The Backbone: A History of the Internet | Hacker News Reader

The Backbone: A History of the Internet

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119 pointstim_sw18 comments

I had the privilege of working on some of this during the UUnet days. The pride I felt in "keeping the internet up" as a backbone while no-one in public recognized where I worked was admittedly amusing. Even in career interviews later, including today, I rarely meet anyone that knows or appreciates that exposure. Those formative years being exposed to networking and services in general from such amazing peers are extremely fond and foundational memories of mine.

FWIW although this article says many had oc48s by early 90s I can tell you that wasn't a thing till much later. The fact that I have a FTTH node at home that's faster than that today a severe fraction of the cost, and consumer 2.5g switches below $200 just blows my mind. The planning required during migrations alone for all failivers required calculations back then and I can unplug a cat6 today without sweating

FWIW, OC48 was commonplace in telco rings when I got into the business in 1996, we installed a crapload of Fujitsu FLM-2400 hardware, but mostly as transport for DS3's and the occasional STS-3 or STS-12. We certainly didn't have customers ordering whole OC48's for themselves!

But perhaps the article is blurring the notion and counting it as an OC48 if that's what was entering the building, even if a given customer only leased an OC-3 worth of it and the rest just passed through. That was certainly common, and some customers themselves were confused about the notion, so I could see the details being handwaved here as well.

As another data point, I worked on what I'm told was the first OC192 ring in Michigan, in what I believe was 1999, which included a brand new building that MCI had just constructed behind the old train station. (Fiber often follows railroads since they're straight-line easements connecting population centers.) That was the first time I encountered the notion of polarization mode dispersion compensation, which had been implemented as textbook-sized modules that slotted into the node. I was told that each module contained a bunch of fiber and some micro-actuators to stress it and try to warp the fiber into applying a complementary amount of PMD to what had happened in the OSP, restoring the pulse shape.

The Nortel TransportNode OC-192 hardware itself occupied a full rack just to break the OC192 down into OC48s, and then there were two more racks of OC48 hardware (each a half-rack) to handle customer-rate circuits. (A year or two later, when the Cerent 454 condensed a full OC48 terminal into an 8U or 6U chassis, everything changed. Cisco rapidly gobbled them up and stuck "15454" labels on them, and the rest is history.)

It likewise blows my mind that what was a whole rack of equipment then, today fits in an SFP+ that I can conceal in my palm, and a fraction of an ASIC to drive it.

Author here. Agree based on looking at other sources, my dating on OC-48 deployment seems to be off by ~a decade (it would be more like late 1990s/early 2000s, e.g. [0] says 1999 for a very early use). I sourced this from Fred Goldstein, The Great Telecom Meltdown, but I don't have the book handy to double-check whether I misread something. It may be confusion over just where in the network OC-48 was being used.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_high-speed_Backbone_Netwo...

For the invention and early history of the ARPAnet and Internet I highly recommend Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet:

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

Inventing the Internet is also pretty good:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/753865.Inventing_the_Int...

> Twenty five years ago, it didn't exist. Today, twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net.

As someone who didn't get to experience the early days of the Internet, this seemed to me as if the book was published sometime around 2000-2005. 1996! I didn't expect that many people using and enjoying the Internet so early on.

it's easy to be oblivious to the fact that the software (and "tech") industry exist for almost a century.

I have a book regarding the versatility of the Vacuum tube. It opens with a statement proclaiming the versatility of the device and its usefulness will spread to the 4 corners of the world.

I can't tell if that statement is self aware.

I also have a farming technology magazine with an article describing how the marvelous hot new Hollerith Tabulating machine had just completed the 1900 census. It was a typical tech article except it was documenting an event that happened 3 years prior. That was how slow the world was. The 1880 census took 8 years to complete. Hollerith developed a punch card process for the 1890 which was an improvement and Hollerith added an auto tabulator and feeder for the machine that performed the 1900 census.

The big question it raises for me is how slow can the modern world be?

For about 18 months after WWSUL was published, you couldn't meet with a BBN sales rep without getting a copy pushed into your hands.

My favorite book on this topic is The Dream Machine which tells how Licklider believed in the "Intergalactic Network" and then worked through all the bureaucracy to make it a reality.

* https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-M-Mitchell-Waldrop/dp/1...

Thanks for sharing this, OP. I enjoyed The Switch by the same author so I just bought the kindle version of this. For those that didn’t see the chapters of McDonald’s earlier book posted serially here, it is a sort of pre-history of the computer focusing on electromechanical switches in the phone network.

I've found some of History of Networking podcast very interesting. What it lacks in production it more than makes up for in insight. I wish more podcasts were like this.

https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/history-of-networking/2391...

I'm only halfway through this collection of essays. I wasn't aware of the continuity of the "networking" history from telegraph to telephone to internetworking.

I wonder if this would have happened without the intervention of federal regulators. Maybe federal regulation helped the process, maybe it impeded it.

Also, the articles make a lot of the role of individual technicians, advocates and entrepreneurs. I wonder whether the process would have developed in much the same way if those individuals hadn't existed. I.e., was the process driven by historical forces, or by "great men"?

Out of curiosity, did you have a notion of how those various sorts of networks were related or not-related, or was it just a hazy blank spot you never thought about?

I'm super curious about this, having grown up in the telephone network, and I keep running into people with interesting misconceptions. (The one that comes first to mind, and which I see quite a bit lately, is that modems and "the internet" were the same thing; people don't realize standalone computers could just call each other directly.)

A remark that struck me:

"Income tax returns will be automatically prepared on the basis of continuous, cumulative annual records of income, deductions, contributions and expenses."

~ John McCarthy, 1966

Apparently that still doesn't work.

For a brief time 84/5 if you had a WHOIS record, you could buy a paper copy of the internet white pages. I was quite annoyed when they ditched all the records later on in the 90s. I was GM85.

Here is a NASA poster that documents the Program Support Communication Network.

https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0YGf693ZGEIAMx

The poster documents the backbone, the services offered, and the Network Gateway architecture.

An astounding amount of rare details which ends pretty much when the net began!! Will enjoy digging in,thanks!

My two cents: I enjoyed reading Johnny Ryan's A History of the Internet and the Digital Future

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