Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that

Sun Feb 16 21:25:54 UTC 2020

Ok it's Sunday...

The first time I got on the internet was around 1977.

A friend dropped by the lab I worked in at Harvard and wondered if I
had an MIT ITS account and I said no wasn't even sure what it was
other than a time sharing system at MIT.

So we had a modem and dumb terminal and dialed-in and one could create
an account from the login prompt which I guess today seems mundane but
really was totally unintuitive, getting logins on time shared systems
generally required paper work and proof one should have access.

And I became BARRYS at MIT-AI (no stinkin' dots back then.)

He showed me some ARPAnet things and I was suitably amazed and
explored more from home where I had my own dumb tty and modem.

TBH I didn't really have much use for it at the time other than
joining mailing lists or similar.

Occasionally if someone was in the room I'd say "watch this!" and get
to a login prompt at Stanford or UCL (London.) They were usually
impressed.

I did use the local area network to access MIT-MC to use MacSyma (a
symbolic math package) which I did use in my work.

I was fairly amazed that my files were visible on either machine.

etc etc etc.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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