WebbyFootprints

What are the roots of the Internet? Not e-commerce or spam, but rather three simple collaborative services:

• correspondence: human-to-human email and bulletin boards ("mail", "readnews", etc.)
• data sharing: retrieval from and contribution to archives ("ftp", etc.)
• tool sharing: remote login to computational resources ("telnet", etc.)

Some of the above is illustrated by ^z's checkered history on parts of the international network now loosely known as the Web. In brief:

• ~1976-79 --- on the ARPANET (aka DDN = "Defense Data Network"), 300 baud dial-in from the Caltech physics department via a local Terminal Access Controller (a "TAC", e.g. USC's Information Sciences Institute) and then through "telnet" connections to MIT-MC, the "Macsyma Consortium" machine, on which ^z derived and checked messy equations in his thesis (see SpinningSources, 11 April 2000); also faster dedicated connections from Caltech to UC Berkeley, to run FORTRAN programs on a then-supercomputer CDC-7600 in a vain attempt to simulate nucleosynthesis in stars with neutron-star cores (see SoftOutsideCrunchyCenter, 1 May 2000)
• ~1982-87 --- via the kindness of MITRE Corporation (mitre.org), dial-in access to the Internet and email services, mainly for correspondence with colleagues in academia, industry, and government labs (which led to an encounter with the "Hannover Hacker" and then Cliff Stoll, to be told at another time!)
• ~1984-92 --- via the kindness of the David Taylor Research Center (oasys.dt.navy.mil), email and other resources for software development and remote database access
• ~1985-90 --- less-than-glorious experiences with Prodigy, Compuserve, and America On Line (as it was then known, a local and rather shaky service) each of which was a closed stand-alone mini-universe
• ~1985-93 --- extremely productive work on the "Twilight Clone", a FIDOnet node and one of the largest Macintosh-oriented bulletin board systems on the East Coast (the Clone was run from Paul Heller's basement, and evolved into his.com)
• ~1992-98 --- alumni.caltech.edu, which thanks to the Caltech Alumni Association offered email, programming facilities, and Web server space on a fine succession of machines. Here were hosted ^z's first Web pages ... including most notably the Shakespeare Stack Archive and the "Best of" Gibbon's Decline and Fall; alas, a hacker infestation forced the system off the 'Net for some months, and when it eventually returned the new security procedures for access made it too difficult to use remotely
• ~1998-now --- Tripod, an early free (advertiser-supported) Web hosting service, where ^z placed his pages for lack of a better solution when alumni.caltech.edu became inaccessible ... and, all things considered, Tripod has been one of the more satisfactory of the free services, though it lacks many of the advanced features which one might wish for in an Internet host (and it of necessity has all those obnoxious ads!)
• ~1999-now --- his.com at Heller Information Services, where the ^zhurnal project has been happily perking along for almost two years now ... wonderful service from real human beings --- thanks, Paul!
• Wednesday, February 21, 2001 at 19:36:16 (EST) = Datetag20010221

TopicPersonalHistory

(correlates: SlowThyself, CodeOfTheHaggler, HonestVotingMachines, ...)