdkee
I love reading about the history of the internet, along with the history of
computers in general. It truly demonstrates the effect of "standing on the
shoulders of giants" to read about Turing and Von Neumann and Godel and
Shannon, Shockley, Knuth, Ritchie, Bell Labs and Watson and PARC, etc. To
understand history is to understand the future.

------
unnouinceput
Quote 1:

"Great idea," said Herzfeld. "Get it going. You've got $1m more in your budget
right now. Go."

Quote 2:

"They cost $80,000 each, more than $500,000 (£405,000) in today's money. "

If only would be that easy to get $6.25m in today's government environment for
a pet project done in name of science. Today, to get those money, all you have
to do is be a military contractor and say "...for helping troops in
Afghanistan" and a check would already fly in your direction. Not so much for
science one though.

~~~
cameronbrown
Military research has always been a major driver of technological development.
It's not a recent thing - it's just the other sources of funding are drying
up.

~~~
throw0101a
> _Military research has always been a major driver of technological
> development._

Silicon Valley was built on government / military spending (at least until the
late 1970s):

* [https://steveblank.com/secret-history/](https://steveblank.com/secret-history/)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600305)

~~~
rasz
It never stopped [https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-
ci...](https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-
research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/)

------
cpr
Ah, happy memories of late-night sitting at a teletype (TTY) by the IMP in the
PDP-1/PDP-10 Harvard CRCT machine room, hearing the phone ring on the IMP, and
a voice on the other end from BBN HQ asking me to reboot the IMP, as it was
hung...

I.e, early Arpanet management was manual--no remote power-cycling equipment.

(We had some incredibly whizzy _50Kbaud_ leased lines between the Harvard IMP
and the BBN HQ IMP.)

------
Jaruzel
> _It was, as the historians Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon put it, like
> "having a den cluttered with several television sets, each dedicated to a
> different channel"._

This is how I feel about modern streaming TV; needing multiple apps on
multiple platforms just watch it. That TV is for Netflix, and that TV is for
Amazon, and that TV is for Disney+ and that TV is for...

------
throw0101a
_Where Wizards Stay Up Late_ seems to be the definitive history of the
Internet:

* [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late)

------
kyberias
Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon is a great book
about the subject.

------
NotCamelCase
> Next to his office was the terminal room, a pokey little space where three
> remote-access terminals with three different keyboards sat side by side.

How'd that remote access work?

~~~
gumby
Likely a Bell 103 modem and an acoustical coupler.

