The internet celebrates the Big Four-O Today, the internet celebrates its fortieth anniversary. Or at least one of them. On September 2, 1969, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a team of engineers led by Professor Leonard Kleinrock attached the first two machines on the first node of the ARPAnet, the Defense-Department-sponsored computer network …
I put together my first ever computer.
I bought all the basic parts in PC World and carefully assembled it at home - Wow, I was so nervous that I'd break something. But the monitor, printer, main unit, keyboard, mouse, and speakers fit perfectly.
I switched it on and waited 20 minutes while it booted up into Windows (Millennium Edition). Within a few weeks I had managed to connect it to the Internet and soon my computer uttered its first words:
"You gay loser kill ass c*nt dead fail douchebag b*tch f*cker I kill you"
Happy birthday, Internet!
40 years later I can switch on a tiny PC at home, check the news, the weather and every minute I can be bombarded with 1.5M viruses, 75 malware attacks, 17 email messages promising me "expansion" pills for $19.99 a bottle and ads for every major social networking site with a bouncy, happy go lucky graphic artist and an average membership age of 12!
What a wonderful age we live in, thank Dawkins for the haven that is The Reg!
"Still, kudos for building a complete TCP/IP stack in isolation and having it almost work on the first try."
Nit-picks, TCP/IP was a long way off, the "IMP" referred to is/was roughly analogous to a network card in a modern PC, and you can be sure that they tested each end in isolation, so the actual achievement here is that they wrote drivers for two network cards and managed to get them inter-operating on the second attempt.
Still, that's *more* impressive than it sounds.
The DARPA work 40 years ago, while important, was just one of many networking projects, many having begun much earlier and were already in daily operation. Even the "packet switching" aspect was included in some of these already-existing systems. BBN, which implemented the IMPs, was one of many suppliers of timesharing and related networks. If I remember correctly, the initial IMPs were based on existing designs already in use for TS work.
For a personal example, forty years ago here in North Carolina, the TUCC network supported the three primary universities (UNC, Duke, NC State), IBM, several other businesses, and a total of 45 colleges around the state through the NCECS network. While some of these schools might have just remote card reader/printer sites and a few had little more than a few Teletype terminals, other locations had extensive computer-to-computer networks.
While most of the connections were typical of 1960's time-shared or batch operations, there were a number of specialized devices on these networks (e.g. CalComp plotters). In 1968, I added support for a bit-mapped graphics device (the CC-30) -- quite slow over a modem and not very good resolution either. (That was using BTAM on 2701 controller; in 1969-70 I did animations on a CC-30 channel-attached to a PDP-8.)
Read about timesharing (e.g. DTSS) and networks (e.g. Burroughs Poll-Select/Contention) and you might be surprised at what existed in the late 1960's. You might even find email and markup languages long before HTML.
So enjoy the "birthday", but keep it in perspective. Now you kids get off my lawn!
There is an Ofcom consultation out on NGNs. The gist is that BTs original plan for 21C NGN has largely failed and the re-focus is on delivering better access, which we hope will include a simple and transparent high capacity data transport layer.
This I believe is good news for customers and shareholders, as after 5 years BT switch from attempting to control the Internet with its NGN to just giving us high speed access we need.
Ofcom disagree. Internet is still a demo, IP cannot carry voice and thus cost recovery will continue on call conveyance for the next 4 years and NGNs may take 10 years to emerge.
No mention of the Universal Broadband Service. no mention how the spectrum allocation will be integrated into creating a common data transport layer.
And these good people will be in charge of network investment. Help!
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