[HN Gopher] How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)
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How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)
Author : samizdis
Score : 42 points
Date : 2025-01-09 20:02 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| dang wrote:
| I've put 2018 as an approximation above because the intro says "a
| few years before he died" in 2020. If anybody can figure out the
| actual year, we can change it.
|
| Edit: in HN titles, if you see a year at the end in parens, that
| indicates the year that the _article_ originated. If you see a
| year that 's not at the end in parens, that's part of the article
| title, meaning it's probably about something that happened that
| year. That's the convention anyhow.
| hildenae wrote:
| It says it was newer published (before now), so would not 2025
| be correct?
| dang wrote:
| We usually try for the year that the article originated.
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| "The impact of the internet on our way of life in its first 40
| years has been immeasurable. It has expanded and developed in a
| way none of us envisaged in 1975", suggesting 2015?
| dang wrote:
| Not sure how literally to take the 40 but that's at least
| more precise than "a few" so I've switched to 2015 above.
| Thanks!
| lysace wrote:
| So I was just reading through a 1988 Swedish popular book on
| "data communications". Not a single word on Arpanet/etc. _Many_
| other network technologies and attempts at global networks
| described.
|
| My point: "Internet" wasn't very well-known "even" in 1988
| outside of well-connected places.
|
| Book: Scandinavian PC Systems, Valentino Berti: "Introduktion
| till datakommunikation"
| kjellsbells wrote:
| The inter-networking part of Internet was specialist knowledge
| restricted to those researchers actively working in the space.
| But countries had rich national networks back then, e.g. UK
| universities had a thing called JANET (joint academic network)
| that allowed, say, someone at the University of Kent to send
| files to someone at the University of Durham. The hosts were
| heterogeneous but the protocols were kinda sorta in place
| (there was a lot of X.25 leased lines and UUCP dialup, if I
| recall). Kent sticks in my memory because they could do
| commercial email in the old path!to!destination style if you
| knew the right guy to call. And Durham because they had this
| incredibly wacky mainframe OS, Michigan Terminal System, which
| I have never seen anywhere except there and at Newcastle (a
| town 40km up the road from Durham).
| Kye wrote:
| It looks like Archive.org has it.
|
| https://archive.org/details/michigan-terminal-system-
| distrib...
| qingcharles wrote:
| Any idea when JAnet connected to the Internet? When I first
| used it ~1994 I remember they had a single 2Mbps connection
| to the USA for the whole of JAnet.
|
| What connection did the housing in the dorms at Kent have? I
| seem to remember serial ports in the rooms, but could have
| been ether?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| JANET went live in 1984. Before then, UK universities were
| connected by X.25 links with ARPAnet gateways to Rest of
| World. (Such as it was then - basically the US and
| Scandinavia.)
|
| You could, with a tiny amount of password hacking, joyride
| around the system quite easily, at least as far as getting
| to a login message on a remote host, possibly logging on
| with a guest account and having a text chat with surprised
| people in other countries.
| gnufx wrote:
| Yes, SRCNET/SERCNET/JANET were great as a physics
| researcher, despite what people have said about X.25. A
| potentially interesting point is that TCP/IP on JANET
| originally ran over X.25 until X.25 was finally phased
| out.
| gnufx wrote:
| The "fat pipe" didn't look so fat at that stage! (I don't
| remember when you could first easily interact with the
| Internet.)
| euroderf wrote:
| IIRC Finland was connected by then.
| lysace wrote:
| I do understand your urge to turn this into a competition -
| but let's not.
| dang wrote:
| Far be it from me to step between Sweden and Finland but
| this might be a moment to mention from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
|
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| (which of course applies to your comments as well)
| lysace wrote:
| Fair.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I was in the basement of UCL computer science (in the Pearson
| building) in 1988. Our lab had a very special yellow (Don't
| ever touch that!!) cable that ran across the ceiling between
| joists, then off under UCH toward Telecom tower. Of course we
| hung bits of origami on it with cotton. Apparently that was
| JANET. I never heard anyone say "The Internet" back then, but
| we did have a coms lecture where "inter-networking" was a
| thing. Nice to read some old names in that piece.
| grumblepeet wrote:
| Until relatively recently I worked with JANET (or Janet -
| lower case - as it is now) as part of Jisc, the UK's NREN. I
| also worked with the wider European org, GEANT, that runs the
| academic networks across Europe. We were (and still are )
| very proud of Janet.
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
| xp84 wrote:
| I'm happy that you Brits finally got the Internet in 2018. It
| took a while, but I hope it was worth the wait.
| louthy wrote:
| > I hope it was worth the wait
|
| It's awful, what's wrong with having a chat, in person, over
| a nice cup of tea?
| crankyOldGuy wrote:
| Sorry if I'm unclear on what 2018 is supposed to mean
| (understand it's an approximation). But internet service is
| much older than that. According to Wikipedia,
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom
|
| Pipex was established in 1990 and began providing dial-up
| Internet access in March 1992, the UK's first commercial
| Internet service provider (ISP).
|
| That's about the same time it became available in the U.S. I
| got home internet service (dial-up) in the mid-1990's.
| philipkglass wrote:
| 2018 is the estimated year of the article, not the events
| described in the article.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| Some of the other comments are joking around, but 2018 refers
| to the original date the article was published :)
| Symbiote wrote:
| > Pipex was established in 1990
|
| I know reading the article is very much out of fashion, but
| all the dates given in the article are in the 1970s.
|
| Just like the dates in the Wikipedia article you linked.
| cpr wrote:
| That March 1977 map always brings back a flood of memories to
| this old-timer.
|
| Happy nights spent hacking in the Harvard graduate computer
| center next to the PDP-1/PDP-10 (Harv-1, Harv-10), getting calls
| on the IMP phone in the middle of the night from the BBN network
| operations asking me to reboot it manually as it had gotten
| wedged...
|
| And, next to me, Bill Gates writing his first
| assembler/linker/simulator for the Altair 8080... (I tried
| talking him out of this microcomputer distraction -- we have the
| whole world of mainframes at our fingertips! -- without success.)
|
| (Edit:) We also would play the game of telnet-till-you-die, going
| from machine to machine around the world (no passwords on guest
| accounts in the early days), until the connection died somewhere
| along the way.
|
| Plus, once the hackers came along, Geoff Steckel (systems guy on
| the PDP-10) wrote a little logger to record all incoming guests
| keystrokes on an old teletype, so we could watch them attempting
| to hack the system.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Dear Sir, could you just, you know, continue writing? I just
| love these stories, would love to hear more!
| timthorn wrote:
| > The little black book of the internet
|
| The article doesn't mention the Coloured Book protocols, but I'm
| pretty sure this phrasing isn't accidental:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols
| gnufx wrote:
| Red book was particularly interesting (modulo lack of security)
| long before "the Grid"; it worked between various computer
| centres.
| sourraspberry wrote:
| Time-sharing is interesting. The same kind of thing is happening
| now with AI.
| gnufx wrote:
| The trouble was that it was quite unclear to a researcher, even
| in one of the research council networking hubs, how to get access
| to the gateway, and it may have cost. I gave up trying before
| going to work in Oak Ridge for the summer (where I was taken
| aback by the primitive computing, at least "outside the fence").
| For some time (mid-80s to early 90s? I don't remember) we were
| generally dependent on the infamous BITNET email gateway to
| communicate with the rest of the world from the well-developed UK
| network. It was "interesting" to deal with code in a Swedish
| 6-bit character set sent through the EBCDIC gateway to ISO
| 646-GB. (The Fortran Hollerith formats were added interest...)
| nxobject wrote:
| The most hilari-depressing part of the story was the funding
| politics and grantwriting headaches that have never changed:
|
| - the NPL couldn't set up a British inter-network because of
| pressure from GPO;
|
| - they couldn't connect to ARPA via Norway because of the Foreign
| Office;
|
| - then, UCL couldn't get funding from SERC;
|
| - then, UCL couldn't get funding from DTI because it didn't have
| industrial interest (although, to be fair, it was the department
| of "industry")...
|
| ...and then nearly a decade later government bodies were trying
| to take it over.
|
| (It looks like the IMP/TIP was literally funded by petty-ish
| PSPSPS that the NPL superintendent could get his hands on without
| further approval. To be fair, GPO did fund the link to Oslo.)
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Peter Kirstein died in January 2020, likely around the time when
| the internet finally reached Wales.
|
| Context: https://x.com/vizcomic/status/457192728770510848
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(page generated 2025-01-09 23:00 UTC)