>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Picking the nits Re: Offtopic: Internet is 30 years old Today!
>Date: Thu, 02 Sep 1999 12:37:52 -0400
>From: Joel B Levin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>|> The Internet is 30 years old today!
>|
>|It has been amusing to read the news coverage of the bickering back and forth
>|over just what date should be the birth of the Internet; for some very odd
>|reason, that date seems to be whenever the particular speaker became very
>|important...
>|
>|> September 2nd is officially the 30th birthday of the Internet, being the
>|> day that the first packets were sent between the Sigma 7 mainframe that
>|> was the first internet node and its Honeywell based IMP (Internet Message
>|> Processor) at UCLA.
>|
>|a-HEM. It would have been an ARPANET node and IMP stands for InterFACE
>|Message Processor
>
>Thang kew.
>
>| (or Interfaith Message Processor, according to a newspaper
>|clipping on one of the MIT IMPs).
>
>I'm trying to remember if that came out of a congratulatory letter
>from Sen. Kennedy's office. Naw, maybe just a newspaper article.
>
>|Vint Cerf has properly pointed out that the 1969 date commemorates the
>|ARPANET, which was a single physical network stretching across the country
>|with a limit of something like 128 nodes (I forget exactly how many).
>
>Sixteen (well, fifteen), expanded to 63 in time for the first TIP --
>the last Honeywell 516 based IMP was no. 15 and there was time to deal
>with this problem. (It was dealt with in plenty of time, too.) [1],[2]
>
>|Those who insist that the invention of HTTP really signalled the "birth of
>|the Internet as we know it" are simply wrong. That signalled the beginning
>|of the end, the destruction of the Internet as a medium of information
>|interchange to be replaced by a hollow mockery built in the image of
>|cable TV...
>
>I dunno, I think a case could be made for NNTP as the beginning of the
>end, but then from the inside of Usenet looking out, one's perspective
>could be warped. In the real world the significance of Usenet
>completely disappeared next to the behemoth that the WWW eventually
>turned out to be.
>
> /J
>
>[1] from the flaky memory of one who was there, as opposed to perfect
> memory of a myth or legend
>
>[2] Only 15 ruggedized 516 IMPs (and one non-ruggedized IMP, which
> started as the prototype and became the first NOC) were ever made.
> All subsequent Honeywell packet switches were made of Honeywell
> 316s which were cheaper and slower and which were never
> ruggedized. Some of them had an integrated BBN-designed 63 line
> terminal processor (which was fronted to the network as "host 2")
> and these were called TIPs (Terminal IMPs). Node 16 was a TIP.
>
--
"So foul a sky clears not without a storm" - Shakespeare
