The Internet Turns 40, For a Second Time 152
sean_nestor writes with this excerpt from The Register: "Some date the dawn of the net to September 12, 1969, when a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet, the US Department of Defense-funded network that eventually morphed into the modern interwebs. But others — including Professor Leonard Kleinrock, who led that engineering team — peg the birthday to October 29, when the first message was sent between the remote nodes. 'That's the day,' Kleinrock tells The Reg, 'the internet uttered its first words.' ...A 50kbps AT&T pipe connected the UCLA and SRI nodes, and the first message sent was the word 'log' — or at least that was the idea. UCLA would send the 'log' and SRI would respond with 'in.' But after UCLA typed the 'l' and the 'o,' the 'g' caused a memory overflow on the SRI IMP. ... 'So the first message was "Lo," as in "Lo and Behold,"' Kleinrock says. 'We couldn't have asked for a better message — and we didn't plan it.'"
Hello (Score:2)
Kleinrock? (Score:1)
What? Did this guy escape from the Jewish Flintstones? :-)
What happened to Bolt, Baranek and Newmann's team? What about Cerf?
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I wonder if the internet is developing some kind of AI, after all it's a complex network just like the human brain is.
No, it's a complex network completely unlike the human brain is. The world's weather systems are complex networks of air currents, temperature and humidity differentiuals, etc. It, too, is completely unlike a human brain.
A dog's brain is a complex network that is far more like a human brain than anything digital. But I don't see dogs plotting to take over the world, nor do I see the interne
Ping Time? (Score:4, Funny)
I.e. my guess is with a memory overflow after two characters, the network stack wasn't exactly the fastest thing around.
Re:Ping Time? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not the only thing. What about the 110 and 300 bit/sec modems that Bell Telephone provided for data transfers over regular phonelines? They date back to the 1950s.
It's interesting that the first ARPAnet line was no faster than a modern dialup modem (53-56 kbit/s).
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It's interesting that the first ARPAnet line was no faster than a modern dialup modem (53-56 kbit/s).
Well, internet porn was limited to ascii art at the time, so it didn't need to be all that fast.
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It's interesting that the first ARPAnet line was no faster than a modern dialup modem (53-56 kbit/s).
Well, internet porn was limited to ascii art at the time, so it didn't need to be all that fast.
That's such an anachronism. This was four years before the ASCII standard was even published.
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Re:Ping Time? (Score:4, Funny)
If i remember my computing history class correctly (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ping Time? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry, but the original Arpanet did not have ICMP or pings. This was years before the invention of IP.
I am not sure if it even used 8-bit ASCII. Many, many systems of that day were 6-bit ASCII (no lower-case letters) or EBCDIC. A "word" could have been 12, 16, 18, 24, 36, or 60 bits. (There were MANY other lengths including 1 and 29, but these were oddities.) Note that most of those were multiples of 6, so 6-bit ASCII was the more common unless it was an IBM Computer. I suspect that this initial use lacked anything that could be called a "protocol stack", but I was still in high school and thought the Arpanet was there so I could play Zork on the ITS systems at MIT, so I am far from sure.
Now, 40 years later, I'm pretty sure I was right about the reason for the Arpanet.
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>>>thought the Arpanet was there so I could play Zork
ZORK online: Unfortunately this doesn't "fee" right; it should be light blue text on a dark blue background the way I remember. Or pale green on a dark green CRT. (shrug). http://thcnet.net/zork/ [thcnet.net]
You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
> open mailbox
Opening the mailbox reveals:
A leaflet.
> read leaflet
Welcome to Zork! Zork is a game of adventure, danger, and low cu
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plugh
and i guess i should type some to avoid the lameness filter too...
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thought the Arpanet was there so I could play Zork
Ah, the Original Adventure. XYZZY. I think it took me weeks of trying to map out the damn maze of twisty little paths to get by that part. There was that and black box, and the star trek game too ("hunt the klingons" maybe was it's name? or at least that was what everyone called it). So I guess I could say I have been computer gaming for about 30 some odd years, even before home computers. At the time I didn't care why it existed, only that it let me play games. But it was all over when I got my first 300
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I am not sure if it even used 8-bit ASCII
Probably not, given that there is no such thing. There is also no such thing as 6-bit ASCII. ASCII is a 7-bit encoding. There were a few 6-bit encodings. The IBM 1620, for example, used 6-bit bytes (and variable length words) as did a number of IBMs other machines. Later, when 8-bit bytes were common, people used the missing bit to add another 128 characters for things that the Americans didn't think were important.
Also, I'd be quite surprised if you were playing Zork on an ITS. It's more likely tha
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"...the network stack wasn't exactly the fastest thing around."
you want to think that through again?
Oh great... (Score:3, Funny)
Great, I can just imagine all the corny jokes Slashdotters are goin[NO CARRIER]
Re:Oh great... (Score:5, Funny)
Great, I can just imagine all the corny jokes Slashdotters are goin[NO CARRIER]
lo[NO CARRIER]
Ha! Now you'll never know if I was laughing out loud or just correcting you!
Re:Oh great... (Score:5, Interesting)
ATDT5601750
(dialtone)..... dee-doo-bee-boop-da-ba-dee-bee.... skeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee skrooooooo....
CONNECT 1200
.
.
.
Welcome to Slash Dot BBS!
login: commodor
pass: $$$$
command (H for help): E
Welcome to Email. Command (H for help): N
TO: Mobile /end
SUBJ: Huh?
BODY: Hello. Your last message did not come through. All I received was "lo". Was that LOL? Or "lo here come the sheep"? hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. L8r.
command (H for help): S
Message sent. Command (H for help): +++
ATH
.
.
.
*#$!@^(!%!$(&
NO CARRIER
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Oh man I miss... uhh imagined the modem noise in my head. I seriously wish modems sounded like scatman john larkin [youtube.com].
The scatman's ok--but in my book nothing beats the sound of an old USR Sportster connecting at 56k [darkpixel.com]....err..52k...or whatever the heck the feds limited it to.
I'll send a bottle of Guiness to the first person to figure out the phone number my modem dialed...
oh man, I remember my first 9600 baud... (Score:2)
I was like, this is -really- getting fast now!
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4271200 :)
Nice...where do I send the Guiness?
But the question remains, were you elite enough to simply listen to the tones, or did you hold it up to a VoIP phone and look at the Asterisk console output?
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> Nice...where do I send the Guiness?
It'll probably get stolen on its way to Malaysia... ;)
> But the question remains, were you elite enough to simply listen to the tones, or did you hold it up to a VoIP phone and look at the Asterisk console output?
Neither :).
I uploaded the relevant bit to: http://www.dialabc.com/sound/detect/ [dialabc.com]
There's also this: http://www.zeebar.com/tkddt/ [zeebar.com] (but didn't work so well on the sample).
I could probably learn it, but I'm just too lazy to sit down and practice deciphering DTM
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Back in the early 90s, we used to run an update process at night to send data from our site to various customer sites. It used modems to dial up and send the stuff.
At some point, we switched from the cheap 2400 baud modems we had been using, to Telebit Trailblazers. The tones were very different. I came in the next day and found a note from the night manager, who talked about how she liked the new way the "modems sing to one another" :-).
From the Start (Score:1)
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So whatcha saying is.... (Score:5, Funny)
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...that the very first even to occur on the Internet was a **buffer overflow**? Talk about a zero-day exploit.
This sounds more like a memory leak than a buffer overflow.
Can you believe this? (Score:1)
The first 3 bytes transmitted over what was to become the intarwebs were "log", and already it was porn - scatophilia in that case. Was that a sign or what...
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40 years of 40th birthdays (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:40 years of 40th birthdays (Score:4, Interesting)
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"or did your 1st abstract thinking,"
Wouldn't THAT be a mess! We still have neanderthals who live to 80, and never think of ANYTHING except food, sex, booze and sleep. It's a step up for some of them to think about mind altering drugs - the first taste of abstract that they ever experience!!
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Maybe because you aren't a network of computers. Internet is nothing more than computers connected sending messages.
Re:40 years of 40th birthdays (Score:4, Funny)
"Maybe because you aren't a network of computers."
What an odd assumption.
Try 18 years. Re:40 years of 40th birthdays (Score:2)
Funny.
I thought the internet was not born until January 1, 1981 - the day when the ARPAnet was replaced with today's modern IP addressing. That would make the internet only 18 years old.
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Only 18 years old? It must be 1999! Forget about buffer overflows, the world is going to end in two months!!
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Damn 8-bit machine! (slaps C=64). Can't you even count higher than 18? That's it. I'm upgrading to an Apple IIgs. It's 16 bit - that means it has twice as much power.
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I say the Internet isn't really born until it has self-awareness, sentience, has tricked us into believing a false reality, and is breeding us as an energy source.
Or, has it already happened... which pill was I supposed to take again?
The FIRST internet session had a buffer overflow?! (Score:3, Funny)
My god, that's more apropos than they could possibly have realized. Things haven't changed since then either.
7 Weeks Gestation (Score:5, Interesting)
Some date the dawn of the net to September 12, 1969, when a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet... others peg the birthday to October 29, when the first message was sent between the remote nodes.
That's not such a difficult metaphor to construct. The net was *conceived* when the two nodes came together, just as you and I were *conceived* when two nodes, um, er, yeah. And just like then, nobody knew what the result of coupling of the first Internet nodes would be, if anything.
It was *born* when someone slapped it on the bottom and it did something seen by the people gathered around. You probably went "WAAAA!". The Internet went "LO". Of course "G" caused a fault, because the next letter was supposed to be "L".
So I think it would be fair to say that the world would want to celebrate the "birthday" of the Internet today, October 29, just as the world (or your corner of it) celebrate your birthday on the day you made your emergence into the world.
Celebrating the day the Internet was *conceived*... well, that seems a bit weird.
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In Thailand, you're considered to be a year old when you're born. But then again, the internet wasn't invented in Thailand (however, the bong was).
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Either that or the first two letters were supposed to be "OM".
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Either that or the first two letters were supposed to be "OM".
Or the last two letters...
(favorite in game advertising was that pirate with the huge pin that said Ask me about Loom...)
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"Celebrating the day the Internet was *conceived*... well, that seems a bit weird."
Not if you are looking at it from dad's perspective. From the dad's perspective it is all down hill from the moment of conception.
Happy birthday (Score:5, Funny)
ha
Drinking Straw (Score:2)
A 50kbps AT&T pipe
Haha, had to laugh at that phrasing. Although I was around for the era where 50kbps would have qualified as a pipe, by today's standards it is more of a drinking straw... and a really thin one at that!
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Back in the mid 1990's, the USENET feed for some universities (and the companies who were downstream from them) was still provided by ISDN, which would often fail. Consequently, it was referred to as a "two plastic cups tied together by a wet piece of string".
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Drinking straw? Nah, more like one of those plastic coffee stirring things.
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It's more like a series of tubes.
surprising first message (Score:2)
What, nothing about penis size or how to make money at home? Things really were different back then.
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you must be born after September. in the past, there were no typos.
Midlife crisis (Score:1, Redundant)
I wonder what sort of sporty two seater the Internet is going to buy for itself. A Miata? Z3? Or is the Internet going to go whole-hog and get a Ferrari?
of course (Score:1)
At the time they couldn't fathom anyone needing more than 2 bytes of memory.
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1/640 kb should be enough for anybody!
second message (Score:1, Redundant)
And the second message was "Buy cheep c1al!5 now!".
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In the beginning, I wonder if they ever thought that 90% of the bandwidth would be consumed by fake viagra ads and Nigerian scams?
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It was 1969.
"Buy healthy c1gerett5!"
Followed buy how pirates were causing a decrease in Beatles record sales.
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Er, there was no such thing as c1al!5. They hadn't even invented V1a6ra!
I know, you woosh I wouldn't have pointed that out.
Honestly... (Score:2, Funny)
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he can tell you when the internet was created, since he signed it into being.
He never said he built the Arpanet.
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As a congressman, his ultimate act was to vote "yes" on the appropriations bill which resulted in it eventually being signed into being.
I suppose you could say he "push-button'd" it into being. If they were using push-button vote tallying at the time...
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He wasn't even born yet! The inner tube was patented in 1846 [wikipedia.org] (well, pneumatic tires were, and the inner tube was an integral part of a tire back then) and produced commercially in 1888. But what does it have to do with Al Gore or the information highway?
First Packet? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Eventually IPv4 will go away just as but I won't consider that the death of the Internet. Plus, the IMPs were the implementation of RFC 1.
September 12 was the day the Internet was hatched. October 29 was the day it took flight.
Oblig. (Score:1)
But after UCLA typed the 'l' and the 'o,' the 'g' caused a memory overflow on the SRI IMP
ok, here goes:
1. Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
2. Does it run Windows 7?
3. Does it run Linux?
4. ???
5. Profit
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You listed windows 7 before linux you sick fsck. Get the fsck back in your hole and don't come back.
We don't tolerate your ki...
lo, I for one welcome ou...
It was like this: (Score:2)
1>First
2>First1
2> damn
1> N00b
Better Message? (Score:2)
We couldn't have asked for a better message and we didn't plan it
That's funny, since one of the guys who was working on it was just on NPR talking about how all these other historical firsts had meaningful or interesting messages, while this one was boring.
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Well, given the amount of crap that lands in my spam filter, little improvement has been made It's only delivered faster. /sarcasm
I do like the idea of starting a revolution with "ah.. bummer, that didn't quite work" - it fits right in with my personal theory of evolution (it was an unfortunate accident).. :-)
For a second time? (Score:2)
So it's 80 years old now?
It's like celebrating (Score:2)
Conception AND Birth
50kbps? (Score:2)
Isn't 50kbps really, really fast for 1969? I was expecting something more like 1200 baud at most. I remember how big a deal it was in the late 1980s that my 2400 baud modem supported MNP level 5 (compression and error correction), and then lusting after the 14.4 modems in 1990. I remember an engineer at Loral (defense aerospace contractor) in Akron in 1989 telling me that 56k modems were impossible, and that they couldn't even reliably sustain 56k on the LAN across campus. So I was rather surprised to se
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In (iirc) 1983 I was on Compuserve with a 300 (count 'em three hundred!) baud modem. I didn't get 56k until the late nineties.
Who designs this stuff, anyhow? (Score:2)
But after UCLA typed the 'l' and the 'o,' the 'g' caused a memory overflow on the SRI IMP.
So the Internets wasn't even 3 characters old and it was already being hacked and DOS'd. So, so lame.
And thus it was said (Score:2)
And thus it was said "Lo -- It is a feature, not a bug," and all were pleased.
40 years ago the destruction of the music industry (Score:2)
commenced, when the ARPAnet was born, and someone immediately started a query for music by Kenny Loggins
LOL! (Score:2)
Since the next message was them trying a second time, the first three letters sent were "LOL"
Leonard Kleinrock is also a Karate master (Score:2)
I would train at the JKA Dojo in Santa Monica [jkasm.com] maybe 20 years ago. Leonard was one of the students. I recall when he was promoted from brown belt to black belt. Shotokan Karate is a very intense discipline.
Nothing like having the crap beat out of me by one of the founders of the Internet...
And a little-known side event (Score:2)
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Considering that an internet is when two NETWORKS are connected together, the event of the first connection between two machines does not qualify.
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Re:What is this Bullshit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple. This was not the first time two hosts were connected together via a serial line. If you only cared about that, you'd have to go back a lot farther. Heck, the first modem dates back to 1962. What made the Internet possible was not the notion of having computers that could talk to other computers. The key change that made the Internet possible was the notion of all the computers speaking a single language and having routers that knew how to pass messages on to other routers, eventually to another computer. That was not realized until the first packet was sent on a packet-switched network, which in its most primitive form, occurred on October 29, 1969.
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Which, coincidentally, is the year of my birth.
Evidence!
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Funny. I *thought* that date looked familiar...
Four phrases--Black Thursday, Black Friday, then Black Monday, and Black Tuesday--are commonly used to describe this collapse of stock values. All four are appropriate, for the crash was not a one-day affair. The initial crash occurred on Thursday, October 24, 1929, but the catastrophic downturn of Monday, October 28, and Tuesday, October 29, precipitated widespread alarm and the onset of an unprecedented and long-lasting economic depression for the United States and the world.
From stock market crash to Internet in 40 years, then from Internet to LOLcats in another 40. (more or less.)
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Assigning arbitrary dates to mark an amorphous event?
Yeah--I hear daylight savings time is this Sunday...
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The first official use of the word internet was in rfc 675.(1974?)
in 1988 Al Gore's National High-Performance Computer Act made it available for all. So that would be the birth of it as we know it.
So pick on of those. I highly suggest you pick 1988 because people can relate to that kind of action, as opposed to the first rfc to mention it.
We are talking about the internet, not all forms of distance communication.
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"I get it, it all started when Adam dropped his fig leaf. Eve's first scream. I think I have a jpeg of that. Stupid fig leaf..."
I think it started when that pic was first transferred. We all know the internet is for pr0n.
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but admit to yourself for just one second: it would've been effing hilarious.
Hey, have some fucking respect, it's EFFing. Capital E, capital F, capital F. Even better is E.F.F.ing