I guess the author isn't aware of the magazine's own role in the narratives about the Internet. Wired giveth and taketh away.
Or in BBSes: The WELL.
The Internet origin story you know is wrong
51–58 of 58 posts
Re: The Internet origin story you know is wrong
#52For a vastly better take on the origin story of the Internet, based on the work of someone who was there at the time, documenting it at the time, I'd recommend without reservation John Quarterman's The Matrix.
First published in 1990, just as the WWW was emerging (and failing to make the book), it was revised in 1997 (the link I'm giving here). The earlier book does discuss extensive sets of networks of which ARPANET, formally decomisssioned in 1990 after spawning the then-nascent Internet, was only one instance.
The introduction includes earily prescient discussion of the role early computer networks played in the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre of 1989.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/matrix-computer-networks-and-...
Re: The Internet origin story you know is wrong
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a brief period where BBSs also offered various gateway services into the Internet a long with the normal BBS services like doors. I received my first ever email address from a huge local BBS back in the early early 90s by paying a token fee every month. I had nobody I knew with email addresses until a few years later so it was kind of pointless, but it did work. On a larger scale, when AOL started offering…
Big networks were gated in and out of the Internet, such as UUCP and BITNET. (UUCP for Unix systems, BITNET for IBM mainframes.) This had interesting effects on email addresses: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/the_hideous_name/ Make sense of this one: research!ucbvax!@cmu-cs-pt.arpa:@CMU-ITC-LINUS:dave%CMU-ITC-LINUS@CMU-CS-PT Sourceforge still has Ifmail, an Internet to Fidonet email gateway: http://ifmail.sourceforge…
That's really interesting! Just to be clear in my post I'm referring to bog standard email addresses not fidonet...which was also very common at the time.
I'm not aware of any fidonet internet bridges during that time period but I suppose their could have been. AFAIK fido relays all occurred via POTS sync calls between BBSs
Re: The Internet origin story you know is wrong
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't most of these tabloid-tier rags?
That is absolutely insulting—to procrastinating college kids. Most modern journalism feels like it was scraped five minutes ahead of time from another site and barely changed.
I've met their chief editor and he seemed pretty decent, but this is surprisingly low effort writing.
Re: The Internet origin story you know is wrong
#55Kind of depends on what we mean when we use the word "Internet". If we mean internet as a social/economic revolution, then sure, BBSs were relevant. If we mean Internet as a set of protocols, software that implements them, and hardware to run them on, then I don't see that BBSs had a lot of relevance (though they used sliding window protocols for file transfer such as ZMODEM/YMODEM).
There was a brief period where BBSs also offered various gateway services into the Internet a long with the normal BBS services like doors. I received my first ever email address from a huge local BBS back in the early early 90s by paying a token fee every month. I had nobody I knew with email addresses until a few years later so it was kind of pointless, but it did work. On a larger scale, when AOL started offering…
[deleted]
Re: The Internet origin story you know is wrong
#56Quoted post unavailable.
Oooh cool, time to paste the link again. https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt Al Gore and the Internet: By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf "Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."
Anyone else miss plain text content formatted like this?
Re: The Internet origin story you know is wrong
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oooh cool, time to paste the link again. https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt Al Gore and the Internet: By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf "Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."
Anyone else miss plain text content formatted like this?
Wait, you didn't get the 120MB of CSS and JS to show that? Hmm.