And 'Lo!': How the internet was born | Hacker News Reader

And 'Lo!': How the internet was born

bbc.co.uk

One of my favorite quotes about the Internet by Alan Kay:

  The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean,
  rather than something that was man-made.

Great one.

I really do miss the old Internet though.

Also recommended: "Lo and behold! Reveries of the connected world" by Werner Herzog.

I would counter recommend this - I couldn’t make it through it on Netflix.

It seemed like the director had no idea what he was talking about and a lot of the interviewees were non technical people that said things that made no sense (actually no sense - indistinguishable from words strung together to sound profound that were actually meaningless).

I would counter that counter recommendation. One has to keep in mind that this is still a Werner Herzog creation - and he's quite an eccentric guy. Think "40% David Lynch".

If you want another attempt at Herzog, I'd recommend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroszek

I suspect this comment is aimed at segments like this one with Ted Nelson of Hypertext fame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY

On first viewing, I too felt it was incomprehensible wordsoup in some sense - but upon learning more about Nelson and the history and context around which his ideas were developed, I've grown to find this interview almost magical.

This movie was done by non-technical people for non-technical people. When I started to look at this from this point of view - it became really enjoyable.

To me that makes it even worse - rather than teach how something that seems magical to a non-technical person came to be, it just reinforces the idea that it’s not understandable.

Not everything has to be a lesson. Also I think it focused more on philosophical questions rather than implementation side.

On that last map, the three nodes with a T in a circle represented TIPs -- basically dialup access points. The TIP had a tiny command line that let you specify which machine you wanted to connect to.

Long distance (which could be within your state) calls were expensive in those days so being close to a TIP was a big deal.

Even better, you didn't log in to a TIP--as long as you knew the phone number, you were all set. And phone numbers were generally available.

Even better, back in the early days of the ARPAnet (maybe 15-20 machines in 1973-4? probably faulty memories) every site had a guest account, and some of us would spend hours at night telnet'ing to one machine, then from there to another, until at some point the chain would break.

I’m curious how that worked? Was the line “busy” for everyone else once you connected? Did a TIP have several phone numbers so multiple people could connect at once?

Yes, the number connected to a rolling bank of lines.

I love reading about the history of the internet, along with the history of computers in general. It truly demonstrates the effect of "standing on the shoulders of giants" to read about Turing and Von Neumann and Godel and Shannon, Shockley, Knuth, Ritchie, Bell Labs and Watson and PARC, etc. To understand history is to understand the future.

Quote 1:

"Great idea," said Herzfeld. "Get it going. You've got $1m more in your budget right now. Go."

Quote 2:

"They cost $80,000 each, more than $500,000 (£405,000) in today's money. "

If only would be that easy to get $6.25m in today's government environment for a pet project done in name of science. Today, to get those money, all you have to do is be a military contractor and say "...for helping troops in Afghanistan" and a check would already fly in your direction. Not so much for science one though.

Military research has always been a major driver of technological development. It's not a recent thing - it's just the other sources of funding are drying up.

> Military research has always been a major driver of technological development.

Silicon Valley was built on government / military spending (at least until the late 1970s):

* https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600305

It never stopped https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

Going back a ways. The US Navy was a leading founding backer of MIT.

Its not as terrible as you might think. Do you know of Michael Ossmann HackRF? Funded by DARPA https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/10/19/darpa-...

Ah, happy memories of late-night sitting at a teletype (TTY) by the IMP in the PDP-1/PDP-10 Harvard CRCT machine room, hearing the phone ring on the IMP, and a voice on the other end from BBN HQ asking me to reboot the IMP, as it was hung...

I.e, early Arpanet management was manual--no remote power-cycling equipment.

(We had some incredibly whizzy 50Kbaud leased lines between the Harvard IMP and the BBN HQ IMP.)

> It was, as the historians Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon put it, like "having a den cluttered with several television sets, each dedicated to a different channel".

This is how I feel about modern streaming TV; needing multiple apps on multiple platforms just watch it. That TV is for Netflix, and that TV is for Amazon, and that TV is for Disney+ and that TV is for...

Where Wizards Stay Up Late seems to be the definitive history of the Internet:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta...

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon is a great book about the subject.

> Next to his office was the terminal room, a pokey little space where three remote-access terminals with three different keyboards sat side by side.

How'd that remote access work?

Likely a Bell 103 modem and an acoustical coupler.

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