[ShadowAce]

Tech Ping

[digger48]

I didn’t see Algore or Brian Williams in any of those pictures

[dfwgator]

And the first Internet Pr0n video was created.

[HombreSecreto]

Heeeeyyyyyyy, where’s the picture of Al Gore?

[Delta 21]

I had to reboot before I could read the entire article.......

[jerod]

HOLD ON!!!! Why do I see no pictures of Al Gore?

[z3n]

a teletype over a phone line is more like morse code on a telegraph line (century old technology) than it is like the modern internet. I suppose if the signal were ‘digital’ then that is the transformative key, but there is a reason that even the guys who did it at the time didn’t make much of it. The concept was not as novel as we view it in hind sight. It’s just like the idea of cell phones was not that crazy. People had been using two way radios and relays for a long time. Again, it’s more about the complexity of how traffic is routed that transformed things, and digital packeting of data is how that was accomplished

[Moonman62]

By the mid-1960s, ARPA had provided funding for large computers used by researchers in universities and think tanks around the country. The ARPA official in charge of the financing was Bob Taylor, the key figure in computing history who later ran Xerox’s PARC lab. At ARPA, he had become painfully aware that all those computers spoke different languages and couldn’t talk to each other.

Taylor hated the fact that he had to have separate terminals—each with its own leased communication line—to connect with various remote research computers. His office was full of Teletypes.

...

Necessity is the mother of the Internet.

[IndispensableDestiny]

My first email address ended in dot arpa. I also had to use some bang paths and relays to send mail outside of ARPANET.

[samadams2000]

This is untrue. Al Gore grew up in the Fairfax hotel in DC as a child. Wrong room number.

[JoeFromSidney]

This article brought back memories. Back about 1985 I worked for University of Dayton, after retiring from the Air Force. A friend at New Jersey Institute of Technology got a grant to set up a "computer conferencing" system, that would allow people at different locations to communicate in real time via teletype keyboards. He invited me to join the system. For the next several years we experimented with it, jointly writing technical papers with others on the system, teaching on-line courses, and similar academic activities. Eventually the Internet made the system obsolete. We all abandoned it and switched to the Internet. However, for many of us it was a prototype for the Internet. Since then I've used the Internet for a wide range of things. While I was a visiting professor in Turkey, I kept up with Free Republic via the Internet. I even met the woman who is now my wife on catholicsingles.com. The Internet and it's predecesors have made a big difference in my life.

[zeugma]

But something monumental happened there 50 years ago today. A graduate student named Charley Kline sat at an ITT Teletype terminal and sent the first digital data transmission to Bill Duvall, a scientist who was sitting at another computer at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International) on the other side of California.

If I recall the story correctly, this first file transfer was using the 'uucp' program, which is still a part of any basic Unix installation. I could well be wrong, and I'm sure some intrepid Freeper will correct the record if so. :-)

It does bring to mind something I did many years ago before we really had decent ways to clone disks across a network though. I needed a clone of a boot disk which existed in Dallas, to be created in California. We could have duplicated the disk locally and mailed it, but didn't want to take the time for that. Instead, we booted the Dallas system from media so the boot disk didn't have anything writing to it. Did the same thing for the target system in CA. Then we executed something very similar to the following...

On the target system:
nc -p 2222 | dd of=/dev/disk1

On the source system:
dd if=/dev/disk1 | nc -p 2222

(I'm quite sure I've forgotten additional switches employed) What that essentially did was use 'dd' (also known as "Disk Destroyer) to copy the boot disk byte by byte across the network using nc (or netcat), which was received by 'nc' on the target system and then written out byte by byte to the disk by 'dd'.

Once completed, we ran 'dd if=/dev/disk1 | cksum' on each system and compared the results to validate that no errors occurred during transmission. Then we mounted the target disk, modified it's network config files, and rebooted the system into service.

It was an elegant solution to the problem IMO that was very satisfying to me as it saved us time, and yet solved the problem. We ended up using that a couple of other times, and only had to restart the process once because of transmission errors.

[TalBlack]

The writers of The Rockford Files were onto the dark side of the Web by 1978. In series 4 episode 22 Jackie Cooper is a guy collecting data on Americans from existing data bases for the purpose of having a dossier on everybody and selling the result. Geez, all he had to do was call it Google.

[ken in texas]

Thanks for the history. I remember seeing one of the Arpenet nodes while at Gunter AFS in the mid 70s. A little DEC PDP-something-or-other, with lots of blinking lights on the front.

[JimRed]

The equivalent of “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.”, on 3/10/1876.

[Texas resident]

The second message on the net was sent by a Nigerian prince.

[Billthedrill]

It’ll never catch on. Ordinary people using computers? No way.

[taxcontrol]

I would argue that until TCP/IP was created in 1970, the Internet was not yet created.

[minnesota_bound]

I room 3421 the first xxx website was created.

[Jumper]

They still have the original moth that short circuited the mega computer that was built with vacuum tubes.