There were almost two internets. Then, the CIA destroyed one | Hacker News Reader

There were almost two internets. Then, the CIA destroyed one

mashable.com

This is a series of video essays about Chile's Project CyberSyn:

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

Link title massively overreaches. Cybersyn was a few hundred telex machines, aka glorified telegraphs, and one computer that aggregated daily economic statistics. It was in no way comparable to ARPANET or the Internet. The project was an interesting yet abortive effort at top-down socialist economic management. Since it never had a chance to succeed or fail on its own merits, and also since it had a really swanky-looking operations room, it's been the subject of a boatload of techno-utopian projection. Here are reflections by someone who was directly involved:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cyberneti...

>The emphasis of these reflections is in contrasting its rather limited achievements with its vision and relevance for our societies today. Its claims were large; it was presented as a project that achieved important results in a short period of time. The paper compares its actuality with these claims.

It’s an early ERP system. People undersell or oversell it depending on their ideological bias but that’s what it’s most comparable to imo.

It’s not particularly exciting but it was a practical idea.

It's an early ERP system that existed under a different model of economic organization; omitting that serious detail is almost, er, underselling it.

Modern Free SocietiesTM lose their minds over networked water meters; this was a near-real-time index of important metrics from the country's important industries. The actually-Marxist government used this data to wage class war against the still-private owners of eg trucking companies. We don't hold with that sort of panopticon in the West, no sir!

...Regarding corporations, obviously. Citizens dutifully endure their smartphones and smartspeakers and smartdoorbells reporting important metrics to advertisers and Amazon and the cops. The point is that ideology colours everything.

What is a required by law or your power corporation smart power meter? :) Are you sure we don't do that?

(Water meters more often than not as well.)

What are the chances your gas station does not record the plates and gas purchase data together? Or the credit card number. Or perhaps even driver's license number in some places.

Etc. Ad nauseam.

The data is just not directly available to either the consumer or the government. That does not make for good privacy though.

I don't think so. Project Cybersyn is not even possible on non centrally planned economies.

Try to calculate if Germany will run out of gas this winter. You can't . Because economy is not centrally planned.

Sure you can, it will just be an estimate.

If you had the in depth data such a network provided, the estimate would likely be more accurate.

The monitoring of this sort is done by every energy company these days, just not public or interlinked. The governments get lump values from the big companies instead.

Can they act on estimates? Can they take resources ( like gas, copper, electronics, etc... ) from one private company's storage and give it to other (more critical) company?

For example: take gas from paper-clip factory and give it to fertilizer factory?

That's not what central planning ever did, either. They changed priorities and quotas instead. And even that system (soviet version) was very short-lived.

Governments these days use pricing, including special case pricing and tax breaks to achieve a similar thing even more roughly. Unless there are shortages, in which case they intervene directly.

So, what we have now is actually much less efficient.

An early ERP system built by socialist Trekkies? (Apparently Star Trek inspired the "bridge.")

Ugh a SAP system is probably one of the most boring and user unfriendly things that have been inspired by star trek.

The second video mentions a trucking strike, and that messages were passed between telex sites on alternate shipping options.

Supposedly, this was instrumental in breaking the strike, which was not instigated by the workers, but by the owners of the trucking firms, in reaction to a move towards nationalization of some of them.

Yes, and telex machines were nothing new in 1972. They were invented in Germany in the 1930s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development

When you boil it down to the details, Project Cybersyn really wasn't much. A lot of old telex stations, one mainframe, untested hand-wavey ideas about economic control theory, and some very nice Star Trek armchairs.

I agree, the network looks like a bunch of modems connected to a single host's tty driver.

Reminds me of the bank of modems we hung off our VAX to let employees telnet and do work from home.

It was like maybe 32 28.8 modems. My memory is so vague, and it was just a pile of cables and boxes behind the VAX. I mostly just flipped the power on and off the ones that went totally sideways and tried not to step on things. It was really cable neglect more than management.

After hours, we’d let employees use it as an ISP. It was slow, just 2xISDN from there to our ISP, but it let some employees get internet access that couldn’t afford the bill.

I know at lease one warehouse worker’s kid ended up being a developer after having that mid-90s access. I hope it helped him and maybe others.

Crazy to think, they’re probably around 40 now.

Even if they had had the tech: most projects fail, for one reason or another [*]. There has been another "internet", DECnet, but it lost. There's no reason to assume that Chile, not a country known for international influence and mastery of English, would have actually produced another internet.

Cybersyn looked like an innovative undertaking, though. A bit heavy on metaphors, it would appear from the article.

[*] edit: at becoming a success beyond its original domain.

Let's just call this phenomena redistribution of thoughts and ideas to a central power ;).

I have to point out the public telephone company one in France: the Minitel [1]. This really could have achieved global interconnectivity, but for the stupidity of telephone companies.

Minitel was a terminal you could rent from the phone company, and its original intent was to reduce the need for human information operators. It was available in 1982. But it grew to have all sorts of services on it, even a dating service.

It wasn't a "fraction of a fraction of a fraction" of the population, either - there were millions in use. I saw one in 1989. I even mention Minitel in The Big Bucks (https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks), only mildly satirically.

They "solved" the money problem: the charges would appear on your monthly phone bill. The execs were actually embarrassed that there were things like dating services -- that wasn't their plan at all.

So what do I mean by "the stupidity of telephone companies"? All the other phone companies in the world, who were already connected both physically and administratively (through CCITT) could have easily jumped on it and made their systems interoperate. They already did through phone calls and payments between each other.

They didn't see it, or if they did, they let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There were infinitely many papers on the "proper" way to do "videotex."

Would a global "internet" run by the phone companies be better than what we have? Discuss.

[1] https://history-computer.com/minitel/

>Would a global "internet" run by the phone companies be better than what we have? Discuss.

A global network run by The Phone Company (TPC) was the subject of "The President's Analyst":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President%27s_Analyst

The President's Analyst - The Phone Company:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2NNZdigSXg

The President's Analyst - Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V63yeIIEd6k

Murder of a Movie - How J. Edgar Hoover Killed "The President's Analyst":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwM4Solrzes

Thanks. I've heard of the movie but never made the connection.

One thing I learned from Cliff Stoll's the cuckoo's egg is that the internet was far from the only computer network. Every country was building one or more networks. There was some kind of cambrian explosion of network technologys going on.

What the internet did was more subtle, but far more important: It standardized the technology, connecting these networks. Instead of tons of little private network, we got 1 global net owned by nobody.

I have no problem believing chile had one of these little private networks.

Isn't that the point? The Internet is an "inter-network", a network of networks.

But it wasn't even "The Internet", singular, to begin with. Any network of networks is "an internet". It's just when all the networks (or internetworks) are connected together (because Metcalfe's Law - the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users) that it becomes "The Internet".

A believe a large portion of this is thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, CERN, and the web. That was the free technology that made it immediately apparent how valuable a global internet is.

(Unfortunately, with social networks and chat systems and such opting out of federation and defaulting to closed ecosystems, I think we are moving toward independent corporate-sponsored networks, this time built on top of the global one.)

True. The web was built on top of the internet, which gave it a huge boost. Today, it's hard to separate the www and the internet, they seem almost 1 combined entity.

I wasn't there, but the internet presumably had value before the www, by having email, ftp and usenet.

It also demonstrates how futile nationalistic feelings are on computers. We invented the internet says the USA. We invented the www, says Europe. Both are irrelevant to the point they are almost wrong. The tech got valuable only because a planet worked together.

> I wasn't there, but the internet presumably had value before the www, by having email, ftp and usenet.

Don’t forget telnet and multi—player games. The Internet was a pretty cool place before ad networks conquered it.

They did but the cracks are showing. China with their great firewall. Even Western countries censoring stuff. Russia making sure they can function independently because they'll probably be sanctioned one day.

It's far from one happy family.

> I wasn't there, but the internet presumably had value before the www, by having email, ftp and usenet.

As someone who was barely there, it was largely a standardized client problem. That's why NSCA Mosaic and later Netscape Navigator were so important.

The Internet provided transport... but for what?

To GP's standardization point, the Internet wouldn't have been successful if every server required you to have a different client to talk a different protocol. (The landscape was very different than that in which mobile apps now live)

Web protocols + a client browser that understood them = palatable UX

That's true. However, before the web, it was absolutely common to anonftp to some site, download the software, type ./configure and make, and off you went. That's how software got distributed. And Internet standards.

Not the same as the web, of course, and your grandmother wouldn't have been doing it.

one of the bigger problems was telneting between VAX and UNIX systems.

there was content back then, but no curation. we would telnet from one machine to another using CLI.

the reward was a wall of ASCII highly formatted with extended fonts.

you could lurk in the login areas trying unix-fu or find a mud or a BBS.

there was always tin for reading usenet as a method of content search.

there wasnt so much content fiefdom, you could share links or post content with little oversight except numbers of attendance.

i was there.

  one night on a dumpster dive i found a minitel terminal [i thought it was "trash" but it was perfectly working.]

it dialed out no problem, there was a queue of phone numbers

I was launched into a world of freenets and BBSs

Wait, Chobits?

im not the only one that found that path, i think Akira may have had a similar beginning.

More specifically, Vint Cerf was one of the main guys who actually standardised the interconnectivity that made them all one internet in the first place

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf

Indeed, the web was the "killer app" of the technology

There were a lot of protocols at the beginning. Google worked hard to kill some of them: nntp, ftp (archie), http.

Sesh, people blame google for everything.

Usenet died due to spam problems.

Ftp has been on the way out for a long long time.

Neither of these had anything to do with google.

Usenet is still "dead", eh?

Yes. It is.

Its ghost might still technically exist, but it is a pale ghost of what it was before.

They didn't, though. They had a bunch of telex machines that were old even at the time. The title of this link is hyperbole to serve an ideological agenda. It's Teen Vogue tech history.

Before the Internet became widespread, people were using BBSs, and several large (for the time) networks of interconnections between them. Fidonet, and many more regional ones like Z-Netz. There were also networks for businesses and research institutions that were not the Internet. None of these were just a bunch of Telex machines, even if the network in the article was.

> Before the Internet became widespread

This is looking at things with blinders and assuming the public at large determines the significance of the Internet. The People were not using BBS, etc. A tiny vanishingly small minority of intrepid computer geeks were using BBS, etc. in the late 1970's, but Arpanet was already very well established by 1973.[1] Just because it was mainly limited to academics and corporations, this still vastly outmatched BBS use in the 1970's. BBS only came into popularity by the mid-1980's, when the Internet was already huge and stayed big, and BBS were effectively extinct within a few years of the invention of WWW. BBS use itself was never "widespread," unless we define widespread as a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population. Not to diminish the nostalgia for the unique fun of logging into a BBS, in reality, hardly anyone ever used them, which would be maybe tens of thousands at most among hundreds of millions. The number of academics at one large university attached to the Internet in 1978 could match the entire population of BBS users for it's entire existence.

[1] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

AFAIK the French minitel system was used by The People over there. It was semi obligatory for e.g subscribing to (some?) higher education, and maybe interacting with some governemental services. The People, once introduced to minitel, had some commercial services available, including primitive porn.

I consider minitel a fork in the road to the www, with different architectural choices leading to a different net culture. Minitel had a clear consumer vs producer split and 1 central governer, compared to the www free-for-all peer to peer vision. It probably would not have grown so fast as the www. But it had payment infra from day 1 and no 100%free connectivity, so it wouldn't become the privacy invasive ad infestation the www has become.

If you say so. I don't have any hard numbers (I would love to see them, either way), but I think there was a brief moment around 1990 when BBS usage was more widespread than the Internet. I wouldn't (and didn't) say BBS usage was widespread in absolute terms. Nor did I say anything about the significance of anything.

I don't have hard numbers on BBS, but on the internet-history@ mailing list, someone estimated there were around a million people worldwide on the Internet in 1990. This is a pretty informed estimate. You think BBS was more than that?

Apparently, there were close to 7000 Fidonet nodes in 1990[1]. What's a reasonable average for distinct user accounts per node? I don't know. If it's 100, that's 0.7 million already.

Compuserve had 380000 users in 1987[2], when it was basically US-only. Now, I don't want to argue that Compuserve is a BBS (though I suppose you could). But it's evidence people were using their modems to connect to things that weren't the internet. And Compuserve in 1987 apparently had no ability to exchange information with the Internet proper; when I used it as a child, a couple of years later, I used Compuserve -- its groups, pages, whatever they were called, and did not use it for Internet access.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes... almost 40000 at its peak in 1996

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share

I wouldn't dispute any of your numbers. It sounds like they were roughly comparable. At least that's the best we can say 34 years later.

Yes, much more. The internet didn’t go mainstream until the mid-90’s. According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system there “were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994.”

First of all, "in the US alone," is misleading because the vast majority of BBS and their users were actually in the US. In 1990, the Internet was composed of 350,000 hosts being accessed by over a million computers (aka users). 60K BBSs means a capacity of exactly 60K users simultaneously, while the Internet capacity at the time was... more that a million simultaneous users... IOW all of them. The Internet (called ARPANET) was very well established by 1973, but experienced exponential growth from the advent of WWW.

Your citation has no citation of its own. Curious how there could be 17M BBS users in 1994 when the US had only 11M modem-equipped computers.[1] IOW, the wiki is very wrong, and the claim is unsupportable.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1995/10/16/americans-go...

Let's just remember that most Internet services nowadays measure their traffic as "7-day actives" and sometimes "30-day actives." (Maybe for Twitter it's "daily actives"?)

That's a way of distinguishing people who are just signed up from those who've actually done something in the last N days. I doubt that either the Internet or the BBS's have those numbers for 1990 or thereabouts.

First of all, "in the US alone," is misleading because the vast majority of BBS and their users were actually in the US.

Another vague assertion stated confidently, but without sources. How do you know this? What percentage is a vast majority?

60K BBSs means a capacity of exactly 60K users simultaneously

Again, stated like a fact, but there were BBSs with multiple lines. What percentage? I don't know. Do you? But "capacity" is a red herring anyway, just like "significance".

Multi-line BBSes were few and far between. As a very active BBS user in 1990, there were about 100 systems in my local calling area. Of those, I only remember 3 or 4 having multiple lines. A system like that was a serious investment: you had the $$$ for the phone lines every month, plus all the equipment for the system itself.

Even if it’s only 11 million, most of those users were not on the internet in 1994. They were on local BBSes, CompuServe, GEnie, The Source, and other online services. Do you remember that time? I do. I’ve started BBSing in the late 80’s and first got on the Internet in 1991. It was mostly academics, defense contractors, and early ISPs… which generally started as BBSes.

I don’t dispute the early internet could’ve supported many more users than BBSes. They simply weren’t there yet.

You are vastly overestimating the size of that population of BBS users, and vastly underestimating the population of academics and students at hundreds of universities as well as engineers and computer scientists at hundreds of companies. It wasn't everyone logging into BBS, wasn't most people, and if you were logging into BBS in 1990, you were pretty special. In 1983, when I was using BBS, I never met another soul until 1989 that had any idea what I was doing. If you were at university using the Internet, this was commonplace by 1990, and really it was pretty common by 1980. But since you're apparently unaware that a network of networks of hundreds of universities and hundreds of corporations spanning the globe existed prior to your awareness of BBS, it makes a lot of sense that you might believe that.

I think you are vastly overestimating the number of university users that actually used the Internet in those early days. For example, just because a school "had access" did not mean all their students actually used it. Around here, even as late as 1993, at a state school, you had to sign up for a CS class to even get an email address.

I stand by my statement that the total number of BBS users (including online services, like CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, pre-Internet AOL, etc.) out numbered the users on the early Internet in 1990.

Let's break it down. CompuServe, the oldest of the big 3 dialup services, never had more than 250K subscribers, and it was bought by AOL in 1997. When AOL went public in 1992, it had fewer than 200K subscribers.[1] At its peak, in 2002, AOL had 25M subscribers.[2] The rest of the dialup services never totaled more than 500K subscribers combined, total for their entire existance.

Again, in 1990, the Internet had 350K hosts worldwide and over a million users. The total number of dialup subscribers in 1990 doesn't begin to approach that number, and it doesn't matter if you pile on all BBS users, because BBS at its peak, low hundreds of them. Within 2 years of WWW arriving, there were only 20 left.[3]

So take your 10K BBS users, take all the CompuServe users ever, 250K, take the 200K AOL users in 1990, and all the other dialup subscribers for the entirety of their existence, 500K, and with this screwed up cheating math, you might get a million to match the over a million Internet users in 1990.

[1] https://time.com/3857628/aol-1985-history/

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Aol_subs...

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-l...

I will admit it difficult to get accurate numbers, but this Wikipedia article claims CompuServe had 600K and Prodigy had 450K+ subscribers in 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) It references NY Times articles that are pay walled.

This graph shows roughly 12,000 BBSes existing in 1990: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/support/statistics.html How many users do you think each one had? 50? 100? Of course there is some overlap and it's impossible to figure out actual unique users. Regardless, it is way more than 10K. One large BBS alone (Rusty and Edie's, which got busted for piracy in a big scandal) had over 14,000 subscribers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS

And that last article from The Atlantic says there are 20 dialup BBSes existing when it was written in 2016, not within 2 years of the WWW arriving: "Did any direct-access, telephone-dial-up BBSes survive the internet’s proverbial asteroid? Sure enough, there are about 20 known dial-up BBSes in North America"

The Internet killed BBSing, that's for sure. But that didn't happen until the mid 90's when it went mainstream.

I saw the reference, and my explanation is CompuServe, and especially Prodigy, lied, precisely for the same reasons Facebook lies, about the number of subscribers. You think any BBS users ever patronized more than one BBS? I wonder what the record is for the most logins on one BBS in a day was, but I expect the average to be close to 10 logins a day, because the day is so short, starts after work ends at bedtime, and because the bandwidth was so small, every execution took forever, so logging in and tying up a BBS for 2 hours was probably a very short session. Also, rhetorically, of the 14K alleged BBS that supposedly existed, how many of them could be considered popular among BBS users? I wonder how many would go days or weeks without a login.

If you've ever browsed old newsgroups, you'd get an idea of just how many people were online. By 1983, thousands of people participated from more than 500 hosts, mostly universities and Bell Labs sites but also a growing number of Unix-related companies; the number of hosts nearly doubled to 940 in 1984.[1] The number of newsgroups grew from more than 100 as of 1983 to more than 110,000... some newsgroups receive fewer than a dozen posts per year while the most popular can get several thousand in under an hour.[2] Presumably, each newsgroup had a creator, and my hope is to give you better perspective on how many were using the Internet daily in the early 1980's, which would have only increased massively by 1990. The more than a million Internet users by 1990 figure is extremely soft. The reason the WWW exploded is probably due to Berners-Lee announcing it on Usenet. Just sayin' every Usenet user was using the Internet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Network

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup#Types

It's possible they exaggerated their numbers, certainly, but we can only rely on the public data.

I was very active on BBSes in the early 90's. I would call generally 5 or 6 a day myself. I also ran my own, starting around 1992. I don't have any exact figures, but I remember I had roughly 300 users registered, of which about 20 to 30 called a day (I only had a single phone line.) I was a teenager at the time, and most of my users were also teens, logging in after school, from around 3 PM to midnight. There were larger systems in that area that had 8 to 10 lines, and 1000's of registered users.

I remember Usenet quite well. I was active on it, starting around 1989, through a local system that had a UUCP feed. Also, not every "Usenet" user was necessarily an "Internet" (TCP/IP) user. You could receive mail and news through UUCP (batch, over dialup), without being connected to Internet with IP. More ancient history, but UUCP feeds were very common for smaller sites.

We were talking about 1990. 1994 was much, much different. Not that that isn't also interesting.

If you believe this, Prodigy and CompuServe combined had over a million users in 1990: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) Probably the vast majority of those users also called local BBSes.

> Probably the vast majority of those users also called local BBSes.

This is an absurd notion. The opposite is probably true, that most if not every single BBS user also used dialup services, but most users of dialup services probably were entirely unaware of any BBS.

btw, CompuServe never had more than 250K subscribers total. Prodigy had far less. So it is likely Facebook math being performed here with subscriptions that existed but were never used.

The reality is most people could not afford online services. This is anecdotal, but most local BBS users I knew did not use CompuServe, Prodigy, or any of the others. The hourly fees were expensive.

This is all ancient history, but most articles I look at showed CompuServe around 500K by 1990: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/tracks-the-number-of-hou...

Also Telenet when I was a kid.

The most horrifying thing about the "Computer-generated image of Project CyberSyn operations room" on the Project Cybersyn Wikipedia page is that they're displaying the lyrics of RMS's Free Software Song (which he wrote in 1991) on the fake monitors in the "Close Up of the Data Feed":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn#/media/File:C...

    SHARE THE SOFTWARE

     ##  YOU'LL BE FREE       JOIN US NOW AND SHARE THE SOFTWARE
     ##  HACKER               YOU'LL BE FREE HACKER YOU'LL BE FREE
                              JOIN US NOW
    
     ##  JOIN US NOW        }
                            }
    ####                    }
    #### YOU'LL BE FREE     } JOIN US NOW AND SHARE THE SOFTWARE   
    #### HACKER             }
    ####                    }
                            }
     ##  YOU'LL BE FREE       JOIN US NOW
     ##  HACKER

     ##  YOU'LL BE FREE
     ##  HACKER

     ##  JOIN US NOW
     ##  YOU'LL BE FREE
     ##  HACKER

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw

https://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.en.html

https://www.gnu.org/music/writing-fs-song.html

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

The CyberSyn multimedia "reconstruction":

https://web.archive.org/web/20070716014045/http://www.cybers...

I'm willing to bet that this video is more informative that the ones done by Mashable: https://youtu.be/RJLA2_Ho7X0

Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is a good resource on this topic.

The way it worked beginning in the 80s was that once you had your local in-country research network, you eventually felt compelled to hook it up to NSFNET (maybe after starting out with an email gateway into ARPANET/CSNET). So it's likely that there would have been just one Internet anyway.

lol at the fake shape buttons on the chairs.

Does anyone actually have details about the project?

Skimming the wikipage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn the networking side of things is rather primitive: a single master node talking to a number of child nodes with no other inter node communication. And a lot of software build in the master node to review what is happening in the child nodes. Nothing mentioned packets, routing, or any of the other more interesting bits of what made the original internet different.

Down the wikihole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS seems like the arpanet not taken, 10 years before arpanet with the same design goals of inter node communication.

There was communication network (500 telex machines) , and one mainframe computer. For internet you may also need packet switching.

My understanding is that the "network" was a manually-staffed telex operations room:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cyberneti...

>Serendipitously, we found a large number of spare telex machines in one of the state-owned enterprises. Their installation followed in plants and enterprises throughout the country, as well as in industrial committees, CORFO and other government offices. A telex room with tens of machines was installed at CORFO. In practice, it was an operations room for the state-owned industry that offered an incipient nervous system for the industrial economy; it was called Cybernet

The telex itself was not invented in Chile, but rather ironically in 1930s Germany:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development

This telex machines act like terminals if you connect them to computer. They did best with technology they had. (previous government didn't know how to use them). It is remarkable what they did. And very interesting. The title is misleading.

So it was a single "Wide-Area Network"?

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