A map of the "Internet" in June, 1970. Wow, pretty simple.

Twitter ^ | 28 April 2014 | Cliff Pickover

[ProtectOurFreedom]

I was using the Campus-Wide Information Systems (CWISs) and Gopher for research purposes around 1992. A friend wowed me with Mosaic using HTTP in 1994. I’ve worked with several colleagues who were at Netscape in Mountain View in the early 90s with Marc Andreesen on the Netscape browser.

[MNnice]

I started using the internet for personal use (instead of the military) in 1993. I remember buying a book at Barnes & Nobles of URLs that you could navigate to. It was about an inch thick. But most of them had already been taken down by the time I tried it. Heh

[DeoVindiceSicSemperTyrannis]

OMG all those cables......

[Amendment10]

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the phone circuit was still analog in those days, not digital.

In fact, the earlier slow speed modems (300 baud?; bits / second) used mechanical acoustic couplers which telephone handsets were pressed into so that computers could talk with each other. You could listen to computers chirping data down the line.

And It often took an investment of sweat equity to successfully transfer data or interact with a remote computer. This is because computers would get confused by rogue environmental noises, the transfer process or login session needing to be started from scratch in such cases.

We’ve come a long way since then.

[anymouse]

I got to see the computer room in the basement at RAND back then. I was just a kid, but my neighbor’s dad was a computer researcher at RAND and took us to work one day. He claimed they were working on the Apollo Moon program calculations. I was obviously impressed as an 8 year old interested in space.

[iowamark]

ARPANET history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

Maps 1969-1977:

http://som.csudh.edu/cis/lpress/history/arpamaps/

[The_Reader_David]

It was. It was an ARPA-funded project (back before they added the D to the acronym).

[COBOL2Java]

Where is the link to Al Gore’s house?

Back then, AlGore was busy inspecting loaded rifles in Vietnam...

[ExCTCitizen]

Jeez’ Al Gore’s house is not shown!

[dfwgator]

[ExCTCitizen]

My first connection was with my C64. I thought it was hi tech...

[BreezyDog]

You forgot about Free Republic...

[AZLiberty]

I would swear I used the “Internet” at Caltech in the summer of 1973, but it doesn’t show up on any of the maps. Perhaps we used the USC-ISI TIP.

[Domestic Church]

I was a cute neophyte pioneer. I needed a vet path Dr over at Cornell to help me with an undergrad bio research paper on dispersal mechanisms of fungi in which I had to have 100 entries minimum in the bibliography. It would have taken the entire semester to go through the stacks.

[Domestic Church]

It took days if I recall correctly, but it sure beat going through periodicals.

[GeronL]

and it being computers back then must have seemed really cool

[cynwoody]

My first Internet access was back around 1985 or so, using dial-up access from NY to CA through "the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link," The WELL.

I thought the WELL was just a famous bulletin board system (BBS), accessible via dial-up, but not connected to the internet, at least not until long after 1985.

The WELL was similar to CompuServe, which got started in 1969 as a provider of dial-up time-sharing service (on the DEC PDP-10). In 1989, CompuServe was the first of the dial-up services to offer internet access, but the connectivity was limited to providing access to internet email addresses.

It wasn't until 1991, when the NSF lifted restrictions on commercial use, that the internet was opened up to the public.

1991

T3 bandwidth is 44.7Mb/s.

[DanielRedfoot]

Now thats funny right there, I don’t care who you are...

[MarkL]

At the time, it was a BBS, however it did have direct access to the newsgroups, like "comp.lang.c". This was way before "FidoNet," but I believe it was a pre-cursor of it, for getting access to the Internet. Then in 1987, I got a job as a computer TA in the electrical engineering department at SUNY @ Stony Brook, and had full access to email, ftp, and all the news groups. SimTel at White Sands AFB was a terrific repository of software back then.

Mark

[MarkL]

I remember CIS too, and as a "Novell guy," that was the place to get all the Novell patches for a very long time. I LOVED their tiered access plan. Higher speed access cost $$$! I remember connecting @ 1200bps to see what new patches were avaiable, then downloading them at 9600bps, using Omen's Ymodem-G or Zmodem (I can't recall which). Kermit SUCKED!

Mark