And it's been down hill ever since.
30 years ago, at flip of a switch, the internet as we know it WAS BORN
Thirty years ago this week the modern internet became operational as the US military flipped the switch on TCP/IP, but the move to the protocol stack was nearly killed at birth. The deadline was 1 January, 1983: after this, any of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network's (ARPANET) 400 hosts that were still clinging to …
-
-
Thursday 3rd January 2013 12:08 GMT the-it-slayer
That depends...
On how you view it. IPv4 has been well used and now becoming abused with no spare allocations of addresses left. NAT again saved it's bacon in the last 20 years. IPv6 should save the internet from crashing down on its head, but the adoption is just too slow and won't speed up until companies/ISPs get to a crunch point where the current infrastructure becomes untenable.
Quack!
-
-
-
Thursday 3rd January 2013 17:19 GMT asdf
well because
Networking can be damn complicated which is why competent specialists are worth the big bucks. No expert myself but I can tell you at least on my home router Kahn, Nagel, and Van Jacobson's codel (in form of fq_codel) absolutely destroys pfifo_fast under any kind of load. pfifo_fast should have died years ago or at least not be the linux default which it still is (TOS byte really, what is is this 1997?). Whats sad is it took us so long to get such a wonderfully simple (from end users view) and effective algorithm. What is also pathetic is now little money and expertise are actually being put into TCP/IP technology today. Where are Cisco and all the other big boys (Google has helped some but not enough) to help fight the bufferbloat crises? Its largely being tackled by a small number of very smart and very dedicated hobbyists who really could use some support.
-
-
-
This post has been deleted by its author
-
-
Thursday 3rd January 2013 21:37 GMT jake
@corestore
Yep. Earlier, even, if you were in the wrong place & time :-)
My first ARPA connection was a dumb terminal in my dorm in 1975ish. At home, I had a PDP-11 based Heath H11A personal computer that I dialed into the ARPANET with in late 1979. Following that, I had an always connected, somewhat larger BSD based DEC system under Bryant street in Palo Alto in early 1982, controlled from home by the H11A. Later, in 1985, I had an AT&T PC7300 "UnixPC" at home, permanently connected to the DEC box which was configured as what we would now call a stateful firewall.
The dorm in question was at Berkeley, the home was in Palo Alto's Johnson Park neighborhood, a couple city blocks from the Bryant Street CO ... I was young, naive, and doing research into networking and OS design for a couple of my first degrees at the time ...
Last time I was in Palo Alto (Thanksgiving), the ten-pair solid core bell wire that I pulled between home & the CO in 1982 for permanent BARRNet access was still in place, as was the two pair line I pulled in 1985 for the upcoming T1 capability into NSFNet via BARRNet. Using a TDR from my end, a small 5x8 foot closet under Bryant Street (99 year lease, $1/yr, I have my own electricity meter, they provide HVAC, halon, etc), indicates that the complete run is actually still there. Seems they can't generate a remove order for wire that doesn't exist in the system ;-) Amazing what you can get away with in a reflective vest, hard hat, a white van full of well used linesman's tools, and an official looking clipboard ...
-
-
-
-
Friday 4th January 2013 02:54 GMT jake
Re: Actually...
That's just Usenet, and it was September of 1993, not March of 1994. AOL had email, ftp and other Internet services earlier than that. Not much earlier, but earlier. Search on "Eternal September" for more.
The Internet as we know it was born when the Delphi BBS managed to allow USAian consumer access to TheIinternet[tm] (whatever that is) in early-mid 1992. I can't remember the exact date. Everybody blames AOL, but it was Delphi that started consumer Internet use. The folks who ran BIX are still kicking themselves for not following suit post-haste. I could tell you how I know that, but then I'd have to kill you ;-)
-
Thursday 3rd January 2013 12:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Its the Internet, but not as we know it...
I think the story headline holds true for most El Reg readers but unfortunately don't think it holds true for the "Internet masses".
For me the Internet "essence" (to give it a name) has always been the fascination for that "awesome global network". And all CLI mind you. In the beginning it was using telnet to gain access to "digital cities" which were somewhat fun. Mostly Gopher based stuff, but still..
Later it was using Windows' netsock and Netscape (the other alternative 'Mosaic' wasn't that much fun). For me all using Win/OS2 and later (when I finally understood more about the way it worked) I even got OS/2 online. That was really nice.
But for me the real fun started when I finally got a good grasp of this "Unix" thing; I got sent out to a Sun Solaris course (which was the first Unix environment I fully learned, understood and grasped) and it didn't take me long to figure out that "Internet == Unix".
So when I started using Linux (ironically I only started using it to keep my Solaris knowledge fresh, man, did that take a change!) I also soon started messing with Linux to get my Internet access going at home. And that's where the real fun began.
For my parents the Internet started when I used to spent hours in the evening online (all using dial-up) but because I was using Linux I simply "shared" my connection with them as well. That was nice!
And then eventually we got ADSL, I "hacked" the modem / router to do bridging so that it wasn't the modem but my Linux box which would get the public IP address, that eventually led to hosting some websites on my own PC, setting up a FreeS/WAN IP/SEC network with some of my IRC friends (Epic / Splitfire script FTW for me). That led to learning how DNS /really/ worked (root zones) and all of a sudden I could wake up on a nice Saturday morning, get an e-mail telling me about this new cool thing called "irssi" and would simply go to (iirc, its been years): 10.2.1.1 which put me on a US Linux box hosted by a good friend of mine :-)
I honestly don't remember the domain names we came up with. Something ending in ".irc" that's for sure 8-)
"If we have this vpn thing, why not try setup a tunnel to get lan data across? You know; GRE packets or some other global unused protocol"
Some friends even routed their netbios data over it (I didn't use Windows at all back then) so they could simply copy/paste stuff to each other.
That is Internet for me. But for the common masses? I don't think so...
And can you really blame them? Back then we hacked Linux to copy/paste our X509 keys, passwords, etc. all to setup the VPN. Nowadays I have a DrayTek modem/router on both my end as well as my parents end (both online using cable) and setting up the VPN only requires a few mouse clicks and some common understanding of what you're doing.
Opening up Netbios used to be some iptables hacking now its merely enabling an option.
How many people use Linux to really "hack" and setup a cool global network of their own using the Internet? Without using some kind of wizard I mean ;-)
-
Thursday 3rd January 2013 15:08 GMT rictay
We invent what we need
"...without TCP/IP we wouldn’t have the internet as we know it..." Not true. I was working in the computer/telecomms industries at the time (1980s) and there was a big effort in "convergence" of the two technologies. Also a big drive towards OSI - "Open Systems Interconnectivity" where computers of differing manufacturers could 'talk' with one another. The Internet was in the very air we breathed, and if we didn't have TCP/IP then somebody else would have invented TCP/IP instead - we invent what we need.
-
Thursday 3rd January 2013 18:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: We invent what we need
" Also a big drive towards OSI - "Open Systems Interconnectivity" where computers of differing manufacturers could 'talk' with one another."
In the late 1980s an OSI technical sub-committee meeting of the Big Twelve started by defining its mission of proving "inter-operability". We came up with - "the ability for computers to communicate successfully ...and do useful work". Then the committee chairwoman told us that another OSI committee was also debating the definition - and after 18 months were still no closer to a conclusion.
In recent years whenever TCP-IP connections closed in an ambiguous way it was always a reminder that OSI Transport had been much better at saying "what", "who" and "why".
One rarely hears Jack Houldsworth's pioneering name mentioned these days.
-
Thursday 3rd January 2013 16:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Jacobson devised a congestion-avoidance algorithm to lower a computer's network data transfer speed and settle on a stable but slower connection rather than blindly flooding the network with packets."
Best of luck trying to do that today, 4 years in court arguing the MS, Apple, Google, etc over who owns which bit of what part of which stack.
It's was less "can do" back then and more "will do" in the good old days!
-
Thursday 3rd January 2013 17:13 GMT bed
Here in the UK...
Here in the UK, academia had also being playing with networks in the 1980s with the Joint Academic Network (JANET) using X.25 telecom links and a set of computer network protocols called “Coloured Books”. The name originated with each protocol being identified by the colour of the cover of its specification document. Confusingly, perhaps, the JANET naming convention was, then, the reverse of the Internet; uk.ac.university, for example. TCP/IP and Internet naming conventions started to be adopted in the late 1980, requiring various gateways, and was fully adopted after 1992. The joys of a 64K kilostream link connection to JANET and the Internet. The innocence; no Access Control Lists on routers, telnet and ftp into anything from anywhere until the script kiddies came along and made network security a career.