🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <mTwUb.19243$iv7.9181@newssvr24.news.prodigy.com>, Simon
Belmont <123@abc.xyz> wrote:

> Perhaps, but to be clear I said "BBS network".  I am well aware
> what a BBS is (a had a few sys-op friends). In the absence of the
> widely deployed relatively fast system in place now, I thought that
> perhaps the different BBS's formed a sort of network by sharing
> message posts from various BBS servers. It was just a thought.

Bulletin board systems were sometimes linked to FidoNet but often were
just local sites that local users dialed into.

The Usenet started in the late 70s as a set of newsgroups used for
sharing informaton about "the Net." (Variously called ARPANet, etc.)

My first ARPANet account was in 1973, when only a handful of campuses
and a few contractors were linked.


> 
> Somewhere I still have my first 12/2400 baud modem and
> also the baddest boy of its time......a Multitech 9600 baud.

I have no idea what a "baddest boy" is, but I thought the Racal-Vadic
modem I had in the late 70s was impressive.


> > "the Internet did not yet exist" rather than "I didn't know of it."
> 
> Yes, when dealing with things that I know were around in some
> form but before my time I'll just plead ignorance. However....as
> Todd pointed out the definition of "internet" can be a source of
> miscommunication. For me the only definition is the network that
> was started / put into place decades ago for our national defense
> purposes. It could be argued that it is more practical to consider
> the internet existent when regular people had regular access to it.

Most of the "Internet was built to withstand a nuclear war" jive is
just that, journalistic jive. I'm not a historian of the ARPANet, or
its later incarnations, but most credit the development to some
packet-switching academic research in the mid-60s. One such network was
the ALOHAnet (or AlohaNet, whatever) in, of course, Hawaii. 

Folks like Glenn Culler at UCSB and several corporations and some
campuses in California and nearby states were involved. Small grants
from ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, later called DARPA as
part of the Nixon/Mansfield focus on "defense," and later changed back
to ARPA) funded the small initial nodes. More campuses were added, more
government research sites joined.

It is fair to say that the ARPANet was both a testbed for experimenting
with packet-switching protocols and devices and for universities and
other academic (non-corporate, unless part of the projects) researchers
to communcate amongst themselves (it became this later, with the
success of e-mail and Usenet).

Later, TCP/IP came along. More corporate involvement. More money. And
the Usenet changed as well, with the Great Renaming, the OKing of
"commercial speech" (circa the late 80s), and of course the new
moniker, the Internet.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department had their own independent, generally
secure networks. This went way back, to things like AUTOVON, the
Defense Communications System, the DSCS constellation of satellites,
etc. (I did some advising of the Pentagon about DSCS attack
vulnerabilities in the late 70s).

Meanwhile, journalists were happily babbling about how the Net was
developed in order to provide the country with a communication system
after a nuclear war. Hilarious.

--Tim May