The ARPANet Completion Report is Fascinating; it includes maps of the US with the ARPANet nodes indicated as the network grew. As well as additional logical diagrams of the network.
http://walden-family.com/bbn/arpanet-completion-report.pdf
A map of the entire internet as of May 1973
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Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973
#42Does anyone know what some of the non-obvious locations are? I'm not sure what RADC, ETAC, and a few of the others are.
Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
You're probably right. Btw I didn't want to point out flaws in what you said, but b/c I have fond memories of ND. Out of boredom on a gig a couple years ago I even did a clone of the sintran shell, or rather its unique trie-like command completion over hyphens.
Since you seem interested in norwegian IT history, around 1988 ND had a dept in Kiel/North Germany where I did an apprenticeship and then some freelance work. They did Pascal compilers in cooperation with CAU (Kiel Uni) there, and a commercial system for public libraries.
Very recently, I heard ND also provided computers for controlling parts of the legacy particle accelerators at DESY Hamburg (which is about 3mins from my place).
Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
bitsavers.org are probably the best bet to have a chat with about this sort of stuff.
Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973
#45Does anyone know what some of the non-obvious locations are? I'm not sure what RADC, ETAC, and a few of the others are.
RADC was Rome Air Development Center (from memory at the time; I got on the network in the fall of '72 as a frosh at HARV-10), a big funder of ARPA-related research.
I'm pretty sure RADC were the funding sources for much of the CS research going on at the Harvard CRCT [Center for Research in Computing Technology] in those days. My advisor, Tom Cheatham (RIP), was the head of the CRCT and the PI for many of the funded research programs. (Great man.)
All from memory, the less obvious names:
MIT: LCS, AI, Arch. Machine group, Multics, etc.
Harvard: CRCT with a few machines (PDP-10, -1, etc.)
BBN: contractor that developed the original ARPANET technology
Aberdeen and Belvoir: I believe Army testing grounds
NBS: National Bureau of Standards
MITRE (Corp)
Lincoln (Labs)
LBL (Lawrence Berkeley Labs)
Xerox (MAXC was PARC's home-made PDP-10 clone)
SDC (Software Dev Corp)
We had fun back in the "open days" when most systems had open guest accounts, telnetting from machine to machine to see how many "miles" we could go before the whole thing broke down.
(Fun factoid: back in the early days of email, the mail delivery mechanism was anonymous FTP to append to your recipient's mailbox file.)
Eventually (I'm vaguely remembering by 1973-74) there were enough troubles with vandals that all the open accounts were turned off. (I remember watching a TTY where Harv-10 was logging all typing from guest users, see what mischief they were up to.)
"Those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end..."
Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973
#46Make 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...)
Very nice! This'll look great hung over the microcomputer I've scavanged and fixed up (and hopefully one day my collection of microcomputers I will have scavanged and fixed up).
Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973
#47Which modern protocols even existed back then? IP? TCP? FTP?
NCP, the Network Control Program, was the predecessor of TCP/IP. [1] Host addresses were only 8 bits (zero was reserved), so there could only be up to 255 hosts on the ARPANET. NCP was a simplex protocol, not full duplex like TCP/IP, so each port=>port connection transmitted data in only one direction, and applications would use an even/odd pair of ports for two-way communication. The parity of the ports at each end…
> The parity of the ports at each end of the connection was required to be different: you couldn't connect an even port to another even port, or an odd port to another odd port. "Homosocketuality" was strictly forbidden by internet protocols! NCP's mandatory "heterosocketuality" was called the "Anita Bryant feature". [2]
> ...
> [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422813
Well, that's a whole distasteful part of computer history I was blissfully unaware of before now. As someone fairly young (in my early 20s), it's sometimes hard to remember that things like this are very recent history, so I guess it helps to have some perspective every now and then.
Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
You're probably right. Btw I didn't want to point out flaws in what you said, but b/c I have fond memories of ND. Out of boredom on a gig a couple years ago I even did a clone of the sintran shell, or rather its unique trie-like command completion over hyphens. Since you seem interested in norwegian IT history, around 1988 ND had a dept in Kiel/North Germany where I did an apprenticeship and then some freelance work.…
Thank you; that is most interesting. I haven't had much hands-on experience with ND equipment, only significant exposure I've had to Norwegian-ish computer efforts were working on a Tiki 100 for a couple of years - a mid-eighties Z80 box running a CP/M clone OS, cleverly enough called KP/M (Later renamed to Tiko.) Quite a different beast from the ND minis!
It would make sense that ND had deliveries to DESY - when I was in university (2000-ish), the CS department still had lots of posters on display showing ND equipment installed at CERN; apparently, someone knew someone who knew someone who needed a real-time setup for particle accelerators - and a couple of racks of NORDs running SINTRAN fit the bill nicely.
By the way, the most exotic ND product I've heard of was a 28-bit mini made to circumvent COCOM rules - I can only guess that it specifically forbade export of 32-bit machines to COCOM countries. So, what does an enterprising supplier do? Neuter a 32-bit machine into 28-bit and sell them like hotcakes... :) (I'll have to look that one up one day; I only heard of it over beers (multiple!) at a faculty Christmas party fifteen years ago.)
Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973
#49Hi 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!
Re: A map of the entire internet as of May 1973
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're probably right. Btw I didn't want to point out flaws in what you said, but b/c I have fond memories of ND. Out of boredom on a gig a couple years ago I even did a clone of the sintran shell, or rather its unique trie-like command completion over hyphens. Since you seem interested in norwegian IT history, around 1988 ND had a dept in Kiel/North Germany where I did an apprenticeship and then some freelance work.…
Thank you; that is most interesting. I haven't had much hands-on experience with ND equipment, only significant exposure I've had to Norwegian-ish computer efforts were working on a Tiki 100 for a couple of years - a mid-eighties Z80 box running a CP/M clone OS, cleverly enough called KP/M (Later renamed to Tiko.) Quite a different beast from the ND minis! It would make sense that ND had deliveries to DESY - when I w…
From the support staff at the Kiel facility I heard that to upgrade from a 500 series to a 5000 series system, all they had to do was bring a pair of pliers and cut of a wire on the board (and install a new OS). They were having trouble explaining this to customers ...
IBM, around 1990 at the latest, also had their AS/400 (now iSeries) and their RS/6000 (pSeries) machines integrated down to CMOS level.
Sintran was great. It could do a couple tricks that others couldn't, such as having processes being frozen and restarted (you can do essentially the same with Unix cores but Sintran had it as a user-level feature).
What I really liked about Sintran was its command shell. Its system utilities were named like "list-files", "list-print-jobs", and so on. Then you could abbreviate it to just "li-fi" or "l-f" and the shell would pick the right command, provided the abbreviation was unambiguous. This was a great way to discover commands, while also being able to use short forms for quick entry. And it worked better (and more stylish, too) than Unix wildcards on a German keyboard for touch typists since the hyphen character could be entered without Shift.
But around when I worked for ND, they already had a System V port running in the lab and prepared for the demise of Sintran (I was actually tasked to develop an offline entry system running on Xenix, among other things). Also, the compilers department they had in Kiel was actually the "B-Team", in that ND's own language creation was the PLANC programming language, and of course developed by the elks themselves, as we called them. I believe they only originally did develop the compilers in Kiel because its main use was said commercial bibliography system at the same site. Nevertheless, when Sintran was seen less strategic for ND, for a short time the compiler guys in Kiel hoped they could gain importance within ND because they had also a C compiler running.