What was the internet like in 1989, heres a reproduction you can navigate!

[MIS42N]

Al Gore did a lot to make the internet available to more people. But it was a growing thing. He didn't create it.

Here's a line from the CERN website "CERN opened its first external connections to the internet after a "big bang" in January 1989 to change all IP addresses to official ones." So the idea of global IP addresses was already in place in 1989. TCP/IP was a thing. CERN were connecting to a global network.

Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn said "[snip] ... the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983".

I'm sure different people could come up with different events that could be considered "the birth of the internet" but I think it ends up being an unwinnable discussion.

[EasyGoing1]

So, the government can't do anything good, but Al Gore, and the funding he obtained, was crucially important in kick starting the Internet? Do you see a little inconsistency in that argument?

So it turns out that IANA started out of necessity in the early 70's by a man named Jon Postel who worked at the University of California in Los Angeles and it was used to rope in the resources on the ARPANET. It evolved from there. Seems that the only US government connection to IANA was via funding for about a decade but there was apparently no managerial enforcement being made as a condition of that funding....

******** snip ********

IANA was established informally as a reference to various technical functions for the ARPANET, that Jon Postel and Joyce K. Reynolds performed at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. On March 26, 1972, Vint Cerf and Jon Postel at UCLA called for establishing a socket number catalog in RFC 322. Network administrators were asked to submit a note or place a phone call, "describing the function and socket numbers of network service programs at each HOST".[19] This catalog was subsequently published as RFC 433 in December 1972.[20] In it Postel first proposed a registry of assignments of port numbers to network services, calling himself the czar of socket numbers.[21]

The first reference to the name "IANA" in the RFC series is in RFC 1083, published in December, 1988 by Postel at USC-ISI, referring to Joyce K. Reynolds as the IANA contact. However the function, and the term, was well established long before that; RFC 1174 says that "Throughout its entire history, the Internet system has employed a central Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)..."[22]

In 1995, the National Science Foundation authorized Network Solutions to assess domain name registrants a $50 fee per year for the first two years, 30 percent of which was to be deposited in the Intellectual Infrastructure Fund (IIF), a fund to be used for the preservation and enhancement of the intellectual infrastructure of the Internet.[23] There was widespread dissatisfaction with this concentration of power (and money) in one company, and people looked to IANA for a solution. Postel wrote up a draft[24] on IANA and the creation of new top level domains. He was trying to institutionalize IANA. In retrospect, this would have been valuable, since he unexpectedly died about two years later.

In January 1998, Postel was threatened by US Presidential science advisor Ira Magaziner with the statement "You'll never work on the Internet again" after Postel collaborated with root server operators to test using a root server other than Network Solutions' "A" root to act as the authority over the root zone. Demonstrating that control of the root was from the IANA rather than from Network Solutions would have clarified IANA's authority to create new top-level domains as a step to resolving the DNS Wars, but he ended his effort after Magaziner's threat, and died not long after.[25][26]

Jon Postel managed the IANA function from its inception on the ARPANET until his death in October 1998. By his almost 30 years of "selfless service",[27] Postel created his de facto authority to manage key parts of the Internet infrastructure. After his death, Joyce K. Reynolds, who had worked with him for many years, managed the transition of the IANA function to ICANN.

Starting in 1988, IANA was funded by the U.S. government under a contract between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Information Sciences Institute. This contract expired in April 1997, but was extended to preserve IANA.[28]

On December 24, 1998, USC entered into a transition agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ICANN, transferring the IANA project to ICANN, effective January 1, 1999, thus making IANA an operating unit of ICANN.[29]

Here is the link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Authority

[EasyGoing1]

Al Gore did a lot to make the internet available to more people. But it was a growing thing. He didn't create it.

FOR THE RECORD, I NEVER SAID AL GORE CREATED THE INTERNET ... and I thought he was a total dumbass when he made that statement some years ago. He was merely a Senator who understood the potential of the Internet and he worked tirelessly to convince the rest of Congress to get on the bandwagon and use the publics money to bring the technology into their homes.

But yeah he was a dumbass for saying he invented the Internet. I want to believe he made that statement as a way of helping the general public understand that without his efforts, we would not have the Internet in quite the same way that we do nor would we have had as soon as we did ... so in that effort to make it simple, he just said "I invented the Internet" when really what he invented was the various legislations and committees that were devoted to the task of bringing the technology into our homes.

[EasyGoing1]

If anyone is curious about technology and its history ... look for a documentary called something like, "The history of international fiber optics" or something to that effect. It was a documentary made a few years ago I believe and it talks about - in some nice detail, our first efforts to lay wire across the ocean back when the telegraph was invented. The engineering challenges that went with doing that ... and how after the first connection was made between New York and London, I think it failed within the first week and they discovered a flaw in their methods of running it in the ocean as well as flaws in the outer layers in the cable. So they had to start over from scratch and run a brand new cable half way around the world, which was a success .. and the cost to the consumer for sending a message or making a phone call to London back in the pre-1920s was close to $5 or $6 dollars per message/phone call which would be about $150 in today's dollars.

It's pretty fascinating stuff.


And man I'm starting to sound like a geek version of Cliff Claven over here ... if anyone remembers the guy who played the postal worker on the show "Cheers" ... lol

[madires]

Like many Unix features, UUCP was a discount version of this communication scheme. It also had support for offline message queueing and forwarding, which made it perfect for organizations without the cash to connect directly to the ARPAnet/Internet. The "bang paths" were required because messages could be sent to sites without a permanent Internet connection, but that were reachable via dial-up UUCP connections.

... in the beginning. Later on bang addressing faded away when the modern email addresses arrived. In 1993 our local UUCP group (all hosts with dial-up connections, one gateway to the internet) didn't use bang addressing at all. My system was an intermediate host feeding a few other hosts, since the gateway (located at an university) was a local phone call for me, long distance for the others.

[madires]

But right around that time was when the Internet spread like wildfire! Suddenly if you had AOL, you could access the Internet, same with Compuserve ... then soon after that, the phone company was selling internet connections and there was a fast push to get modems working as fast as possible which brought about the 56k modern into the affordable price range ... then Europe brought ISDN which had wider adoption out there than it did here because we went to DSL pretty quickly ... then once cable modems came into their own and the telcos invested heavily into citywide fiber networks ... we now all have the blazing speeds that we have.

Over here around mid 90s ISDN was common and 33.6k modems affordable. The very first 56k modem arrived a little bit later.

[tggzzz]

Technically there was no Internet in 1989. We have the Internet today because Al Gore introduced legislation into Congress around 1992 I believe. The bill was called "The Information Super Highway Act" - I remember because when I heard my electronics instructor talking about it in class one day, I actually wrote Al Gores office asking about it, because it was always a fantasy of mine to interconnect computers at high speeds. They actually sent me a copy of the bill with a nice letter thanking me for being interested in it. The bill was HUGE ... hundreds of pages ... mostly legalese, but the summary at the beginning I remember some of ... the argument that Al Gore used to justify getting the money to create this new Information Super Highway was something along the lines of "As we did after world war II when we beefed up infrastructure such as building more highways, etc. so that we could more effectively move around the country, we need to once again invest in the "Information Super Highway" so that people can efficiently gain access to information that they now cannot access at all because there is no existing means from which to do so.

Now, I can't say, because I don't know, exactly HOW our government brought that into existence, or what that money was actually spent on because the Internet was simply an extension of ARPANET and other networks that only government buildings and higher education facilities had access to. And it seems that the gatekeepers of the newly formed Internet belonged to the telephone companies. So it seems to me that the bill, once it got funded, merely subsidized the cost of bringing all of those existing networks onto a backbone and that each major telco was given a tax-funded point of access to that network. And I'm sure ONE of the big telco companies retained ownership of that backbone or maybe it was divided up amongst them I'm not sure.

My first exposure to high-speed Internet was in the early / mid-'90s when I worked as a tech at Edwards AFB in California and some of their computers still had text-based web browsers - Mozilla I believe - And Netscape was the only graphical browser and it ran on Windows 3.11. But right around that time was when the Internet spread like wildfire! Suddenly if you had AOL, you could access the Internet, same with Compuserve ... then soon after that, the phone company was selling internet connections and there was a fast push to get modems working as fast as possible which brought about the 56k modern into the affordable price range ... then Europe brought ISDN which had wider adoption out there than it did here because we went to DSL pretty quickly ... then once cable modems came into their own and the telcos invested heavily into citywide fiber networks ... we now all have the blazing speeds that we have.

☺

Oh bless your heart, you really are clueless aren't you.

Don't be a smart ass ... I was THERE ... I REMEMBER what happened ... how old are you anyways? And don't you know it's bad form to accuse someone of being wrong without actually demonstrating how they are wrong and being very specific about it? You must be a liberal cause they tend to think that just telling someone that they're wrong makes them wrong ... but life doesn't work that way because facts and evidence actually define reality. So go find your facts and evidence then come back and tell everyone how I'm wrong.

You remember incorrectly. You make ad hominem statements based on imagined politics that are irrelevant to the technical subject.

Highly unimpressive.

BTW, I was there. I missed the 1984 kremvax hoax, but was using the internet before going to do research on the internet from 1987 onwards.

[tggzzz]

If anyone is curious about technology and its history ... look for a documentary called something like, "The history of international fiber optics" or something to that effect. It was a documentary made a few years ago I believe and it talks about - in some nice detail, our first efforts to lay wire across the ocean back when the telegraph was invented. The engineering challenges that went with doing that ... and how after the first connection was made between New York and London, I think it failed within the first week and they discovered a flaw in their methods of running it in the ocean as well as flaws in the outer layers in the cable. So they had to start over from scratch and run a brand new cable half way around the world, which was a success .. and the cost to the consumer for sending a message or making a phone call to London back in the pre-1920s was close to $5 or $6 dollars per message/phone call which would be about $150 in today's dollars.

It's pretty fascinating stuff.


And man I'm starting to sound like a geek version of Cliff Claven over here ... if anyone remembers the guy who played the postal worker on the show "Cheers" ... lol

Better still, read the books by Arthur C Clarke, the person that described comsats in 1945. "Voice Across the Sea" (1958) and its sequel "How the World Was One" (1992).

Yes, I have both, and read the first in the late 70s.

[madires]

All I know is that 56k modems had an engineering issue that needed to be solved before they could produce them for the public ... something about maxing out the capabilities of an analog phone line and some issues that introduced into the hardware that had to be solved, because we had 28.8 modems available for a few years before 56k finally came out.

To make 56k modems work reliable the ISP's side had to be ISDN and the user's POTS line had be digitized as near as possible towards the user. The US had an additional disadvantage because their digital lines are based on 7 bit PCM (EU: 8 bits). Later on the US came up with an extended frame format which allows nearly 8 bits, i.e. every few frames the 8th bit is dropped.

[CJay]

Don't be a smart ass ... I was THERE ... I REMEMBER what happened ... how old are you anyways? And don't you know it's bad form to accuse someone of being wrong without actually demonstrating how they are wrong and being very specific about it? You must be a liberal cause they tend to think that just telling someone that they're wrong makes them wrong ... but life doesn't work that way because facts and evidence actually define reality. So go find your facts and evidence then come back and tell everyone how I'm wrong.

Older than you, with a better memory than you and you literally admit you were guessing and got it wrong two posts after that one.

I'm done with you, you're trolling.

[bd139]

EasyGoing1: slinging insults, particularly political oriented one, after a retraction of a completely cocked up initial entry to this thread is not appreciated on the Internet. It bites. You’d know that if you’ve been on Usenet and the Internet as long as a lot of people commenting.

Anyway I don’t think I’ve seen a single post relating to the OSI model being referenced which is probably the most complete definition of internetworking.

I’d also like to point out that while an EE forum some of us ended up in different industries wrangling this stuff professionally.

Anyway back on topic, included is a nice picture of the first web server from my photo library.  Now at the science museum here. From CERN:

[CJay]

Anyway back on topic, included is a nice picture of the first web server from my photo library.  Now at the science museum here. From CERN:

I think perhaps I have a very similar picture in my library from a visit to the Science Museum, I was somewhat disappointed nobody had the foresight to include a flashing LED on top.

[bd139]

Yes and good reference 

[CJay]

Yes and good reference 

Something only the Elders of the Internet would get.

I'm trying to dig up references to my first 'paid for' ISP, it was a dialup outfit based in Blackheath called The Direct Connection, they seem to have almost entirely vanished from the written history but they were around in the days of the Amiga 500 and offered a dialup shell connection but only via a long distance call.

Then came Demon, KA9Q and Turnpike...

[tggzzz]

EasyGoing1: slinging insults, particularly political oriented one, after a retraction of a completely cocked up initial entry to this thread is not appreciated on the Internet. It bites. You’d know that if you’ve been on Usenet and the Internet as long as a lot of people commenting.

The word "trolling" has been invoked earlier in the thread!

Anyway I don’t think I’ve seen a single post relating to the OSI model being referenced which is probably the most complete definition of internetworking.

I well remember when it wasn't certain whether OSI/X.400 or TCP/IP would become dominant. I never paid much attention to OSI, but couple of my colleagues wrote a textbook published by Prentice Hall in 1992. That was just as OSI was becoming irrelevant and the year before the WWW became widely known.

[madires]

Yep, IETF and OSI have a very special relationship.

[Syntax Error]

I'm sure you old skool users remember a time when every computer magazine came with a CD for AOL? I certainly collected a few as 'coasters'. No doubt there's a million AOL CDs in landfill awaiting archeological discovery.

In the early 90s, those CDs were often floppy discs for Compuserve services. Today we forget the name Compuserve, but established in 1969, CS helped pave the way for the internet revolution. Any CS users here? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe

[bd139]

They were great for keeping the birds off my tomatoes 

[Syntax Error]

They were great for keeping the birds off my tomatoes 

That is so 2001. I remember drilling holes in magazine CDs to make Xmas decorations. Upcycling

Another geeky use was to turn dead CDs into spectrometers. Energy saver light bulbs made amazing coloured blobs. DIY Homemade Spectrometer: https://www.madaboutscience.com.au/shop/science-extra/post/homemade-spectrometer

[bd139]

That's very neat. Never seen that one before. Unfortunately I don't actually have a single CD in my house now so can't easily play with that . How times have changed.

[nali]

I'm sure you old skool users remember a time when every computer magazine came with a CD for AOL? I certainly collected a few as 'coasters'. No doubt there's a million AOL CDs in landfill awaiting archeological discovery.

In the early 90s, those CDs were often floppy discs for Compuserve services. Today we forget the name Compuserve, but established in 1969, CS helped pave the way for the internet revolution. Any CS users here? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe

Yep, CS was my first "real" access to the 'net as we know it. Before that it was dial-up BBSs.

Also somewhere I guess circa 1990 AMPRNet on 2m. Now that was S-L-O-W with throughputs in bytes per sec 

[ebastler]

@EasyGoing1, your username stands in marked contrast to your style of writing and arguing. Unless it is your goal to provoke others, may I suggest that you dial things back a bit. Less caps and boldface, less opinionated, more easygoing... Otherwise I don't see your account lasting long around here.

Edit: Looks like you (or a mod?) just cleaned up some of the more argumentative posts. Great!

[madires]

And wrong again, modems were already cheap LONG before the Internet took off in the public and long before we could ever purchase an Internet connection. Compuserve and AOL were already well-established services and they often gave modems away at computer shows and what have you just to get people to use their service.

Lucky you! Because of local regulations our modems came with some special features, like re-dial limits, and required an approval which made the modems two or three times more expensive than the ones imported from the US. If you had an import modem without approval you could be fined and the modem was confiscated. After the privatization of Deutsche Bundespost things improved.

[coppice]

And wrong again, modems were already cheap LONG before the Internet took off in the public and long before we could ever purchase an Internet connection. Compuserve and AOL were already well-established services and they often gave modems away at computer shows and what have you just to get people to use their service.

In 1990 a 2400bps modem was fairly cheap, but a 14.4kbps modem capable of doing something more meaningful with the internet was well over $1k. By 1994 it was more like $200.

What was NOT popular before the Internet boom happened was 56k modems ... and they didn't start showing up on the shelves of computer stores and other department stores until the Internet boom started ... booming. And it might actually be that one had no effect on the other where it's probably very likely that 56k modems would have exploded out into the retail market when they did regardless of the onset of the Internet.  All I know is that 56k modems had an engineering issue that needed to be solved before they could produce them for the public ... something about maxing out the capabilities of an analog phone line and some issues that introduced into the hardware that had to be solved, because we had 28.8 modems available for a few years before 56k finally came out. But even they were short lived once DSL hit the scene.

The common kinds of 56k modems (V.90 and V.92) are asymmetric. They were developed because the Internet was becoming hugely successful, and it was feasible to squeeze a bit more speed from existing telephone lines if you accepted asymmetric speeds, which is OK for most consumer's internet usage. Prior, slower, modems were all designed to work peer to peer, and were used for all sorts of communications which needed symmetric behaviour. The huge success of dial up internet with 14.4kbps (V.32bis) and 28.8kbps (V.34) modems spurred the development of anything that would get people faster access. One strand of this was ADSL, which required that the telcos install a broad infrastructure, which took time to develop. The other strand was the development of a stopgap that would let people approach the maximum they could get from the existing telephony infrastructure, which was 64kbps. The result was V.90, and later V.92, which were limited to a slightly slower rate of 56kbps for practical reasons. These require one type of modem in the home, connected to an ordinary analogue telephone line. They needed a completely different kind of modem in the ISP, connected to a digital telephone line (usually a E1 ot T1). The connection was up to 56kbps down, but never more then 33kbps up. These things didn't appear in stores until dial up Internet access was already popular, because their development was a RESPONSE to that popularity. Also, nobody really knew how to develop them earlier on. In the late 80s and early 90s our understanding of digital comms made a lot of progress, and costs plummeted.

[rsjsouza]

I am not really a pioneer of Internet/WWW/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, but we started talking to other computers since 1992-93 via local BBSs, although the price of the call was prohibitive if connected for too long (in Brasil, a new charge was made every 4 minutes for local calls). We were one of the very early adopters of 28.8kbps modems at the time (very expensive), but no BBS had them yet, as digital lines started just a couple of years earlier but adoption was very slow and expensive (that's government owned telco for you) - 9.6k and 14.4k were the norm. The earliest access we had to email was through our BBS - a slow and complicated relay system between a real email and a BBS messaging system. A full send-reply-receive took two days.

At the university, my brother (3yr my senior) had access to "electronic mail" via bitnet since 1990 but, as he is not technologically inclined, didn't make much of it. When I got to the university in 91, this access was still very restricted and during my university years we had no access at all, although we started accessing "the internet" in 1994 at home using Trumpet Winsock and NCSA Mosaic - Netscape only came a bit later to us. I missed the Gopher phase, but FTP was still very much alive. Throughout the university years, I became well versed in SLIP and PPP by setting up and troubleshooting pretty much all my friends' Windows computers. Linux only came to me in 96 but by then I was going through the crazy train of the end of undergrad and would only pick up Unix seriously a few years later in my master's

A pretty typical scenario in the 1990s for someone not professionally working in the area.