A map of the entire internet as of May 1973 • Hacker News Board

Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973

#31

Post by lb1lf » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 6:51 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #29

lb1lf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...being a bit of a pedant (and Norwegian!) I'd like to point out that the first international link was precisely the one to NORSAR at Kjeller; the link over the North Sea to UCL was the second. :) (Kjeller/NORSAR was hooked up in June 1973 using a blistering fast 9.6kbps link, if memory serves)

If Norway indeed had the first endpoint, they surely would have opted to use Norsk Data computers rather than PDPs at the time, including coding up an IP ^H^H^H NCP stack for the SINTRAN OS (or its predecessor).

From the looks of it, the first NORSAR computers hooked up on a permanent basis were two IBM mainframes.

Also, the Norwegian Defense Research Institute (FFI) utilized a teletype against the TIP. (Source: A couple of Norwegian-language webpages.)

Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973

#32

Post by EvanAnderson » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 7:05 PM UTC

mamadrood wrote: post #28

sixothree wrote: post #27

What do IMP and TIP stand for here?

IMP must be a Interface Message Processor [1], an Arpanet equivalent to our routers. And TIP must be Terminal Interface Processor [2], not really sure of their usage but basically they would allow remote sessions on the network, my guess is that they were some early forms of modern modems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip

I went down this rabbit hole this morning myself. There's a nice document at Bitsavers (http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/bbn/imp/BBN1822_Jan1976.pdf) that has details about the two different IMP models, and the TIP and Pluribus IMP (an interesting multiprocessor IMP that I'd never heard about prior to today).

The TIP was the "Terminal IMP" (per the linked document) that provided connections to 64 terminals directly to the network through the IMP (with no intervening host).

Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973

#33

Post by russellbeattie » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

Wikipedia has a similar image from 1977 on the PDP-10 page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10

Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973

#34

Post by user837387 » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #13

camiller wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's also interesting to note that the DC area is the #2 (arguably tied with Boston) given how relatively inconsequential that community is now to what we'd consider the tech sector." Remember, back then it was ARPAnet. ARPA was/is the Defense Departments Advanced Research Projects Agency. If you think the defence department then or now as not part of the tech sector you would be underestimating the investment in te…

But of course. California's nascent technology industry was also created by Federal dollars, just look at Ames, Rand, etc, on the left side of the map. The interesting question I was pondering is why the transition from public to private/consumer sector happened in one place but not nearly so much in the other.

I think at a certain point the question becomes very similar as asking why you got a 6 in a dice roll instead of a 3. You can definitely explain it using Newtonian physics but at a high enough level I'm not sure it really matters.

Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973

#35

Post by jtchang » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

It's kind of amazing how fast the internet evolved. Did the original people who were hooking these boxes up ever imagine what it was eventually going to be?

Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973

#36

Post by rootbear » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 7:55 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #12

Which modern protocols even existed back then? IP? TCP? FTP?

As noted in other replies, the ARPANET predates IP and TCP. Although some Internet applications, like Telnet and FTP, were first implemented on the ARPANET, I don't consider it to be the Internet in any meaningful way. The Internet was conceived as a network of networks, which directly affected the design of TCP/IP. Thus, the Internet proper began with the transition to IP. ARPANET was a test bed, to see if packet switched networking would actually work. It did. So well, in fact, that the ARPANET was used for actual work, until it became obvious that something better was needed to replace it. That replacement is the modern Internet.

I enjoyed this book about the development of the ARPANET: https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832...

Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973

#37

Post by _jomo » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 7:58 PM UTC

A very similar map from 1972 is included in RFC432: [PDF] https://tools.ietf.org/pdf/rfc432.pdf

Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973

#38

Post by rootbear » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 7:58 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #10

One interesting aside is you can see from that even this early in the evolution of what's still a very sparse network, how dense the resources are in California, presaging the eventual concentration of the "internet business" there. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions and such. It's also interesting to note that the DC area is the #2 (arguably tied with Boston) given how relatively inconsequential that communi…

Several of my professors at the University of Maryland, in the late 70s, had connections to the institutions that had IMPs, like NBS (now NIST), the Pentagon, Mitre, etc. If you asked nicely, they would give you the dialup numbers for the IMP/TIP so you could play on the ARPANET. I had an account at MIT-AI that I accessed that way.

Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973

#39

Post by workergnome » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 8:06 PM UTC

beardicus wrote: post #25

workergnome wrote: post #18

Hi there—original tweeter here. Some context for the picture—my father, Paul, was the business manager for the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon at the time, and is a fabulous record-keeper, so he kept all sorts of interesting things from that era. He was also one of the founders of Three Rivers Computer as well as PERQ, which were tech transfer spin-outs from the CS dept in the seventies.

Thank you for posting this, and engaging here on HN. Do you think this collection of interesting things would be a good candidate for digitizing and getting up on the Internet Archive?

Quite possibly—most likely the PERQ and Three Rivers Computer stuff is the hardest to find, though I don't know how much of it is already out there.

Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973

#40

Post by workergnome » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 8:18 PM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #8

Make a high quality scan and blow it up so we can all print out our very own internet map!

No problem: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2efes525sd9q5yg/1973%20ARPAnet%20P...

(I'm assuming that doing this doesn't get my dropbox account suspended for some reason...)