One of my favorite quotes about the Internet by Alan Kay:<p><pre><code> The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean,
rather than something that was man-made.</code></pre>
On that last map, the three nodes with a T in a circle represented TIPs -- basically dialup access points. The TIP had a tiny command line that let you specify which machine you wanted to connect to.<p>Long distance (which could be within your state) calls were expensive in those days so being close to a TIP was a big deal.
I love reading about the history of the internet, along with the history of computers in general. It truly demonstrates the effect of "standing on the shoulders of giants" to read about Turing and Von Neumann and Godel and Shannon, Shockley, Knuth, Ritchie, Bell Labs and Watson and PARC, etc. To understand history is to understand the future.
Quote 1:<p>"Great idea," said Herzfeld. "Get it going. You've got $1m more in your budget right now. Go."<p>Quote 2:<p>"They cost $80,000 each, more than $500,000 (£405,000) in today's money. "<p>If only would be that easy to get $6.25m in today's government environment for a pet project done in name of science. Today, to get those money, all you have to do is be a military contractor and say "...for helping troops in Afghanistan" and a check would already fly in your direction. Not so much for science one though.
Ah, happy memories of late-night sitting at a teletype (TTY) by the IMP in the PDP-1/PDP-10 Harvard CRCT machine room, hearing the phone ring on the IMP, and a voice on the other end from BBN HQ asking me to reboot the IMP, as it was hung...<p>I.e, early Arpanet management was manual--no remote power-cycling equipment.<p>(We had some incredibly whizzy <i>50Kbaud</i> leased lines between the Harvard IMP and the BBN HQ IMP.)
> <i>It was, as the historians Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon put it, like "having a den cluttered with several television sets, each dedicated to a different channel".</i><p>This is how I feel about modern streaming TV; needing multiple apps on multiple platforms just watch it. That TV is for Netflix, and that TV is for Amazon, and that TV is for Disney+ and that TV is for...
<i>Where Wizards Stay Up Late</i> seems to be the definitive history of the Internet:<p>* <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta...</a>
> Next to his office was the terminal room, a pokey little space where three remote-access terminals with three different keyboards sat side by side.<p>How'd that remote access work?