legacy /8

Sat Apr 3 16:16:56 UTC 2010

On Apr 3, 2010, at 1:03 AM, Jeroen van Aart wrote:

> Owen DeLong wrote:
>> It was thought that we would not have nearly so many people connected to the internet.  It was expected that most things connecting to the internet would be minicomputers and mainframes.
> 
> It took some visionary and creative thinking to "come up" with the internet. But given such a train of thought the idea of everyone being connected isn't such a wild idea. I can imagine it'd be almost a given.
> 
You need a better view backwards in time to contextualize this.

The vision of everyone being connected was there.  Everyone would have access to one or more of the
approximately 5 million or so minicomputers and mainframes that was expected to be connected to
the internet. It was based on 56kbit lines and the primary applications were email, ftp, and telnet.
(I believe in that order, too). IRC was added several years later.

> Although if I get the time frame right in those days you had 2 camps, those (ibm, dec...) who believed that there was no need for home computers and you only needed a few (hundred?) thousand big mainframes and minicomputers and those (commodore, apple...) who believed (rightfully so) there was going to be a big future and demand for home computers.
> 
I believe the IPv4 classful addressing scheme (which some have pointed out was the second IPv4 addressing
scheme, I wasn't involved early enough for the first, so didn't remember it) predates commodore, apple, etc.

> So I guess depending on what "camp" you were in, it's not that strange to not envision all these household computers being interconnected.
> 
At the time, connecting was very expensive.  Getting one of the DS-0 circuits required in order to get on to the
backbone was more than $500/month in most locations.

Owen