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

Mon Feb 17 17:38:52 UTC 2020

I was a student worker at a computer lab at USC in the 70s and a buddy 
had a system operator job at ISI in Marina Del Rey.  One day he 
connected to his office from my lab via a 300baud acoustic modem and 
then got on the ARPA-NET.  From there he connected to a system called 
ATLAS in the UK.  I had no idea what to do at the prompt so I typed

 > ?

to get list of commands.  My global eyes were opened when the response was

Pardon?

instead of the usual rude or cryptic error message that I was used to. 
There was a big world out there and we were definitely not in Kansas 
anymore!

Gene

On 2/16/20 1:25 PM, bzs at theworld.com wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

-- 
Gene LeDuc                 | A ship in port is safe, but that's not
Technology Security        | what ships are built for.
San Diego State University |   --Adm. Grace Hopper, USN