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, b...@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@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