Hey, look! Utah! That’s where they are building that huge data storage center for the NSA where all conversations will be stored.
MIT, Harvard, Yale, UCLA?
Weren’t we told the internet was a government thing back then??
I block any social media, except YouTube, so, I guess I’ll have to remember from my early DoD days.
You would type on a keyboard with printout simultaneously so you could read what you wrote...and then the reply would come in a half minute later or so.
I see the map includes the line going right through Flint, Michigan. The physics department at Flint Southwestern high school in 1970 used to dial up something, put the phone in a special receiver (modem) and get their “computer” to talk to an IBM computer in another location outside the building. Seemed weird and real tech-y, like they were doing some Star Trek hocus-pocus.
“Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet “ is an interesting book on the origins of the internet
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
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.
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.
ARPANET history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
Maps 1969-1977:
http://som.csudh.edu/cis/lpress/history/arpamaps/
Jeez’ Al Gore’s house is not shown!
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.