Posted on 01/03/2003 1:22:58 PM PST by hoosierskypilot
NEW YORK -- So, did you at least send a card? According to some of the folks who keep track of such things, Wednesday was the 20th anniversary of the Internet.
It was on Jan. 1, 1983, that the first 400 or so computers hooked up to what was then called ARPANET had to switch to a communications protocol called TCP/IP. It was that means of transferring data that allowed the World Wide Web to expand and thrive -- basically making the Internet what it is today.
Vint Cerf, the co-inventor of the protocol, says the anniversary is "a major milestone" for computer users to observe. However, there are others who insist that the Internet is even older than that.
They say when two computers at the UCLA swapped data across a 15-foot cable, it marked the start of the basic concept behind the Internet.
Also was accessing an aviation related BBS about that time.
Ah, I miss my acoustic coupler.
Not.
Yeah, I was wondering when terms such as (D)Arpanet and csnet gave way to "Internet" -- I had an email address on my school's VAX system as early as 1982 (we used email to invite speakers for ACM forums back then). I don't recall the data-handling protocol, but this sounds almost as if they're celebrating the birth of IP/TCP rather than Internet.
When we had 2 workstation computers linked that way in 1980, nobody thought it was special. We also had dial-up to the mainframe here and there. No big deal.
I do not miss it either.
It was in October of 1983 that I bombarded a phone switch using modem tones in a very small town (500 people) in upstate New York. My phone quit working that evening. It was still dead the next morning. As a matter of fact, so was every other phone in town, including the PBX where I worked. No one could call the phone company to report the outage.
I hope the statute of limitations is up.
You were one of the cool kids!
I was a Kaypro guy running CPM.
Between my wife and I, we got three college degrees on that clunker.
Try that now and you'll find yourself squatting in a Tiger Cage in Guantanamo Bay!
That thing was nothing more than huge, useless paperweight/doorstop.
I do remember going from 1200 baud to 9600 baud and thinking I had broken the speed barrier. It took so little to please me in those days. :o)
Ya done good.
J.Q.
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