Thursday, July 12, 2012

Internet nostalgia

I'm putting together a presentation on Cyber Defense for #2 Son's JROTC class, and in assembling the background material I found a cool site that shows the history of the Internet through 2009.  It does a particularly good job of calling out the April Fools RFCs (specs posted on April 1 each year, and written firmly tongue in cheek; my favorite was RFC 1149, IP over Avian Carriers, which was actually implemented once).

Some of the information was surprising: my first Internet email address was on Dockmaster in 1985, which was the same year that the first DNS domain was assigned (there were only around 1,000 computers on the 'net then, and a lot of systems simply used a HOSTS file).  I can't remember, but it's possible that my email pre-dated DNS format.

If you're a tech nerd like me, this will be a waltz down memory lane.  And you should also check out the Jargon File, which captures the Oral Tradition from those times.  For example, it has an entry describing Multics (the OS that Dockmaster ran).

All of this dovetails nicely with the "How to write C in Ada" code I have stashed away somewhere.  Leave a comment if you want me to dig it out and post it - this seems too wretchedly silly to do, but I can probably find it.

9 comments:

  1. Please do post the "how to write C in Ada" piece. I'm lucky that I've never had to deal with Ada, but no one knows what the future holds. I might need it in some SHTF scenario.

    I actually had a dedicated IP address before I had an Internet mail address. A block of addresses was set aside for amateur radio, and I requested one in 1987 or so. I'm 44.70.0.22.

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  2. +1 for posting the Ada piece, I learned that stuff back in college (back in 2003), but haven't had to really use it since. Still takes up a significant chunk of my usable brain, for better or for worse.

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  3. Sigh, I'm TRULY an old fart, I go back to the MILNET days...

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  4. I got my first compuserve account (don't ask me to remember the address, it was 30 years ago, and a long string of numbers), and my first unix home directory and email address in the same year; both hosted on PDP10s I believe (one running a hacked TOPS-20, and one running a hacked BSD).

    That was late 1982 I think. I do remember that a few months later, my home directory was moved from the PDP10 to a VAX 11/780 (it may have even been an 11-782?), also running a hacked BSD.

    If I remember correctly, my first email address was actually in CTSS/MULTICS format (same as DOCKMASTER), because prior to 1983 the whole university was on MULTICS mail, and the switch to VAXen also moved mail over to ARPAmail.

    I think prior to the @ conversion, mail services themselves were actually hosted on an H-6180-2DPS8/70, with an ungodly 16mb RAM, and 3 gigabytes of storage.

    I believe after the @ conversion, mail was on a VAX-11/750

    Had my first domain in late 1993, just after they opened the web to pubic use. Had it continuously registered since.

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  6. Oh and please, never mention Ada again.

    I still have nightmares.

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  7. I finagled BITNET access when I was in high school, but the beginnings of the Internet actually predate me just a little bit despite the fact that I am in the Internet biz. But I love pointing out to folks that Whois predates DNS and even IPv4.

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