A collection of bits and pieces of
Internet history.
Focusing somewhat (but not exclusively)
on: (a) the 1980s, when I first started using the Internet,
and: (b) Ireland.
* MGonzNet
* --------------------------------------------------
* help Help
* who Nice VM Who
* scoop The truth!
* get Get the p program for your machine
* p Query VM/SCS printer queues
* p :printer: Query specific printer
* --------------------------------------------------
My first "Web page" in February 1989.
That's
years
ago.
I could have it green on my college computers ...
* MGonzNet
* --------------------------------------------------
* help Help
* who Nice VM Who
* scoop The truth!
* get Get the p program for your machine
* p Query VM/SCS printer queues
* p :printer: Query specific printer
* --------------------------------------------------
.. or orange on my home computer!
Introduction
This is an adjunct to my page
How my program passed the Turing Test
where I describe how I hooked up an AI chatbot called "MGonz"
to BITNET
when I was at UCD in 1989.
These pages
are a bit of an exercise in nostalgia.
They were strange times, on the Net in the '80s.
A whole world was happening, but you could never talk about it with anyone.
In the '80s, we actually used the word
the "Internet" to refer to the machines
that used the TCP/IP protocol,
which were only some of the machines
on what was a vast interconnected network of networks.
In retrospect, the whole thing was what we would now call the "Internet".
More on this:
Some people say BITNET was not the Internet,
because it didn't use IP.
I think that is just being pedantic.
BITNET had people in universities all over the world;
it had world-wide email;
it had real-time, interactive chat, one-to-one or in "Relay" chatrooms
in places like CERN;
it had world-wide remote file archives you could grab files from
by issuing commands;
it had world-wide "Listserv" email discussion lists;
you could query if people were logged on across the world;
it had disconnected "answering machines";
it had email to and from all other networks.
The whole thing (BITNET plus connected networks)
was the embryonic Internet.
The protocol has simply migrated to IP since, that's all.
If BITNET wasn't the Internet,
then neither was Arpanet
before it switched to IP in 1983.
When I was at UCD,
you could send talk messages to BITNET nodes
(including MGonz) from the TCP/IP machines as well,
and when I was working on the TCP/IP machine at UCD, I used to get MGonz
to copy me in on any conversation it was having.
So even in the pedant's sense, MGonz was on the Internet.
In the '80s, this whole world of the embryonic Internet
was invisible to the media, and that was just the way things were.
When in the '90s the media finally started to cover my world, I was amazed,
though I should have known it must happen someday.
I finally put up a page about MGonz
in early 1995.
This adjunct page is a bit more of a description
of this "lost world" of the Net
before it was "discovered".
The Euronet
project is mentioned in
at least 1975,
but was not operational
until 1978 or 1979.
The first demonstration connection
between Irish universities
was
in 1977
between UCD
(George Morgan,
Michael Walsh)
and TCD
(Ahmed Patel).
The first computer network
between Irish universities
was the IUN (Irish Universities Network)
set up in 1979
between UCD
(Dennis Jennings)
and TCD
(Michael Purser,
Ahmed Patel).
The Irish academic network
Heanet dates from 1983.
I think this was initially only between institutions in Ireland.
One date I am not sure of is when was the first link from Ireland
outside the country.
By 1981,
Michael Purser
and
Ahmed Patel
connected from IUN to Euronet in Europe
for performance testing at least
(published in 1981),
and Michael Purser's group did
trial file transfers between Ireland and Denmark
"over, I think, Euronet"
in the early 1980s.
But I am not sure if any of
this yet involved a permanent connection
to the network outside, with permanent international addresses.
EARN (the European section of BITNET) started in 1983.
Dennis Jennings
brought Ireland to EARN,
and became EARN's first President 1983-4.
Though the BITEARN NODES file (see below)
only has IRLEARN joining in Jan 1985.
Dennis Jennings
then went to the US
to play a major role in
the emergence of the worldwide Internet itself.
He was Program Director for Networking at the National Science Foundation
1985-6.
He was responsible for NSFNET, which became the backbone of the Internet.
He was responsible for the decision to use TCP/IP in NSFNET.
IRLEARN at UCD was the first Irish node on BITNET
(linked to the US and Europe)
in Jan 1985,
as shown in the
BITEARN NODES file.
See Irish nodes on BITNET 1985 to 1996
from that file.
Kieran Carrick thought that
IRLEARN
was the first permanent connection outside Ireland,
but also thought it was older than the
BITEARN NODES file says
(though it cannot be older than 1983, when EARN started).
So Ireland was certainly on the "Internet" connected to the rest of the world
by 1985.
If 1985 was the start of it all,
then MGonz ran on the
first Irish machine on the Net.
I think Heanet's first connection to outside Ireland
(to Janet in the UK)
was after Ireland's connection to EARN (i.e. post-1985)
but I am not sure of this.
SIMTEL dates from
at least 1987
(it was originally the SIMTEL20 computer at the White Sands Missile Range,
run by Keith Petersen,
see history
and post)
Kieran Carrick
says
IRLEARN was the first machine to use a
.ie
address.
Its "Internet" address
irlearn.ucd.ie
co-existed with its older BITNET address.
The
irlearn.ucd.ie
address was certainly in use
by Feb 1989.
MGonz ran on the
first machine on
.ie.
I used the Internet in this period mainly by
dialling-in to UCD from home.
At this time, the Internet in Ireland was flat-rate
- 11p for unlimited time on a local phone call.
This was mainly because the telephone company
Telecom Eireann
didn't know it existed.
Back in 1988
I was regularly making 10-15 hour phone calls to chat and email
with people all over the world online
and browse remote file archives.
In 1993
Telecom Eireann changed local call pricing to a charge per 3 minutes,
and the golden era was over.
We used to have flat-rate Internet in Ireland.
Then we lost it.
Then we got it again with broadband.
The original CHATDISC was
by Eric Thomas,
inventor of
LISTSERV.
CHATDISC allowed you have a customised "answer message"
when you received a chat message when you weren't logged on.
I rewrote the script to call a program at that point.
I was one of the first people in the world to put an AI online, in 1989.
Far from promoting MGonz, I wanted to hide it
from the people running UCD's computers,
believing they would not like this kind of thing wasting
the valuable network.
So I had a "blacklist" of users who could not talk to it:
/* Centre people - give standard disc msg
don't let them stumble across MGonzNet
*/
centre = ' adillon adviser annmarie bernie bonnie brianm'
centre = centre || ' carrick cecily deirdre dobeirne ebairead emcgrath'
centre = centre || ' eoin guest1 guest2'
centre = centre || ' harringt helen jacklowe jchester jennings joanc'
centre = centre || ' larry listserv maevem mailmnt mailr2 maint'
centre = centre || ' mallen mbreslin mcgrath mnorris'
centre = centre || ' mokeeffe mokelly molooney moriarty msexton'
centre = centre || ' noreilly odonnel'
centre = centre || ' oneillu pdoyle rosemary sinead tinac tmcgrath'
centre = centre || ' twade t_wade vmaccnt walter walsh'
I customised my own CHATDISC to not only provide access to MGonz,
but also serve up files and provide other services:
Here is my first "Web page" in
February 1989
(i.e. the first time I served files to the world
when I was not logged on):
* MGonzNet
* --------------------------------------------------
* help Help
* who Nice VM Who
* scoop The truth!
* get Get the p program for your machine
* p Query VM/SCS printer queues
* p :printer: Query specific printer
* --------------------------------------------------
Notes:
"who" is a program that you run on the server (like a PHP script).
"scoop" is a document download.
"get" is a program download.
"p" is a program that you run on the server (like a PHP script).
Tim Berners-Lee's very first internal proposal for the Web was in March 1989.
The first Web server in the world went public at CERN in Dec 1990.
I was linking to Yahoo when it was still a
Stanford research project.
I remember having to edit my links to change them from
akebono.stanford.edu
to yahoo.com
Lovely:
Someone manages to connect a 1984
IBM Portable
to the 2009 Internet.
Here they are browsing 2009 Google on a 1984 machine.
Genius:
Someone designs a
1980s style front end
for Google.
It is actually live and works!
Sources yet to be consulted:
The Design of a Real-Time Operating System for a Minicomputer,
Parts 1
and 2,
Dennis Jennings
and
Michael Purser,
in Software Practice and Experience, 1975, 5,
147-167 and 1976, 6, 327-340.
Systems Programming for Data
Communications,
Ahmed Patel
and
Michael Purser,
Software Practice and Experience, 1980,
10, 283-305.
The Performance of a Packet-switched Network - a Study of
Euronet,
Brian Alton,
Ahmed Patel,
Michael Purser
and John Sheehan,
in Proceedings of Performance
of Data Comms. Systems and their Applications
- Conference in Paris 1981
(Editor G. Pujolle), North Holland Publishers, Amsterdam.
The Euronet
Diane Network for Information Retrieval,
Michael Purser,
in Information
Technology Research and Development (1982) 2, 197-216.
Data Comms for
Programmers (book),
Michael Purser,
1986, Addison-Wesley.
Ancient Brain
