Internet @ 40

[saahne]

The first two nodes of what was to become the Internet were connected on October 29, 1969. See Arpanet

Video featuring the two people who made the first connection and all the gear that was used.

[growbag]

Wow! That is the most boring video clip I've ever seen .

"....this is the box, I flicked the switches when I had to." lol

[techwiz03]

Originally Posted by saahne

The first two nodes of what was to become the Internet were connected on October 29, 1969. See Arpanet

Video featuring the two people who made the first connection and all the gear that was used.

Isn't history wonderful ... the efforts of us early pioneers seldom get the recognition. As I viewed, it reminded me of how far we have come. That pre-historic (cough) modem pool was exactly how communication between computers was done! Everything was through manual state switches. By the 1970's USARTS like the 8251 (universal asynchronous receiver transmitter chip) had replaced these big cumbersome machines of manual switches with simplistic chips powered by software controlling the former manual operations. Some may refer to such historical videos as being boring just as I thought history was boring BUT where would we be now.
To continue, during the later '70's and early '80's modem pools (banks of modems often (16 to 64)) made possible economic access to many networked machines. Unix, Xenix, DOS machines running Novell netware used these modem pools for Wide area Networks (WANs).
Our early Internet would not have been possible without the modem pools interconnecting across the distances.

But today ... some just complain about how hard it is to configure their single wireless network. A task that would have been infinitely harder had someone not thanklessly pioneered the inroads into the tedious task of making just two machines talk to one another over distances.

We have wireless lans now to replace the antiquated wired modems and in the future (not too distant) we will have Slans (satellite based lans) and Olans (Optical Lans) which we have already seen the precursor in bluetooth and infra-red.

If your interested, with wlans we are talking about 12GB or so maximum throughput in a single channel, now consider 500GB per channel by 30 channel Slan from a PC! or 1.5TB per channel by 400 to 500 channels Olan from a PC! and all because some old inovator took the time to flip some switches to make it possible.

[growbag]

I wasn't knocking or playing down the achievement, but the video itself. I expected more of a technical report.

It seemed as though the 2 blokes were surprised that they were actually being interviewed!

I used to use an IBM teletype machine to communicate with other education centres in England many many years ago and save my programmes on binary punch tape, so I understand the significance of their achievement.

Oh how I miss the sound of the "carriage return, del, del" sequence .