Internet, now 20 years in Australia

Hi Don

Thanks for this. A trip down amnesia lane. It facinates me that the internet is so young and yet has had such an impact on people's lives. It is good to see JANET mentioned as well as this was the first network I used to send email when at University back in 1987. Little did I know email would now dictate my life.

Times have changed. Can you imagine life without mobile phones, PCs and the internet? I was all so different back then...

Thanks

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Bill Naylor
www.electronworks.co.uk
Electronic Kits for Education and Fun

Imagine? No need,

That was when there was the illusion of quality TV programs.

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Great advances in Debian Linux; post a bug report and get spam in three 
days.

Yet people have forgotten how to communicate, go figure.

ml

Hello, I bought a Commodore 64 in 1984. The internet was rudimentary until the Sydney Morning Herald opened up the topic. Email was possible tho I think it was just messaging copied from the English Prestel. I was friendly with a group of techies from Telecom. The internet came for me with the Amiga. We had an early way to get to the internet but as there was no server on NSW Central Coast for a while we had to download what we wanted and looked at it later. Remember the user groups? Dick Smith was the first I saw of shopping.

nof

Boards.http://www.dontronics-shop.com/sparkfun-electronics.html

I was on Packet radio long before the internet. Real internet didn't start until HTML code came along.

I, too, was wondering about this definition of the Internet in Australia. (Like many) I was using UUCP-based email, TCP/connection-based FTP, and cross-Pacific telnet, well before 1989, so I wonder if the arrival of HTTP/HTML is really just a simplifying generalization.

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Chris.

That is true of the "Popular" internet which started with the first browsers, the "Real" internet even the WWW had been going long before that.

Well otherwise you could say that morse code was a form of internet, or even lighting signal fires on top of hills, I mean really, you need a better definition of internet.

Internet == inter-networking, i.e. connecting existing networks, especially using TCP/IP. It was happening more than a decade before "the web" was invented, and even now "the web" is *not* "the Internet".

Clifford Heath.

As IP can be transmitted via morse code, I wouldn't discount it. However, I certainly wouldn't claim it *was* the internet any time before the appearance of IP.

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Chris.

I agree that The Internet is something specific as above. Otherwise we end up discussing whether inter-networking started with dial up modems or tape exchanges or early OCR of hand written letters, or ......

For me the closest was the 80's and dialing up up a BBS on a CPM luggable for Fidonet. When I finally hit an internet connected network in the

90's, the "outside" link was only 9600 baud anyway {:-), so were were still using BBS technology to transfer files between offices.

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Great advances in Debian Linux; post a bug report and get spam in three 
days.

Second on the core Internet being tcp/ip technology. There were other networks, but it is the inter-connectability that made the Internet work.

HTML is just a eye-candy delivery method.

AFAIK, most other networks were structured around a hierachy. In The Internet, so long as machine has an IP address, it can talk to any other IP address.

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Great advances in Debian Linux; post a bug report and get spam in three 
days.

Clifford Heath wrote

Nope, thats not the internet. And it doesnt have to connect networks either, just PCs.

Thats mangled too when that happens with lans.

now "the web" is *not* "the Internet".

Correct.

In *your* opinion. Many of us were using the internet before then.

No, it's just plain wrong.

MrT.

the

Yep, but of course was far more than 20 years ago.

MrT.

that.

Whilst the internet, email, ftp, Archie, veronica, Usenet, etc. etc were all going long before HTML, I think WWW was a term introduced with the advent of the "Web" as opposed to text based internet. i.e. HTML and subsequently the Mosaic viewer.

MrT.

It may only be eye candy but HTML is what made the internet useful and easy to use. The internet would still only be known to nerdy geeks if HTML didn't exist. Packet radio was one of many networking systems, IP addressing wasn't the first. I was communicating with people on the MIR space station before the IP internet came to town.

*What* is just plain wrong?

- I was doing what I stated well before 1989.

- I wonder if many people just consider "the internet" to mean the period after the arrival of HTTP/HTML.

Which of those statements is wrong, and why?

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Chris.

You do know how to follow a conversation, don't you?

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Chris.