[HN Gopher] How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)
Author : samizdis
Score : 162 points
Date : 2025-01-09 20:02 UTC (1 days 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.
| rjsw wrote:
| You could also connect to JANET hosts from commercial
| machines over X.25.
|
| I had an account on the NRS host machine to administer
| our site info.
| 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.)
| vidarh wrote:
| I have fond memories of the Nordic university network
| (NORDUnet) when the US<-->Sweden link was upgraded to
| 34Mbps in '95 (NORDUnet kept 24Mbps of the cable
| initially). At the time the fastest connection between the
| US and elsewhere in Europe was 6Mbps, according to the
| NORDunet 25 year report....
|
| At one point there was an outage of the Sprint connection
| to Sweden that the Nordic connection to the US went over,
| and the Nordic countries for several hours saturated
| connections throughout parts of Europe that were in no way
| at a scale suitable to be a functional backup for the
| traffic from the Nordic countries...
|
| It was first later I realised how spoiled we'd been... Tens
| of Mbps FTP speeds to other Nordic countries was routine in
| 94/95, for example.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Fascinating, do you think this is the reason why Linux
| started there?
| vidarh wrote:
| I mean, it can't have hurt, but Linus started programming
| long before he started university, and I assume he had no
| access before he started so odds are he had the interest
| already. It might have eased access to some material he
| needed, but you slower connections weren't a huge
| limitation back then either.
| mrmlz wrote:
| I've never heard of NORDUnet - but googling it seems to
| be the international facing part of the more (in Sweden
| at least) famous SUNET!
|
| https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunet
|
| https://internetmuseum.se/tidslinjen/nordunet-connects-
| the-n...
| vidarh wrote:
| Well, not just SUNET. It includes SUNET (Sweden), UNINETT
| (Norway), FUNET (Finland), Forskingsnettet (Denmark) and
| RHnet (Iceland), and was how the Nordic networks arranged
| internet access - before NORDUnet only Norway had
| internet/Arpanet access (largely due to NATO - the NORSAR
| connection from the early 70's was because the seismic
| array was a way of keeping track of Soviet missile
| tests), and only to a few institutions.
| mhandley wrote:
| UCL was on both the JAnet X.25 network and the Internet
| when I joined in 1985, and provided a relay service between
| the two for email and for telnet. Maybe others - not sure.
| Relaying email required translating the address order as
| the UK used big-endian "foo@uk.ac.ucl.cs" and the rest of
| the world used little-endian "foo@cs.ucl.ac.uk". There were
| a whole set of heuristics to figure out which order the
| destination should be, which worked fine up until
| Czechoslovakia joined with their .cs domain. I think it was
| probably in the early 90s when JAnet fully deployed IP-
| over-X.25, and all UK universities became IP-reachable, but
| some would have been reachable before then.
|
| Peter was also responsible for the UK using .uk instead of
| the ISO country code "gb" which it should have been
| according to "the rules". But Peter insisted on .uk, as the
| official name of the country was "The United Kingdom of
| Great Britain and Northern Ireland", and he thought GB was
| not properly inclusive of Northern Ireland. It took until
| 2021 for UK to replace GB on car number plates (and
| stickers for travelling abroad).
| rjsw wrote:
| There was an FTP relay as well.
| lproven wrote:
| > UCL was on both the JAnet X.25 network and the Internet
| when I joined in 1985
|
| Same for Royal Holloway out in Egham when I went up, also
| in 1985.
|
| I was foo@vaxa.rhbnc.ac.uk or uk!ac!rhbnc!vaxa@foo (or
| something like that).
| fanf2 wrote:
| JANET started running IP-over-X25 in 1991 and within a year
| the volume of IP traffic was greater than the volume of
| native JANET traffic.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| I don't remember all the details, but allegedly some
| undergraduates at a college very close to me in the late
| 80s were able to get limited Internet access by snagging
| the passwords of CS postgrads who had remote accounts at
| UCL via Janet, and logging in when they weren't around.
|
| Boy, those scalliwags would have got into a _lot_ of
| trouble if they had got caught.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| When I was at Kent (88-91) the few rooms which did have
| connections (only available in the new-build Darwin Houses
| at the time, IIRC) had basic serial ports. The colleges (
| _not_ dorms, if you please!) had dedicated computer rooms
| (using mostly old TA Alphatronics as terminals) with a PAD
| connecting them to the Cambridge Ring campus network. We
| had full email /FTP privileges for the Internet (the term
| 'JANET' was still used, but it was becoming less prominent)
| but mostly only read-only Usenet privileges, unless you
| asked the right person very nicely.
| matt-p wrote:
| It was certainly in place at the launch of SuperJanet in
| 1993, where 55 Universities each got a 34Mbps connection. I
| could believe only 2Mb to the USA, but it had a number of
| connections to europe and UK ISPs that were faster.
| matt-p wrote:
| NB by 1999 is was 2X 155Mb to the US, and by Feb 2002
| became 2X 2.5Gbps.
| qingcharles wrote:
| The connections to Europe were great. Relied on all those
| lovely FTP archives in Scandinavia.
| 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.
| lysace wrote:
| But I think we had it handled.
| vidarh wrote:
| By '73? My understanding is the only other country outside
| the US to have a connection at that point was Norway, and
| only NORSAR and maybe one other location. NORSAR only because
| it was a critically important seismic array used by NATO to
| monitor Soviet missile tests.
|
| As far as I can tell, Finland first got ARPANET connection
| via NORDunet in 1988 [1][2][3], though possibly indirectly a
| few years before as there was a connection to Sweden a few
| years earlier.
|
| [1] https://siy.fi/history-of-the-finnish-internet/
|
| [2] https://csc.fi/en/news/funets-anniversary-40-years-of-
| action...
|
| [3] From [2]: "On Thursday December 1st, 1988, the first
| routing test was carried out, allowing IP packets to pass
| from Finland via Nordunet to the USA, in effect the National
| Science Foundation's NSFNET and Arpanet networks. This
| connected Finland to the international Internet via the Funet
| network. The following message can be seen as the beginning
| of the Finnish Internet."
| euroderf wrote:
| That sounds about right. I was working at the NSF in the
| late 80s, around when they were uniting all the scattered
| mini nets into Teh Interwebz, and I was trading emails with
| Finns. And BTW I was not trying to compete.
| 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.
| mhandley wrote:
| I was also in one of those basement labs in the Pearson
| building in 1988. Not exactly the nicest place to work, but
| some great equipment. I particularly remember that year
| coding a graphical application in NeWS (Sun's original
| network window system, long before it became X/NeWS) on a Sun
| Workstation there, which was an amazing piece of kit for its
| time. Also remember the DecStation 3100s we had down there
| that would periodically catch fire.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Nice to meet you. Yeah the smell of overcooked circuits
| down there was something eh? I forget my room number now
| but there was something called the Pyramid next door that
| was mysterious and hush-hush. Phil Treleaven was my prof
| (saw him outside Waterstones last time I was around ULU so
| he must still be there).
| mhandley wrote:
| Haha, yes, the Pyramid was alien technology, but the
| cover story was that it was a multiprocessor RISC
| minicomputer.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Technology When I
| arrived at UCL, there were three PDP 11/44s of which one
| (?) was shared by all the undergrads. The pyramid
| replaced those circa 1987 and was a huge improvement.
|
| If I recall correctly, the main workstation lab was B10A,
| where I spent a lot of time. Then there was a narrow
| room, B09 I think, that had mission control on the right
| hand side with a machine room behind it, and a second
| machine room on the left side. Can't remember which
| machine room the Pyramid was in.
|
| And yes, Phil is still around.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The POP11s were a rack of ribs when I saw them, so I
| figure you must be one of the older boys. Awesome.
| Totally pm me man. im at @cybershow.uk
| corford wrote:
| Memories. I had an unfiltered 100Mbit ethernet port, with
| public static IP, in my dorm room at Manchester Uni in 2000
| thanks to JANET. It was amazing compared to the ISDN line at
| home (...which until then I had thought was the bees knees).
| It took almost another 15 years before I could get something
| faster at home than what I'd had at uni (!)
| peterstjohn wrote:
| I even hosted a mirror of the original Mozilla source code
| dump from St. Anselm Hall, and nobody ever complained ;P
| qw wrote:
| I think knowledge was more localised to certain universities or
| researchers.
|
| Norway was the first country outside of USA to be connected to
| Arpanet in 1973 to share seismic data, but the universities did
| not gain general access until 1983.
|
| I posted submitted a link to a story here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655568
| 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!
| mromanuk wrote:
| Yes, please! I love these comments on HN, this is blog
| material.
| coffeecantcode wrote:
| If this man wrote a book I'd read it.
| cpr wrote:
| Nah, it'd come out too much as "almost famous".
|
| I did manage to avoid being Microsoft employee #12 or so (my
| buddy Bob Greenberg was #8, I think?, and encouraged me to
| come join them), and Adobe employee #8 (I knew Chuck Geschke
| from some earlier work done as an undergrad extending his PhD
| thesis to Harvard's extensible language ECL), due to various
| life circumstances. I guess God didn't want be to be a
| spoiled rotten billionaire.
|
| Another near miss was co-consulting with Len Bosack at HP
| setting up Lisp Machine networking, and wondering how the
| heck the then-nascent Cisco was ever going to sell more than
| a few hundred routers (based on the same Sun-1 boards
| developed by Andy Bechtolstein at Standford that we used at
| Imagen, the first typeset-quality laser printers, a spinoff
| from Don Knuth's research at Stanford) to universities and
| government labs.
|
| As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and
| came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity
| didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.
| Suzuran wrote:
| You worked at Imagen? I had to write a partial Impress
| emulator a little while ago so I could make waste paper
| from my lispm. It only supported the image format since
| that was the only thing the lispm sent when printing the
| screen, but it beat the heck out of taking photos of a CRT.
| cpr wrote:
| Yes, helped start it (first or second employee back in
| 1980(?)).
|
| Wild! I had forgotten the LispMs had Impress support; I
| think that came out of the time when we worked with Janet
| Walker, head of documentation at Symbolics.
| Suzuran wrote:
| On the subject of that last item, it is to my amusement that
| modern internet scanners are completely confused by a 1970s
| operating system. They record a "hit" when they find an open
| telnet port, but then get stuck because there is no
| recognizable prompt after the system banner message prints.
| They find a running FTP server but get confused that it does
| not use recognizable filesystem semantics. They get even more
| confused when it ignores passwords because the system has none.
| By all rules and tenets of security doctrine this system should
| be the internet equivalent to a smoking crater, instantly and
| utterly destroyed by advanced security threats beyond the
| imaginations of its creators.
|
| PS: It is also amusing that an unmodified 1970s SMTP server can
| still deliver messages to gmail and receive responses back,
| given only the provision of a SPF record. Sadly, the coming
| mandatory requirement for DKIM will finally make this no longer
| a possibility.
|
| PPS: It is much less amusing to attempt to read the gmail
| user's responses on a terminal.
| lxgr wrote:
| Surprisingly, as I discovered earlier today, Gmail (still?
| newly?) supports sending plaintext-only messages!
| Suzuran wrote:
| Really? How?
| lxgr wrote:
| "Plain text mode", hiding in the "kebab menu" (i.e. the
| three vertically stacked dots) on the bottom of the
| message composition window. It even seems to stay on as a
| default once activated!
|
| Very useful for the few times I actually need to send
| email to mailing lists with strong opinions about
| newfangled MIME multipart messages :)
| Suzuran wrote:
| Yes, that's very useful, thanks for pointing that out.
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| While it could be, "little black book" commonly refers to an
| address book, and has since long before the internet. While
| it's hard to established when it became a _commonly understood_
| term for that, -as it was used in a more general sense before
| that, and often simply referred to small notebooks -, it has
| seen use to refer to address books since _at least_ the 19th
| century[1]. (EDIT: It 's also mentioned in Aretha Franklin's
| "Runnin' Out of Fools[2] from 1964)
|
| Also, now I feel _very_ old. "Little black book" was an
| ubiquitous term when I grew up, and so using the term would
| just be a synonym to "address book" that nobody would think
| twice about.
|
| [1] E.g. The House and Home: A Practical Book - Volume 1
| (1896): "And there is a little black book with red lettering
| seen on every writing-table and carriage-cushion wherein
| puzzled mater-familias finds her bearings annually among her
| cherished acquaintances, many of whom the little black book
| alone keeps in her recollection!"
|
| [2] Guess you got back (Guess you got) To my name (To my name)
| In your little black book
| timthorn wrote:
| > "Little black book" was an ubiquitous term when I grew up,
| and so using the term would just be a synonym to "address
| book" that nobody would think twice about.
|
| Indeed, I'm aware of that meaning and its ubiquity. But
| amongst UK university computing staff at that time, knowledge
| of the Coloured Books was as embedded. Remember that JANET
| network addresses were the other way round, so rather than
| cam.ac.uk it used to be uk.ac.cam - the author of this piece
| will have been well aware of the double meaning.
|
| It's that double meaning that gives the headline it's precise
| relevance and a dash of humour.
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't see why the order makes any difference with respect
| to the use of the term, nor do I get from description what
| you think is humorous about it.
|
| It still reads to me like just a synonym for "address book"
| to refer to a mapping.
| timthorn wrote:
| The order of the addresses was linked to the Coloured
| Books and needed translation to interwork with SMTP, and
| eventually the users needed to change their addresses.
| The point being, that anyone involved in UK scientific
| computing will have been aware of the UK protocols - many
| will have been involved in their creation and
| maintenance.
|
| The humour comes from a (non-risque) double entendre.
| 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.)
| mhandley wrote:
| Peter once told me that in 1973, the only two organizations
| permitted to do telecommunications were the Post Office and the
| Ministry of Defense. So to legally connect UCL to the ARPAnet,
| he needed an exception clause. Somehow he got both the Post
| Office and the Ministry of Defense to sign off that they were
| not interested in computer-to-computer communications, in
| perpetuity, so that UCL could do so instead. He said he never
| tried to hold them to it later.
| Full_Clark wrote:
| Spot on. Would be interesting to see what sort of hoops you'd
| have to jump through in an academic lab today to secure similar
| money.
|
| That 5k GPB in 1973 is 77k in today's pound, or about 95k USD
| at current exchange rates.
| indymike wrote:
| Every time I have a meeting with government, especially
| regulatory agencies about getting something done, it isn't easy
| because these words have very different meanings, which can
| lead you into bad places quickly:
|
| support - engineer means "compatible, works with" govt means
| "aiding a cause"
|
| business rules - engineer means logic, govt means literal rules
| that have force of law
|
| If you want to get results, you have to be really careful - if
| you say you are supporting something, the govt people may think
| you are aiding a cause they or whoever appointed them oppose.
| If you talk about rules, govt people assume a 2 year fight,
| expensive process, and lots of hearings - so it gets weird.
| 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
| mhandley wrote:
| I worked for Peter Kirstein for many years - he always had
| wonderful stories to tell.
|
| In the article Peter talks about the temporary import license for
| the original ARPAnet equipment. The delayed VAT and duty bill for
| this gear prevented anyone else taking over the UK internet in
| the early days because the bill would have then become due. But
| he didn't mention that eventually if the original ARPAnet
| equipment was ever scrapped, the bill would also become due.
|
| When I was first at UCL in the mid 1980s until well into the 90s,
| all that equipment was stored disused in the mens toilets in the
| basement. Eventually Peter decided someone had to do something
| about it, but he couldn't afford the budget to ship all this gear
| back to the US. Peter always seemed to delight in finding
| loopholes, so he pulled some strings. Peter was always very well
| connected - UCL even ran the .int and nato.int domains for a long
| time. So, at some point someone from UCL drove a truck full of
| obsolete ARPAnet gear to some American Air Force base in East
| Anglia that was technically US territory. Someone from the US air
| force gave them a receipt, and the gear was officially exported.
| And there it was left, in the US Air Force garbage. Shame it
| didn't end up in a museum, but that would have required paying
| the VAT bill.
| nxobject wrote:
| If only it could have disappeared into a vault until now... the
| bill could have been inflated away!
| ggm wrote:
| I had the great fortune to work at UCL in the early 1980s, just
| as SATNET came to an end as a project. I worked on what became
| ISODE, and related stuff as well as doing operations bits and
| pieces. I was far too junior to figure in Peter's planning but I
| will say, he was a very interesting HoD: he didn't suffer fools
| gladly (and I am one) but at the same time could be quite
| forgiving, if you were at least entertaining about your
| foolishness.
|
| His most preferred model of funding work was to have 9/10ths of
| it done or a sure-fure thing, and then use the funding to work on
| the next idea, so he was guaranteed to have goods to deliver at
| the end of the project. He didn't always carry it off but when it
| worked it was superlative. I was on at least one OSI (protocol)
| project with 6 partners across industry and research in Europe,
| and the work was very unequal. That said, very fine dinners. I
| have fond memories of INRIA canteen food having wine and fresh
| fruit. UCL had baked beans and pies, the staff club had the same
| baked beans and pies but you could eat them under a superb
| Stanley Spenser oil painting of the resurrection.
|
| The first Cisco Router turned up one day, it had annoyingly noisy
| fans which blew air a useless direction compared to the rest of
| the racks. As Mark Handley has pointed out below the basement was
| full of trash: a fantastic Prism-wedge shaped digital copying
| stand used with the British Library to photograph rare works, and
| an unbelievably expensive CCD digital camera attached gathering
| dust, a BBN Butterfly (it was a heap of crap frankly) running
| pre-BGP routing, a BLIT terminal and depraz mouse, the first Dec
| and Sun workstations.
|
| We ran a project with the slade school of art doing digital arts
| design with them, lovely people. I still have some of the reject
| works.
|
| Peter liked inviting people to come and be at UCL. During my time
| Bob Braden (SATNET) was there, and Mike Lesk (UUCP) -and they
| were also very nice and approachable. Tiny tea-room, I caused a
| kurfuffle washing out the most disgustingly stained coffee mug
| there, the owner of which was bulding the patina both to see how
| thick it got, and to discourage others from using his cup.
|
| Peter had one standing rule you did NOT break: If there was an
| inter-departmental meeting with the people from ULCC (at that
| time down at Lambs Conduit St) he expected you to "vote against"
| any proposal they brought to the table without question:
| Departmental politics ran deep.
|
| Peter was a committed skier, he was hardly young when I got there
| and he was still avidly visiting the alps as often as possible.
|
| UCL ran the gateway from JANET (X.25 based non internet) to the
| ARPANet which required you to login to a unix jump host and use
| kermit to connect across, and lodge FTP requests using JANET
| "grey book" FTP protocol to talk to the FTP client through a
| conversion script. The gateway got hacked every now and then.
| Some of us were a bit unkind and said it used Kermit because
| Peter, who was somewhat small, frog-like and had thick glasses he
| peered through, appreciated the joke that he was Kermit
| personified.
| msla wrote:
| Here's a debunking and a history of the myth the ARPANET/Internet
| was designed to survive nuclear war:
|
| http://9ol.es/nuclear-myth.html
|
| A bit more:
|
| https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15035/did-the-co...
| Its_Padar wrote:
| > (2018)
|
| I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that... After
| some searching I found the Conversation's RSS feed for
| technology[1] which says it was 2025 after searching the page for
| "internet" and looking through the results
| <id>tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45404</id>
| <published>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</published>
| <updated>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</updated> <link
| rel="alternate" type="text/html"
| href="https://theconversation.com/how-britain-got-its-first-
| internet-connection-by-the-late-pioneer-who-created-the-first-
| password-on-the-internet-45404"/> <title>How Britain got
| its first internet connection - by the late pioneer who created
| the first password on the internet</title>
|
| [1] https://theconversation.com/uk/technology/articles.atom
| pxeger1 wrote:
| The preface says it was originally written "a few years before
| [the author] died", but never published (until now - having
| been (re)edited), so the (2018) makes sense.
| lproven wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that
|
| You seem to be confusing the date it was written with the date
| it was published.
|
| I believe there are multiple works where that interval is over
| 50 years. I would not be surprised if a gap of a century has
| been surpassed.
| justinl33 wrote:
| let's thank him for making some absolutely god-mode architectural
| calls (protocol layering, manufacturer agnosticism, etc.)
| ryao wrote:
| I really hope cable management has improved at LLNL since the 70s
| when that picture was taken.
| DrBazza wrote:
| > he was prevented from extending his project outside the lab by
| pressure from the British Post Office, which then held a monopoly
| on telecommunications.
|
| The UK and telecoms don't make a happy pairing - we always seem
| to do the wrong thing:
|
| https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
|
| Dr Cochrane knew that Britain's tired copper network was
| insufficient: "In 1974 it was patently obvious that copper wire
| was unsuitable for digital communication in any form, and it
| could not afford the capacity we needed for the future."
|
| He was asked to do a report on the UK's future of digital
| communication and what was needed to move forward.
|
| "In 1979 I presented my results," he tells us, "and the
| conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT
| started a massive effort - that spanned in six years - involving
| thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre
| everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other
| nation.
|
| "In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper
| and we started a programme where we built factories for
| manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in
| Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing
| components for systems to roll out to the local loop".
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| BT let me off a PS2,000 bill 'cus my dialer.exe got hijacked
| and I was calling a Seychelles premium line. I'd turned off the
| sound on my 56k? modem and didn't spot the extremely long beeps
| and boops. That's what got me started on basic security...zone
| alarm (pre-shitty-ness), proxomitron, hosts files (and other
| blocking lists/ banner blockers), autoexec.bat to delete
| histories, being caught out by dark patterns etc. Fun
| times....'cus the internet was fun at the time, too. Nowadays,
| despite a trove of bookmarks, I visit very, very, very few new-
| to-me sites.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| The story has it all. Government stupidity and shortsightedness.
| Nonsensical self-harming bureaucracy. A plucky, persistent,
| woefully underfunded Brit who eventually succeeded in spite of
| the state.
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