The Internet & our hobby

rod rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com
Fri Oct 23 04:44:49 CDT 2015


Well that is sort of right.
I was working for digital at the time and therefore
I have a slightly different perspective.

Internet has its roots in three places the US universities, Research 
Establishments and the US military.
ARPAnet  came sometime before Internet. It was a packet switching network.

Inter site everything was done on good old copper telephone lines.
The software would have been either IBM or DEC network software.
Dial out modems for the small systems and leased lines for the big guys.

TCP/IP was not the main protocol used to begin with being a child of 
UNIX and
originating in the universities.

TCP/IP was adopted for inter networking 1n 1982
Notice I said inter networking. Yes Internet was the connection between 
networks not the networks themselves.
There were many different local area network protocols  usually decreed 
by the makers of the network hardware

The colleges did it just to see if it could be done and the military for 
a very good (at the time)
reason.

It was the height of the cold war and peace only maintained by the fact 
that regardless
of who started it both sides would be wiped out.

The high level of connectivity helped to ensure that the orders of the 
President
and the generals got to the missile sites and bomber bases even if US 
had been
already attacked and lost some of their communications.

  Timeline:
        Packet switched networks developed in the 1970's
        Microprocessors (4004 early 1970's )
        8085 used in VT100 about 1975
        First micro processors to support networking late 70's
        Loads of differing LAN and WAN (packet switching) software 
(1970-1980)
        TCP/IP 1982

Remember my view was from the inside and not as good as from outside.

Rod Smallwood


On 23/10/15 01:54, Murray McCullough wrote:
> 43 years ago around this time the Internet we use to communicate with
> was probably made possible because of TCP/IP, or Transmission Control
> Protocol/Internet Protocol created at Stanford University. Today 3
> billion people are on the net but really made it possible for this
> extravagant number was the microcomputer created at around the same
> time – the Micral in France and 4004 processor machines in the U.S.
> Our hobby supported through this web site keeps this history alive.
> Hurrah!
>
> Happy computing.
>
> Murray  :)
>
> PS  This week marks the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of
> General Relativity though published in 1916 according to Wikipedia.



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