Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking The world of datacenter networking is crammed with exotic technology and capabilities beyond the imaginings of administrators charged with running big iron decades ago. However, while it might have been a slower and more proprietary time, it was also perhaps a little simpler. Dr Andrew Herbert, Chairman of the Board of …
In those days ports were real ports, disks were real disks and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
And back-ups were real back-ups.... Well, three out of four isn't too bad.
Encrypting ransomeware would still be chugging away today with DES if it had been a thing back then.
Ahem....
Here in Blighty we had "discs".
"Disks" are those thing you put into cardboard envelopes with the words "Floppy Disks - DO NOT BEND" on which posties wrote "Oh yes they do" before folding them to fit the letter box.
None of your fancy Amercan ideas here.
I did Computer Science A-level at the local technical college, partly to get out of Games lessons at my proper school. We connected to the Open University's computers using dial-up modems where the telephone handset was put in a cradle. I suppose it might have been nominally 300baud, but I don't know for sure. Each student, or at least each terminal, had to have their own connection. Then there was the clacketty printer, which of course had to be connected in the same way, not to mention the punched tape readers and punches. (In those days, "telephone handsets" were real "telephone handsets", not fondleslabs. Kids don't know they're born... well, they weren't.)
In those days telephone handsets in the UK were rented from the GPO, permanently wired and you weren't allowed to connect unapproved equipment - so acoustic couplers were pretty much the only option. They certainly added to the bulk of 'mobile' equipment.
You could of course buy modems that came with a Red Triangle warning (no, not the Channel 4 Red Triangle warning!) indicating they were NOT approved for connection to the GPO/BT phone network. That's not to say you couldn't wire them up anyway... so acoustic couplers were not the only option.
To be honest, I cannot recall ever using an 'approved' modem. I started using email, then via FidoNet, about 40 years ago and migrated rapidly from 300 baud to whatever came next as the costs of new hardware was easily justified by the reducing the then ruinous phone bills (I'm omitting the "you kids don't know you good you have it etc. etc." here).
The way I figured, I had a good understanding of the ACTUAL electronics risks so I bought what I knew to be safe, and I also had a good understanding of the ACTUAL reason the phone companies were only allowing 'approved' modems: they were making a substantial profit there too, often on gear that was inferior or not able to reach the call duration-reducing speeds that for instance US sourced modems coul reach. They were basically bottom feeding from both sides..
And no, using different pins of the RJ11 connector (as done in the Benelux) wasn't going to stop me. Honestly, that was just pathetic, using the outer two wires instead of the middle two ones. Truly tragic.
Being from the US, when I was living in Edinburgh, I was gobsmacked at first the thought of paying per-minute for local calls (and dialup with a close enough POP). But then again, on average my phone bill was far less than that of my family in the US. At least back in early 2001, I was paying maybe 9p/minute to call internationally calling them, and they were paying $1.50 per minute to call me.
I'd forgotten about all that equipment that was not approved for connection to the GPO network, and the Red Triangles! Damn.
It wasn't just modems though, if I remember correctly it was anything other than the boggo standard phone; want something fancy, then get a Red Triangle item.
I remember going to a computer user group way back when.
They had a presentation (with an overhead projector) about how your dog spot, with a (hopefully waterproof) daily newspaper in its mouth could deliver the contents to the next major city faster than the current at the time dial up technologies.
> In those days, "telephone handsets" were real "telephone handsets"
Depends, about the only time someone today encounters a “real” handset is if they use a call box. Back then we were seeing the first of the newer “plastic” rather than Bakelite handsets and phones.
For my O level in computing we used the Teletype (model 33) connected via dial modem to the local polytechnics DEC 10. Great fun, we learnt how to tap the handset rest to dial numbers other than the modem preset…
Haven't seen a "hand set" since the last public phones that i've seen in a while were removed from the T station up the road. Think they took them out about 3 years before covid. Think there were two phones on the first floor of one campus building more recently, but they're gone now also. there is a mail chute on the 4th floor to deliver mail to the ground floor for pick up. could still put a letter in it but doubt the mailbox exists any longer. There used to be two phone booths outside of the registrars office back when i went to school here back when they had a cyber 70, but they're gone now too. don't miss them until i realize i forgot my phone and need to make a call.
"We connected to the Open University's computers using dial-up modems where the telephone handset was put in a cradle."
The same arrangement was used for a computer assisted training exercise in the chemistry section of the S100 course. As Tutor/Counsellor it was my privilege to oversee this by AFAICR hauling the not insubstantial cradle and, I think, an allegedly portable TTY out to the further flung bits of N Ireland. That last bit doesn't seem to have been a likely thing, now I've written it and memory is vague - half a century and perhaps PTSD of the whole effort have dimmed the memory. It was the kit of that era that made the later Osborne and its clones portable.
What I do recall clearly was that one of the students was a middle-aged* nurse tutor who was so terrified of the whole computer thing that she'd brought her teenage son along as reinforcements and went away completely enthused about the whole thing. It was that sort of happening that made the job worth-while**.
* Or, from my present perspective, young. It was one of the features of the OU back then that the tutors were considerably younger than most of the students.
** Given our finances at the time even the limited pay available was also very useful.
55 years ago I wrote the major part of the second Dartmouth College time-sharing system. Everything was teletypes. We used DN-30's to multiplex 50 ttys (2 remote and 2 local) to a GE 635. In the real early days the Bell system was leary of computers on their lines so all datasets connected to a computer reversed mark and space. Repairmen had no clue as to why there testing didn't work. BASIC was the language of choice for users.
It was fun bending a giant mainframe to your will.
ARCnet was fun. Once you figured out that you were just dealing with radio transmissions it was merely a matter of keeping the impedance right (I think it was 75Ω) and making sure your cables didn't get too long. And thanks to nitwits trying to charge me £10 for a terminator I quickly worked out I could make loads of them myself if I bought the parts.
Also, you could build impressive things with the T-pieces :).
The only challenge was going between buildings, because you had to avoid galvanic coupling and boy, the optical gear for that was *expensive*.
An insightful comment. It really was fun and an awful lot if what we did was unexplored territory. My first job was getting an ICL mainframe to talk to remote data acquisition devices and download data that was previously sent on paper tape. When it eventually worked I was beside myself with joy, it truly seemed like magic.
Yes, I know the feeling.
We had a vax in Central London and terminals that connected to that. We had two people spend a week typing in a stock list every month, so I had a word with the vax admin and we got a kermit server installed and a default template. Downloading the report via Kermit and some filtering later I ended up replaced two manweeks worth of annoying work with a 15min process that was far more accurate.
Given that I did that without any support (actually against their will because they couldn't see what I saw, proving that they were genuine British management), it working as expected with very few tweaks was incredibly rewarding. Naturally no reward was forthcoming from management, but somehow they didn't want me to tear it all down again. Funny that :).
I often hark back to the days of my youth - to the days (just) before the ZX80, when things were fairly open (boards full of chips and ripe for modification). We had lots of fun then. Were I to go back then it would be dreadful - as I'd know what we didn't have. But back then, the tech we take for granted now was just science fiction - the communicators from Star Trek looked like science fantasy back then, but primitive now.
As for networking, I still recall the excitement of getting hold of my first 1200/75 model and being able to dial into ... bulletin boards. And then, Demon Systems started up offering access to this mythical thing called the internet which had previously been only accessible to those with a connection (e.g. being a student) with a university. A whole tenner a month in 1990s money - plus your online phone bills ! And to think that a lot of the software we take for granted didn't exist - e.g. POP hadn't been invented, so Demon had to write software that would trigger their mail server to start an SMTP outbound attempt to you when you connected, and you had to be running some SMTP software to collect your mail. But your emails weren't bloated with lots of graphics, HTML, or masses of indecypherable headers (looking at you MS !) so the slow modem speed generally didn't matter.
Ah, nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
"And to think that a lot of the software we take for granted didn't exist - e.g. POP hadn't been invented, so Demon had to write software that would trigger their mail server to start an SMTP outbound attempt to you when you connected, and you had to be running some SMTP software to collect your mail."
While Demon were probably the first to do dialup SMTP they weren't the only ones. I remember setting up the dialup SMTP infrastructure for the ISP I ran (one of the early UK ISPs) using RADIUS Accounting messages (i.e. user "X" connected) to trigger an Exim queue flush (when users were not online then SMTP deliveries went into a queue). We did also offer POP3 accounts as an alternative.
POP3 *had* been invented (RFC 1081, November 1988) before Demon launched (June 1992) and AFAIK Demon did offer POP3 as an alternative to SMTP.
I joined Demon in 1994, (158.152.202.35 was my IP address; why can I still remember that 30 years later, but I can't tell you what I had for breakfast 10 minutes ago?)
I remember having to have something that accepted mail being pushed to start with, and then later, a rather snazzy piece of software called Tetrix Reader Plug (Demon got you a discount on this!) which was a newsgroup reader as well as being able to pull individual email addresses or everything for the host (each demon user had their own hostname - bobertd.demon.co.uk, in my case - and could have any number of emails at that host.
And it was still more useable that Outlook...
I can't remember my IP address, but I did find my first Fidonet email account in some documentation a while back, i.e. before I joined the Innertubes. That truly was a *long* time ago..
Before that there were also lots of "personal computers" around that time before the dust settled. Dai, BBC Micro, ZX80, Apple ][ (and, inevitably, thus a Pear II), TRS80 - each with their own ideas and features and mass storage solutions.
Those were the days that floppies were, er, truly floppy :)
Demon didn't offer pop initially. When I first got demon in 92, my dos pc had to run an smtp server. I would wait for the server "punt.demon.co.uk" to start squirting mail my way I remember when pop started maybe a year or so later. It seemed like the modern way to get mail. I don't know when they started offering imap, but at that time, with imap's main advantage - sync - have little to no use cases, most people would have ignored the option. In fact, I recall helping various small businesses in the early 2000s where we didn't bother much with imap at all because few people had two computers or a mobile option. In the early days, pop made more sense for home users. You'd dial up, get your mail, reply, then dial up again to send. In those days, the sync settings, and automatic dial settings in outlook made a lot more sense than they do now.
At least for me, back then, was a belief in the promise of such things, to spread knowledge, establish bonds with people even halfway across the world,[1] and so on. Now about 30 years later, I can't even read dystopian cyberpunk works because that seems like where we've ended up instead.
[1] Not to mention being young, naïve, and hopeful enough to believe that we were taking the first steps to a Star Trek-like world.
"I think getting old is when you decide to leave things as-is instead of fixing them."
No ... that is when you have DIED !!!
The problem at this end of the timescale is that there are MORE people to say NO you CANNOT DO IT !!!
All those years ago you just DID IT because it needed doing and there were few people to say NO !!!
:)
I totally agree with you, I hark from the days of the Creed 75, 54, and 7 series of teleprinter not forgetting the teletype KSR series where messages were sent and received within a closed network, sometimes enciphered...I now visit the Science Museum of London and see the equipment's that I used to maintain as exhibits!
And as a final insult down in the basement in the history of the kitchen there is my cooker...
I feel that shortly I shall be stuffed and mounted to be displayed therein complete with screwdriver in hand!
I was using Prestel (Micronet 800 etc) on my Speccy with the 1200/75 VTX modem. It could also do a 300 baud connection to mainframe computers and we would circulate numbers and passwords, WarGames-style. Dialling up foreign systems was possible but the phone bills could get you into hot water. I used it to compare times for the same program on a Speccy in BASIC, in machine code, and in BASIC on someone else's PDP, as a homework project. You could also connect via the modem on the phone to another Speccy user with a VTX and type messages to each other in real time. That would have been 'Tomorrow's World' stuff a year previously and we were doing it at home as teenagers on retail tech!
At uni I had a lovely Mac Classic for my thesis, but would spend an hour in the evening in a tiny room with a row of pricey Macs and a 5 grand Apple laser printer connected to JANET. There was no info available on JANET, so I would play games on a standalone PC that nobody else bothered with. When I first got an internet account, I was probably using W98 on a home built PC with a 14k4 Mac'n'Fax modem. My first copy of the TCP/IP software arrived in the post on a floppy when I signed up to - I think - Pinnacle Internet. I had a 2nd hand LCIII pizza box Mac and switched the modem between the two. The pizza box Macs were well designed machines.
The 80s, and for networking, the 90s, were an adventure. We were seeing science fiction become science fact in our bedrooms. New, cool stuff was being invented, reviewed the next month in a magazine, and you could be using it a few weeks later. The pace of innovation was phenomenal.
I made a ribbon cable with a box in the middle that had switches allowing me to switch lines from straight to crossover, with a DB25 male connector on one end and a DM25 female connector on the other end. I can't count how many times that helped me out, but it was a major time saver.
Last time I visited, they had the 'Witch', a running example of Air Traffic Control and one of the ancient IBM something_or_other (93xx?) on loan from a French museum. They were built in Greenock but only leased to customers and so were recovered and destroyed when the contract was over.
Fascinating place even if you don't work with computers and I can recommend it to everyone.
Baud rates and bit rates are connected, but not equivalent.
The baud rate is a measure of the number of symbols per second, but each symbol can represent multiple bits. A V.21 300 bit/s modem operated at 300 baud, but a V.32 9600 bit/s modem was only 2400 baud, because each symbol can represent 4 bits.
So had the "joys" of Token Ring and 10base2.
Ah the fond memories of crawling under desks trying to which dodgy card was taking half the site off line....
Or wondering if the Baystack 450T's would power up, or the Shiva RAS would have Factory reset, after after any reboots.
Or pulling thicknet through the ceiling to the accounting director's office, and then dropping a rope from the third floor, down a wiring shaft, to pull thicknet to the second and third floors, where we also pulled it though the ceilings. The system administrator was on two and the computer center director and head programmer were on three. A grand total of five connections in the entire building full of accountants and IT people.
Those were much simpler times.
A long time ago I worked in an office full of ladies most of them older. I once ended up under a desk trying to fix a cable issue for one and said the immortal words "can I do anything else for you while I am down here"? Cue much laughter from the lady in question who whilst a good 20 years older than me was quite attractive and I suspect no stranger to male company. My face was a beetroot in embarrassment.
Now it would be a oneway trip to HR but 30 years ago was a different time. Some of the conversations in that office were not for my sensitive ears.
[The worst was the production floor of a Silicon Fab full of women from the rough end of Greenock and Port Glasgow. As a young Engineering student I was fresh meat to the lions there!]
Ahhh...dial up!
1974 - KSR-33 and an Omnitec 701B acoustic coupler
1980 - CRT and General Datacomm GDC1200 wired modem
1990 - CRT and Hayes Smartmodem
2000 - PC and US Robotics 56k modem
After 2000, it was all cable Internet.
I was lucky(?) enough to have been paid to design a couple of Token Ring controllers and many more devices for Ethernet interfacing, from thick yellow wire to gigabit twisted pair.
A volunteer at TNMOC said: "All the major computer manufacturers had a proprietary polled, half-duplex protocol in the 1970s ..."
"IBM's polled protocol was Bisync, Univac's was 1004, ..."
Ah yes, the volunteer said... Univac/Sperry's 1004 'protocol' was used to talk to peripherals - printers/cardreaders. Not a networking protocol at all. Clue is in the '1004' - a plug wire programmed box.
Now Bisync was a general purpose protocol. God help me, I had to write a bisync comms handler in Fortran 77 using the new CHARACTER* type in the 80's.
Shame the volunteer was so confused on basics of networking. This was not a good article.
As a Ph.D. student at Liverpool University in the mid 1980s, I tried to use the X.25 JANET FTP protocol to transfer a set of data files from a VAX at the Royal Greenwich Observstory (of blessed and glorious memory) at Herstmonceux to the IBM mainframe at Liverpool. It turned out to be a non-trivial task, and even when the head of operations at Liverpool got involved, he was unable to get it to work, and advised me to ask my collaborators at the RGO to put the files on tape and send it by Royal Mail.
That the Great Unwashed don't know what the Internet is (like presumably in the past they didn't know what "air" was) just shows you what a brilliant invention it is. Anyone who attempted to use Janet X.25 certainly appreciates how the Internet "just works" (of course, except when it doesn't).
PS to my previous post, it was c1978 when I was doing CS A-level.
Anyone who attempted to use Janet X.25 certainly appreciates how the Internet "just works"
That's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison. X.25 is a protocol that defines the connection between the equipment and the X.25 network, and has various levels (physical, datalink and packet). You needed other layers above it to manage network-network connections, defined by X.75 and the like. It's possible to run IP over an X.25 network's datalink layer, for example, and also possible to run an X.25 packet layer over an Ethernet (using LLC2). JANET supported various higher-level protocols over X.25, such as X.29 (terminal connection), FTP (File transfer), JTMP (remote job execution), Mail, etc. and also "just worked", within the JANET framework, as did the many other X.25 networks that were in use.
I lived in rural Colorado (US) back in the 70s and for telephones, we had party lines. This was where 4 houses were on the same POTS line and you got 1, 2, 3 or 4 rings to indicated which house should pick up the phone. Of course the other houses could pick up and listen in but generally speaking, people behaved back then.
I - being an engineer at DEC and a geek to boot - had a desire to dial into the department computer (*) from home. 300 baud Hayes modems and party lines don't mix. I wound up getting my own dedicated party line. I don't recall how much it cost. As noted, there were warnings and prohibitions about connecting 'weird' stuff to the company's lines which everyone ignored.
* An RSX-11M machine named BALROG
When people nowadays talk about how certain things won't or can't be successful unless they please some corporate entity, a wonderful example to consider is TCP/IP. Imagine if instead of TCP/IP, we had standardized on what corporations had to offer.
Imagine if Novell tried to make Netware work planet-wide. What would that look like? Who would pay for it? How many people would have full time jobs doing nothing but babysitting it? How much would humankind suffer as a result?
Then I remind people that if corporations had their way, we'd be locked in to their services and would need to pay them for those services in perpetuity. It's neither fun to imagine, nor is it practical. Look at how many services Google stopped supporting because of "profit", even when tons of people still wanted to use them. Profit is a very wasteful determinant for whether something is worth running.
It's also a good reminder that we need to be vigilant about companies that are trying to lock us in now. Cloudflare, for instance, wants to recentralize the Internet around them, a for-profit corporation in the Untied States, so we'll be "protected" from the very scammers and DDoS actors that they protect.
Let's learn from the successes of the past and not get tied in to proprietary things and corporate lock-in!
My first networking experience was in 1968 or 1969, with a an IBM stand-alone tape drive with a built-in modem (which Gemini, in its infinite wisdom, denies ever existed. Fuck you, AI dolt).
We the IBM Newman Street London data centre had customers far away who sent in work over the phone line, for the 7094 or the 360. We ran it on the appropriate machine, and then transmitted the results back over the line.
To get the transmission started, we had to talk to the operator at the other end, agree the speed and parity, set the switches on the drive, switch the phone from TALK to DATA, and press start.
Which is where my very first "networking protocol problem" started. One of the customers was Whessoe, in Glasgow. I could not understand one word that the operator at the other end said.
Now that's a PROPER networking problem.
One of the features of dial-up was that a call-waiting beep would reset the whole connection. There is, I hope, a special place in hell for the salesmen of one particular double-glazing firm. I'm sure there was a collective sigh from the whole of the Huddersfield area when that - rightly - went bust.
I remember in uni, many moons ago, having to learn how to code with token ring nets using assembler. The tutor painted such vivid pictures and I remember sitting there imaging this this little ball shaped ship hurtling around the ring, it was bright blue and called Gerald and the pilot looked a bit like Dave Gahn from Depeche Mode for some reason! ha ha!!
I was once talking to a chap who'd worked as IT support for a big firm. The business had gone to the wall and the auditor was doing the rounds, trying to account for equipment. Some of which had been .....er ...rehomed.
Auditor: " What was in there?" pointing to a small empty room with a lot of leads going to it.
"That was where the VAX was".
Auditor: "Oh. What a strange place to keep it".
The Auditor then wrote on their list.....Vacuum cleaner ....£20
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