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General Discussion & Feedback => Just Chat! => Topic started by: Pseudoscience-is-malarkey on 20/01/2023 15:11:17

Title: When was the first time you recall hearing about and/or using the internet?
Post by: Pseudoscience-is-malarkey on 20/01/2023 15:11:17

I'm surprised that as early as the year I was born (1981) there were some people in western Europe and North America ordering their prescription medication from their GP online.
For me, the first time I recall hearing about it was when my ma installed American Online on our first personal computer in 1996 when I was in the 8th grade (that is year 9 to you Brits). To me, the internet was about sports talk, chat rooms, webpages dedicated to band worship and the end of time, and pictures of nude celebrities.

Title: Re: When was the first time you recall hearing about and/or using the internet?
Post by: alancalverd on 20/01/2023 18:49:36

ARPANET was in my field of view in 1971, thanks to my lab being next door to Davies and Scantlebury at NPL.

Title: Re: When was the first time you recall hearing about and/or using the internet?
Post by: evan_au on 20/01/2023 20:28:21

When I was at university in 1976, the university was connected to the internet, and some people were using email and receiving feeds from various interest groups over the internet.
- The internet connection was hosted on a PDP-11 mini-computer with 128kBytes of RAM, running UNIX*

Around 1995 I loaded Gopher on my Macintosh computer (also with 128 kBytes of RAM); Gopher was an early internet index system. My wife's reaction was "It's just like a library catalogue - it will never catch on"
- Soon after that, web browsers became available, and it did catch on!

*I took the Operating Systems course; it was about UNIX. At the start of the course, they provided the source code for the entire operating system kernel, and warned that in the final exam they would pull out a line of code, and expect you to write about it. Surprisingly, it was actually possible. It's been quite a while since operating systems were that small!

Title: Re: When was the first time you recall hearing about and/or using the internet?
Post by: alancalverd on 20/01/2023 23:46:10

I never got involved in OS codes but I am proud that I taught an ALGOL class that included Steve Heighway, the first graduate to score a goal in an FA Cup Final, and Guy Evans, drummer of the Van der Graaff Generator (one of which I had in my lab at the time). So it wasn't a complete waste of a few hours.

Title: Re: When was the first time you recall hearing about and/or using the internet?
Post by: Bored chemist on 21/01/2023 12:17:38

The first I heard about it was JANET in the mid 80s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET

Title: Re: When was the first time you recall hearing about and/or using the internet?
Post by: evan_au on 21/01/2023 19:36:32

In the 1980s I visited Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) in Cambridge Massachusetts (now part of Raytheon). This was the company which managed the early ARPANET, linking 4 universities on the other side of the USA, in California.

They had some interesting stories to tell...
- They had set up remote maintenance, so they could measure error rates on all of the individual links between sites.
- It had automatic re-routing, so that if any link failed, it would take an alternate path
- When they detected excess error rates on one of the links, they would ring up "Ma Bell" (the telephone company) and say you have this error rate on this link (quoting the specific link reference in the internal Bell reference system).
- The technical people in the telephone company would be astonished that BBN could tell this specific information from the other side of the country...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET