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Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

This brings back memories of being connected to the ARPANET through a BBN IMP[1] in 1982. Here's a photo of BBN's iconic refrigerator-sized network interface box:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/5114191251/

Some years later, our CS department's IMP was replaced by a much smaller Cisco router (and our .ARPA e-mail addresses with .EDU addresses).

I had always associated BBN with internet engineering, so it was interesting to read that they started out in a completely different business.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor

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Yes, happy memories (1972?) of sitting at a terminal next to Harvard's CRCT IMP (56Kb connections to 2 other nodes, woohoo!) late at night and picking up the phone on the side when it rang, with BBN network ops folks calling and asking me to reboot it manually...

(The IMP also functioned as a local router between the PDP-10 and the PDP-1.)

I also remember Ray Tomlinson well from the first email list on the ARPAnet, meta-appropriately about email lists, protocols, and clients.

Those were simpler times when receiving an email was done by anonymous FTP appending to your mail.txt file.

Sometime around 1979 or 1980 someone gave me a slip of paper with a phone number and said "Dial this with a modem."

I did, it answered "Pentagon TIP," and before too long I was roving around the ARPANET. If memory serves me right the main command was "C" for connect. You simply typed "C" and a small number, and then logged in as "guest"/"guest" (the world was smaller and more innocent back then). I'm fairly certain that I logged in to a system at UC Berkeley.

nice. that was also a time when every geeky kid kinda secretly feared (or hoped) you might stumble into a system which, after login, would prompt you with:

"Welcome! Would you like to play a game of global thermonuclear war?"

and then you really would be worried you were connected to the Pentagon

I did sort of the opposite back in the very early nineties - I had my MicroVAX ID as a Norwegian DoD machine when anyone dialed it.

That netted me a few laughs as friends got confused - and a summons to see the local police a few weeks later; apparently, someone had thought it WAS indeed a DoD box, reported the security breach and the next thing my local PD knew, the security services called and asked them to tell me it was quite funny and all that - but STOP DOING IT!!!

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