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Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265576 is a reply to message #265572] Fri, 29 August 2014 10:36 Go to previous messageGo to next message
hancock4 is currently offline  hancock4
Messages: 6746
Registered: December 2011
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On Friday, August 29, 2014 10:13:13 AM UTC-4, Scott Lurndal wrote:

>> $4k for something like that seems expensive. I remember, at that time, a colleague buying an "full" IBM XT, with hard drive, 640k, etc., and I recall she paid $3,000 for it. (I thought that price was obscene for the capability offered).

> The first XTs in 1984 with a 10MByte hard disk cost $10,000. A friend of mine
> financed his via the big B credit union.

Perhaps my colleague purchased her XT a year or so later and the price had dropped.

But, frankly, I can't see anyone spending $10,000 in 1984 dollars for such a low-powered device. I don't know what it could do to justify the purchase price. Now, later on when the prices dropped to a few thou and the horsepower increased, the payback was different. Indeed, in those days the price drop was very significant in real dollars because of high inflation at that time.
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265583 is a reply to message #265572] Fri, 29 August 2014 10:54 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Walter Banks is currently offline  Walter Banks
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Scott Lurndal wrote:

> hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
>> On Thursday, August 28, 2014 11:19:07 AM UTC-4, timca...@aol.com wrote:
>>> In 1984 the place I worked at sold terminals for Burroughs systems considerably
>>> below what Burroughs charged for their terminals. I believe the price was
>>> something like $1700, and they were sold with very little profit (if any).
>>> It seems unlikely that IBM would charge as little as $1000 for a 3270.
>>
>> I am going solely by memory, but in 1984 we were installing a new mainframe

> system and acquiring terminals. I do remember the $1,000 price because it represented

> a cutoff, and the competition (Telex) was noticeably cheaper.
>>
>>
>>
>>> Also in 1984 I bought my first micro. A Zenith Z-100. 8088, 192K of memory,
>>> 10Meg hard disk, color monitor: $4500 with the educational discount.
>>> It was a very good price for that system for several years (even
>>> when compared against IBM-PC & clones). (Yeah, I still have it, it has
>>> had a few upgrades since then :) ).
>>
>> $4k for something like that seems expensive. I remember, at that time, a colleague

> buying an "full" IBM XT, with hard drive, 640k, etc., and I recall she paid $3,000 for it.

> (I thought that price was obscene for the capability offered).
>>
>
> The first XTs in 1984 with a 10MByte hard disk cost $10,000. A friend of mine
> financed his via the big B credit union.
>

I am not sure what was in his system. I bought a very early XT system and paid
about $6K I think with 64K of memory 10M HD and IBM monitor. It is possible
that I added memory after the purchase.

For very little computing power in todays terms they were expensive. But IBM did
one thing right the product was reliable, well supported and a big change from
the many of the systems people were using. We ran UCSD pascal on the early IBM
systems in our office because it would run on everything we owned, PDP-11, apple][
and TERAK. (I know start with a slow computer and interpret everything just to
make sure it stayed that way)

The TERAK is one of those orphans that was quite a good computer. The perception
at the time was it was expensive and it was but for a while as a self contained development
computer it was quite good.

Relatively slow personal computers at the time could beat the number of processing cycles
available to an individual on a multi-user machine.

w..
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265586 is a reply to message #265565] Fri, 29 August 2014 10:56 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anne & Lynn Wheel is currently offline  Anne & Lynn Wheel
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Registered: January 2012
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Texas <a@b.com> writes:
> My favorite article about this is one by Neal Stephenson titled
> "Netheads vs Bellheads"
> http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.10/atm.html
> An excerpt:
> "It is a war between the Bellheads and the Netheads. In broad strokes,
> Bellheads are the original telephone people. They are the engineers
> and managers who grew up under the watchful eye of Ma Bell and who
> continue to abide by Bell System practices out of respect for Her
> legacy. They believe in solving problems with dependable hardware
> techniques and in rigorous quality control - ideals that form the
> basis of our robust phone system and that are incorporated in the ATM
> protocol.
> Opposed to the Bellheads are the Netheads, the young Turks who
> connected the world's computers to form the Internet. These engineers
> see the telecom industry as one more relic that will be overturned by
> the march of digital computing. The Netheads believe in intelligent
> software rather than brute-force hardware, in flexible and adaptive
> routing instead of fixed traffic control. It is these ideals, after
> all, that have allowed the Internet to grow so quickly and that are
> incorporated into IP - the Internet Protocol."

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#59 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#60 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#61 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#62 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#63 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#66 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984

we had a flavor of this in the early/mid 80s ... and the derogatory term
was "telephone toads". Part of this was "telephone toad" orientation
dominated error handling philosophy in osi & sna/vtam ... assuming
relatively high error rate over copper wires with lots of connection.

in hsdt
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

we were working with high-speed fiber and satellite with forward error
correcting ... starting with viterbi and then reed-solomon and sometimes
combination of viterbi and reed-solomon. with reed-solomon we were
starting to see bit-error-rates over fiber that was compareable to
datacenter mainframe channel error rates. as a result, Somewhat as a
result, I was starting to do "dual simplex" ... constant transmit and
receive in both directions.

hsdt got an engineer that had been one of reed's graduate students at
JPL ... and also got to work with cyclotomics (Berlekamp at UCB one of
the founders). trivia ... cyclotomics played major role in reed-solomon
being used for cdrom standard and in part because of working with some
vendors on the other side of the pacific in early/mid 80s, I was
claiming I could get much better technology out of $300 cdrom player
than I could get from $20k computer communication modems

past posts mentioning viterbi, reed-solomon, and/or cyclotomics
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#28 Log Structured filesystems -- think twice
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#115 What is the use of OSI Reference Model?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#210 AES cyphers leak information like sieves
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#38 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#1 4M pages are a bad idea (was Re: AMD 64bit Hammer CPU and VM)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#80 Disks size growing while disk count shrinking = bad performance
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#71 Encryption + Error Correction
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#53 Mainframers: Take back the light (spotlight, that is)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#53 Free Desktop Cyber emulation on PC before Christmas
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#27 shirts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#3 Calculations involing very large decimals
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#73 1950s AT&T/IBM lack of collaboration?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#37 Why doesn't Infiniband supports RDMA multicast
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#11 Mainframes (etc.)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#43 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#25 The 8008
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#27 Data communications over telegraph circuits
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#52 Go-Back-N protocol?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#50 non ECC
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#44 waiting for acknowledgements
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#45 waiting for acknowledgements
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#29 Just another example of mainframe costs
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#4 Even worse than UNIX
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007p.html#62 Damn
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007v.html#82 folklore indeed
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#19 IBM-MAIN longevity
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#23 Blinkylights
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#61 Is SUN going to become x86'ed ??
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#66 Architectural Diversity
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#46 Follow up
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#79 big iron mainframe vs. x86 servers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#0 Anyone going to Supercomputers '09 in Portland?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#26 Tapes versus vinyl
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#23 Program Work Method Question
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#58 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#60 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#69 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011o.html#65 Hamming Code
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013k.html#58 DASD, Tape and other peripherals attached to a Mainframe
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013m.html#102 Interesting? How _compilers_ are compromising application security
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013n.html#31 SNA vs TCP/IP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013n.html#33 SNA vs TCP/IP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013n.html#34 SNA vs TCP/IP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014g.html#75 non-IBM: SONY new tape storage - 185 Terabytes on a tape
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014g.html#98 After the Sun (Microsystems) Sets, the Real Stories Come Out

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265587 is a reply to message #265573] Fri, 29 August 2014 10:52 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Morten Reistad is currently offline  Morten Reistad
Messages: 2108
Registered: December 2011
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Senior Member
In article <8ec3a1be-22d5-4235-85bf-09add1ecb75a@googlegroups.com>,
<hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
> On Friday, August 29, 2014 8:47:00 AM UTC-4, Texas wrote:
>
>> "It is a war between the Bellheads and the Netheads. In broad strokes, Bellheads are the original
>> telephone people. They are the engineers and managers who grew up under the watchful eye of Ma Bell
>> and who continue to abide by Bell System practices out of respect for Her legacy. They believe in
>> solving problems with dependable hardware techniques and in rigorous quality control - ideals that
>> form the basis of our robust phone system and that are incorporated in the ATM protocol.
>> Opposed to the Bellheads are the Netheads, the young Turks who connected the world's computers to
>> form the Internet. These engineers see the telecom industry as one more relic that will be
>> overturned by the march of digital computing. The Netheads believe in intelligent software rather
>> than brute-force hardware, in flexible and adaptive routing instead of fixed traffic control. It is
>> these ideals, after all, that have allowed the Internet to grow so quickly and that are
>> incorporated into IP - the Internet Protocol."
>
>
> The above is not exactly accurate. The old Bell System was migrating to software control in 1984. Further, it always had
> "flexible and adaptive routing" in the network, even with manual control and electro-mechanical switchings. Elecronic
> switching allowed network management to be faster and more sophisticated.

This is another way of saying connectionoriented vs connectionless. This was, and to a point still is,
THE major technical schism in telecommunications.

It is about what is important.

The "bellheads" all go for connection-oriented networks, where e.g. a phone call reserves
a connection through all the devices on the way. The Internet, on the other hand, is
a big sea of packets at the physical and link levels.

> Adequate hardware is still required to support the Internet. That means reliable equipment and enough 'horsepower' to support
> demand even in busy times.

Of course yoy need to support the "sea of packets", but the horsepower (and cost) of the intermediate
nodes is orders of magnitude lower than a connection-oriented design. A high-end router (like the
Cisco GSR, Juniper Mxx, Force10 etc) can handle many 10G links at wire speeds, or a significant portion
of a terabit/second. With normal Internet metrics of about 80k per tcp session this means that
hardware has about half a million connection/session setups and teardowns per second. This is
frankly not doable by any connection-oriented device in existance today, and we are at least
two orders of magnitude out from the state of the art.

This is the main technical reason that the Internet left X.25, Frame Relay, ATM etc in the dust.

> In my humble opinion, the 'netheads' have never sought the maximum reliability that was a key hallmark of the old Bell System.
> Every Bell published article talked about the issues of reliability--having a robust _system_ in the first place (that was
> thoroughly tested), and then good tools for maintenance and recovery if problems arose.
>
> It frustrates me when using the web, especially in conducting business involving money, to have web pages lock up or act
> weird; leaving me unsure whether an order was place or a payment made.

The Internet relegates reliable transfers to the end nodes, and we have a _very_ well thought out
session management platform, TCP to acheive that. It allows the intermediate nodes to give some
feedback regarding capacity; but otherwise is completely end node controlled.

> Further, we all know that the web was not designed for adequate security, and identify theft, fraud, and other problems are rampant.
This is therefore entirely up to the end nodes, and have nothing whatsoever with the core,
regional or access infrastructure used.

I can assure you that with a connection-oriented network this would all have been _much_ worse.

> I really don't think the 'netheads' understand the old Bell System (and old mainframe) philosophy, indeed, if anything they
> denigrate legacy practices and technology.

Yes, they do. Go read rfc875 "a critique of x.25" for the philosophical underpinnings of the
connectionless approach.

> As mentioned, after hurricanes, with electric power out for a week, the traditional landline telephone never stopped working.
> Other modes can't make that claim.

If we get DSL supply regulated as phone service and some local power to the customer premise
equipment it will work as well, or better, than landline service. Given the solution to the
power problem, fiber is even better because you can go 40+ km without a repeater at all;
just using WDM-based add/drop points that are completely passive devices in terms of
energy use.

-- mrr
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265589 is a reply to message #265586] Fri, 29 August 2014 11:28 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel is currently offline  Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel
Messages: 3156
Registered: January 2012
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Senior Member
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
> we had a flavor of this in the early/mid 80s ... and the derogatory term
> was "telephone toads". Part of this was "telephone toad" orientation
> dominated error handling philosophy in osi & sna/vtam ... assuming
> relatively high error rate over copper wires with lots of connection.
>
> in hsdt
> http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#59 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#60 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#61 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#62 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#63 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#66 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#68 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984

the other thing that came up along this line was doing rate-based pacing
in hsdt for effective operating outgoing and incoming traffic as
asynchronous as possible. i've claimed that windowing started out as
trivial buffer management overrun on point-to-point links and only
indirectly was able to control operations for multi-hop packet
environment.

i was also on the xtp tab ... some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#xtphsp
and wrote up rate-based flow control for xtp
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/xtprate.html

I've contended that slow-start (windowing) shows up in tcp/ip because of
the almost non-existant timer facilities on many of the platforms.
Approx. same month as slow-start presentation at IETF ... there was ACM
SIGCOMM meeting with paper that showed slow-start was non-stable in
large multi-hop, bursty network (in part because returning ACKs tended
to bunch at intermediate hops arriving all at once at the sending end
.... which then transmits multiple back-to-back packets overloading
intermediate nodes).

past posts mentioning slow-start:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#22 CP spooling & programming technology
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#11 "Mainframe" Usage
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#19 Is Al Gore The Father of the Internet?^
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#38 Ethernet efficiency (was Re: Ms employees begging for food)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#38 Buffer overflow
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#4 Microcode? (& index searching)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#54 Swapper was Re: History of Login Names
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#57 CDC6600 - just how powerful a machine was it?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#55 Cluster and I/O Interconnect: Infiniband, PCI-Express, Gibat
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#54 Rewrite TCP/IP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#46 Fast TCP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003k.html#57 Window field in TCP header goes small
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003l.html#42 Thoughts on Utility Computing?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#13 packetloss bad for sliding window protocol ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#37 Why doesn't Infiniband supports RDMA multicast
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#8 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#12 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#13 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005g.html#4 Successful remote AES key extraction
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#22 tcp-ip concept
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#28 tcp-ip concept
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#37 Callable Wait State
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#21 IBM 610 workstation computer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#18 TOD Clock the same as the BIOS clock in PCs?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#46 blast from the past, tcp/ip, project athena and kerberos
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#20 Why I use a Mac, anno 2006
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#58 Computer Clocks
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#19 MAINFRAME Training with IBM Certification and JOB GUARANTEE
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#28 MAINFRAME Training with IBM Certification and JOB GUARANTEE
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008f.html#1 independent appraisers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#39 My Vintage Dream PC
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009m.html#80 A Faster Way to the Cloud
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009m.html#83 A Faster Way to the Cloud
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#68 Happy DEC-10 Day
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#40 Other early NSFNET backbone
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#42 Multiple Virtual Memory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#27 TELSTAR satellite experiment
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#33 TELSTAR satellite experiment
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012g.html#39 Van Jacobson Denies Averting 1980s Internet Meltdown
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012m.html#37 Why File transfer through TSO IND$FILE is slower than TCP/IP FTP ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013i.html#46 OT: "Highway Patrol" back on TV
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013i.html#83 Metcalfe's Law: How Ethernet Beat IBM and Changed the World
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013n.html#30 SNA vs TCP/IP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013n.html#31 SNA vs TCP/IP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013o.html#25 GUI vs 3270 Re: MVS Quick Reference, was: LookAT
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#7 Last Gasp for Hard Disk Drives

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265591 is a reply to message #265576] Fri, 29 August 2014 12:07 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Peter Flass is currently offline  Peter Flass
Messages: 8375
Registered: December 2011
Karma: 0
Senior Member
<hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
> On Friday, August 29, 2014 10:13:13 AM UTC-4, Scott Lurndal wrote:
>
>>> $4k for something like that seems expensive. I remember, at that time,
>>> a colleague buying an "full" IBM XT, with hard drive, 640k, etc., and I
>>> recall she paid $3,000 for it. (I thought that price was obscene for
>>> the capability offered).
>
>> The first XTs in 1984 with a 10MByte hard disk cost $10,000. A friend of mine
>> financed his via the big B credit union.
>
> Perhaps my colleague purchased her XT a year or so later and the price had dropped.
>
> But, frankly, I can't see anyone spending $10,000 in 1984 dollars for
> such a low-powered device. I don't know what it could do to justify the
> purchase price. Now, later on when the prices dropped to a few thou and
> the horsepower increased, the payback was different. Indeed, in those
> days the price drop was very significant in real dollars because of high
> inflation at that time.

It seems low-powered now, but compared to a CoCo, Sinclair, or Ti it was a
behemoth. Even compared to an Apple ][ it was very powerful. I guess
there were some large CP/M or MP/M systems, but they were expensive and
(IME) uncommon. I wouldn't have paid $10K, I waited until prices had
dropped significantly and bought a clone, but then I've never been accused
of being an early-adoptor.

--
Pete
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265608 is a reply to message #265587] Fri, 29 August 2014 13:30 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Stephen Sprunk is currently offline  Stephen Sprunk
Messages: 2166
Registered: March 2013
Karma: 0
Senior Member
On 29-Aug-14 09:52, Morten Reistad wrote:
> <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
>> The above is not exactly accurate. The old Bell System was
>> migrating to software control in 1984. Further, it always had
>> "flexible and adaptive routing" in the network, even with manual
>> control and electro-mechanical switchings. Elecronic switching
>> allowed network management to be faster and more sophisticated.
>
> This is another way of saying connectionoriented vs connectionless.
> This was, and to a point still is, THE major technical schism in
> telecommunications.
>
> It is about what is important.
>
> The "bellheads" all go for connection-oriented networks, where e.g. a
> phone call reserves a connection through all the devices on the way.
> The Internet, on the other hand, is a big sea of packets at the
> physical and link levels.

Connection-oriented networks seem good to humans, who can communicate
with only a handful of people (at least effectively) at the same time,
and generally for long (in computer terms) periods.

OTOH, computers aren't so limited; they can have conversations with
thousands of other computers at the same time, and those conversations
may last only milliseconds. Connectionless networks do much better
under such circumstances.

>> As mentioned, after hurricanes, with electric power out for a week,
>> the traditional landline telephone never stopped working. Other
>> modes can't make that claim.
>
> If we get DSL supply regulated as phone service and some local power
> to the customer premise equipment it will work as well, or better,
> than landline service. Given the solution to the power problem, fiber
> is even better because you can go 40+ km without a repeater at all;
> just using WDM-based add/drop points that are completely passive
> devices in terms of energy use.

After 9/11, phones were down for weeks and even radio and TV had
problems. The Internet worked just fine.

Keep in mind that an important part of the design of the Internet was
the ability to keep functioning through a nuclear war. Service would
obviously be degraded by the loss of each node that was hit, but it
wouldn't fall apart completely like traditional networks do.

S

--
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265609 is a reply to message #265587] Fri, 29 August 2014 13:33 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Stephen Sprunk is currently offline  Stephen Sprunk
Messages: 2166
Registered: March 2013
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Senior Member
On 29-Aug-14 09:52, Morten Reistad wrote:
> <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
>> I really don't think the 'netheads' understand the old Bell System
>> (and old mainframe) philosophy, indeed, if anything they denigrate
>> legacy practices and technology.
>
> Yes, they do. Go read rfc875 "a critique of x.25" for the
> philosophical underpinnings of the connectionless approach.

RFC 874, "A Critique of X.25"
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc875

RFC 875, "Gateways, Architectures, and Heffalumps"
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc875

S

--
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265614 is a reply to message #265554] Fri, 29 August 2014 13:59 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Stephen Sprunk is currently offline  Stephen Sprunk
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On 29-Aug-14 02:28, Jack Myers wrote:
> Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> wrote:
>> It is an error, but for most people, they had no idea there was
>> something out there until the Web was in place.
>
> Yes, and it took years for the web to move from the research labs to
> businesses and then to homes.

Many people "knew" of the Internet, but perhaps not what it was called.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, hundreds of universities connected
and provided free email to all students. Most didn't even know what
that was at first but quickly figured out they could talk with former
classmates at other universities--and with families using commercial
services. A phone call to the same people could cost several dollars
per minute, so that had a huge impact on communications--and
expectations of cost. It was also far, far faster than letters.

When those students left, though, most lost email access, so they pushed
their employers to provide email. Many employers did but had draconian
policies on how it could be used, which forced employees to get
commercial service for personal use, driving that market. Few
executives of the time understood how it would eventually transform
their paper-based business processes.

The WWW was another major step forward for the Internet, but it merely
accelerated a process that had already begun. And again, few execs
understood how it would transform their business.

There are still execs out there that have a secretary print out their
emails and dictate responses, and have probably never used the Web, but
they are literally a dying breed.

S

--
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265616 is a reply to message #265591] Fri, 29 August 2014 13:31 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Ahem A Rivet's Shot is currently offline  Ahem A Rivet's Shot
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Senior Member
On Fri, 29 Aug 2014 16:07:53 +0000 (UTC)
Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> wrote:

> <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
>> On Friday, August 29, 2014 10:13:13 AM UTC-4, Scott Lurndal wrote:
>>
>>>> $4k for something like that seems expensive. I remember, at that
>>>> time, a colleague buying an "full" IBM XT, with hard drive, 640k,
>>>> etc., and I recall she paid $3,000 for it. (I thought that price was
>>>> obscene for the capability offered).
>>
>>> The first XTs in 1984 with a 10MByte hard disk cost $10,000. A
>>> friend of mine financed his via the big B credit union.
>>
>> Perhaps my colleague purchased her XT a year or so later and the price
>> had dropped.
>>
>> But, frankly, I can't see anyone spending $10,000 in 1984 dollars for
>> such a low-powered device. I don't know what it could do to justify the
>> purchase price. Now, later on when the prices dropped to a few thou and
>> the horsepower increased, the payback was different. Indeed, in those
>> days the price drop was very significant in real dollars because of high
>> inflation at that time.
>
> It seems low-powered now, but compared to a CoCo, Sinclair, or Ti it was a
> behemoth. Even compared to an Apple ][ it was very powerful. I guess

I raced an IBM XT against a 6MHz Z80 machine running CP/M with
256K of banked switched RAM running an MDBS III database application. The
CP/M machine won hands down. The IBM XT was not a particularly powerful
machine of it's day.

> there were some large CP/M or MP/M systems, but they were expensive and
> (IME) uncommon.

Indeed there were, in 1982 at Torch we had a machine (Micromation
IIRC) with several Z80 cards each with 64K - one ran MP/M and managed the
system farming tasks out to the others which ran CP/M. A little later there
were several CP/M and MP/M machines around that could give an XT a run for
it's money on one CPU and a number of multi-machine systems such as
Televideo's MMMOST based networks which did things for multiple users that
an XT or even an AT couldn't hope to match, it took the 386 and XENIX to
knock them off their perches.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays
C:>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265632 is a reply to message #265616] Fri, 29 August 2014 15:35 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel is currently offline  Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel
Messages: 3156
Registered: January 2012
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Senior Member
Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
> Indeed there were, in 1982 at Torch we had a machine (Micromation
> IIRC) with several Z80 cards each with 64K - one ran MP/M and managed the
> system farming tasks out to the others which ran CP/M. A little later there
> were several CP/M and MP/M machines around that could give an XT a run for
> it's money on one CPU and a number of multi-machine systems such as
> Televideo's MMMOST based networks which did things for multiple users that
> an XT or even an AT couldn't hope to match, it took the 386 and XENIX to
> knock them off their perches.

mp/m
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=MP/M

I've heard folklore claims in the valley that some people in the valley
that worked on vm370 also worked on mp/m

.... and as I've periodically referenced that killdall worked on cp67/cms at navy
post graduate school ... a couple recent refs
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#103 Microsoft publishes MS-DOS, Word for Windows source code
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#95 Is end of mainframe near ?

from recent thread in "closed" linkedin "IBM Historic Computing" group
thread titled "33 years ago yesterday the IBM PC was introduced" ...
i recently posted:

A software group was formed in (ibm) silicon valley to do software for
Acorn and every couple months it would validate with Boca that Boca
wasn't interested in doing software. This continued for some time
.... until Boca changed its mind and said that it wanted to control
software fro Acorn ... either directly by internal groups reporting to
Boca and/or through external contracts. Most of the people in silicon
valley weren't interested in being part of Boca.

.... snip ...

"Acorn" was the unannounced IBM/PC code name. other posts mentioning
"Acorn"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#79 Coulda, Woulda, Shoudda moments?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#31 diffence between itanium and alpha
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#9 IBM says AMD dead in 5yrs ... -- Microsoft Monopoly vs. IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#19 PC history, was PDP10 and RISC
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#16 unix
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#24 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#27 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#8 Intel strikes back with a parallel x86 design
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#48 Hey! Keep Your Hands Out Of My Abstraction Layer!
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#45 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#41 Device Authentication - The answer to attacks lauched using stolen passwords?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#29 "The Elements of Programming Style"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#31 "The Elements of Programming Style"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#44 Is computer history taugh now?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#5 Is computer history taugh now?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007p.html#35 Newsweek article--baby boomers and computers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#24 What if the computers went back to the '70s too?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#25 What if the computers went back to the '70s too?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013j.html#58 What Makes a Tax System Bizarre?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014g.html#73 After the Sun (Microsystems) Sets, the Real Stories Come Out

recent posts in this thread:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#59 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#60 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#61 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#62 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#63 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#66 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#68 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#69 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265635 is a reply to message #265608] Fri, 29 August 2014 16:21 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Morten Reistad is currently offline  Morten Reistad
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Senior Member
In article <ltqdb9$c4g$1@dont-email.me>,
Stephen Sprunk <stephen@sprunk.org> wrote:
> On 29-Aug-14 09:52, Morten Reistad wrote:
>> <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
>>> The above is not exactly accurate. The old Bell System was
>>> migrating to software control in 1984. Further, it always had
>>> "flexible and adaptive routing" in the network, even with manual
>>> control and electro-mechanical switchings. Elecronic switching
>>> allowed network management to be faster and more sophisticated.
>>
>> This is another way of saying connectionoriented vs connectionless.
>> This was, and to a point still is, THE major technical schism in
>> telecommunications.
>>
>> It is about what is important.
>>
>> The "bellheads" all go for connection-oriented networks, where e.g. a
>> phone call reserves a connection through all the devices on the way.
>> The Internet, on the other hand, is a big sea of packets at the
>> physical and link levels.
>
> Connection-oriented networks seem good to humans, who can communicate
> with only a handful of people (at least effectively) at the same time,
> and generally for long (in computer terms) periods.
>
> OTOH, computers aren't so limited; they can have conversations with
> thousands of other computers at the same time, and those conversations
> may last only milliseconds. Connectionless networks do much better
> under such circumstances.

Phone networks are going connectionless too. POTS networks are
rather far gone towards being SIP/RTP on closed IP networks now,
and all GSM mobile at 3G and beyond are hybrid IPv6 networks
internally.
>
>>> As mentioned, after hurricanes, with electric power out for a week,
>>> the traditional landline telephone never stopped working. Other
>>> modes can't make that claim.
>>
>> If we get DSL supply regulated as phone service and some local power
>> to the customer premise equipment it will work as well, or better,
>> than landline service. Given the solution to the power problem, fiber
>> is even better because you can go 40+ km without a repeater at all;
>> just using WDM-based add/drop points that are completely passive
>> devices in terms of energy use.
>
> After 9/11, phones were down for weeks and even radio and TV had
> problems. The Internet worked just fine.
>
> Keep in mind that an important part of the design of the Internet was
> the ability to keep functioning through a nuclear war. Service would
> obviously be degraded by the loss of each node that was hit, but it
> wouldn't fall apart completely like traditional networks do.

Being able to function in and after a nuclear war did not mean
doing so without service interruptions, but to be simple and
straightforward to bring back up again.

IP does this just fine, and has done so since 1982.

-- mrr
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265656 is a reply to message #265583] Fri, 29 August 2014 17:38 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Charles Richmond is currently offline  Charles Richmond
Messages: 2754
Registered: December 2011
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Senior Member
"Walter Banks" <walter@bytecraft.com> wrote in message
news:54009415.DF6DE603@bytecraft.com...
> Scott Lurndal wrote:
>
>> hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
>>> On Thursday, August 28, 2014 11:19:07 AM UTC-4, timca...@aol.com wrote:
>>>> In 1984 the place I worked at sold terminals for Burroughs systems
>>>> considerably
>>>> below what Burroughs charged for their terminals. I believe the
>>>> price was
>>>> something like $1700, and they were sold with very little profit (if
>>>> any).
>>>> It seems unlikely that IBM would charge as little as $1000 for a 3270.
>>>
>>> I am going solely by memory, but in 1984 we were installing a new
>>> mainframe
>
>> system and acquiring terminals. I do remember the $1,000 price because
>> it represented
>
>> a cutoff, and the competition (Telex) was noticeably cheaper.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Also in 1984 I bought my first micro. A Zenith Z-100. 8088, 192K of
>>>> memory,
>>>> 10Meg hard disk, color monitor: $4500 with the educational discount.
>>>> It was a very good price for that system for several years (even
>>>> when compared against IBM-PC & clones). (Yeah, I still have it, it has
>>>> had a few upgrades since then :) ).
>>>
>>> $4k for something like that seems expensive. I remember, at that time,
>>> a colleague
>
>> buying an "full" IBM XT, with hard drive, 640k, etc., and I recall she
>> paid $3,000 for it.
>
>> (I thought that price was obscene for the capability offered).
>>>
>>
>> The first XTs in 1984 with a 10MByte hard disk cost $10,000. A friend
>> of mine
>> financed his via the big B credit union.
>>
>
> I am not sure what was in his system. I bought a very early XT system and
> paid
> about $6K I think with 64K of memory 10M HD and IBM monitor. It is
> possible
> that I added memory after the purchase.
>

I have an old Radio Shack Computer Store catalog. It listed a 64k Model 3
TRS-80 for $1999.95. The 10 meg hard disk in a shoebox enclosure was listed
for $3000.

--

numerist at aquaporin4 dot com
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265672 is a reply to message #265560] Fri, 29 August 2014 18:50 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anonymous
Karma:
Originally posted by: Jack Myers

Morten Reistad <first@last.name> wrote:
> In article <3mm5db-6sf.ln1@n6wuz.net>, Jack Myers <jmyers@n6wuz.net> wrote:
>> Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 28 Aug 2014, Quadibloc wrote:
>>
>>>> On Thursday, August 28, 2014 7:20:22 AM UTC-6, Anne & Lynn Wheeler quoted, in part:
>>>>
>>>> > In fact, 1984 was 10 years before the World Wide Web (commonly called
>>>> > the internet) was born.
>>>>
>>>> But it wasn't until 1989, five years after 1984, that any of the unwashed
>>>> masses could connect to the Internet - when the very first dial-up ISP opened
>>>> for business. So in 1984, the Internet existed, but it was just for a few
>>>> fortunate people in academia.
>>>>
>>> And that's really where the comment comes from, common access and the
>>> popularity of the internet came with the Web.
....
>>> It is an error, but for most people, they had no idea there was something
>>> out there until the Web was in place.

>> *Yes*, and it took years for the web to move from the research labs to
>> businesses and then to homes.

> *No*. I was almost there, but know the people who said no to taking
> over world-wide exclusive rights to the www from Cern in late 1991,
> propmting Cern to have some (then) juniors develop the web server
> and a graphical browser. It was all unveiled less than two years
> later, in Paris Interop in fall 1993, in a BOF session sponsored by
> Cisco.

> The graphical browser and the server rewrite took about 18 months.

> By November of 1993 it was all becoming the www we know today.

OK, *yes and no*.

We all could see the potential of the web, but I had the following
anectdote in mind:

An acquaintance, a graphic artist, was casting around for something more
challenging to do. I suggested moving into computer graphics. "This
worldwide web is going to be a big, big thing."

She didn't want anything to do with computers.

A decade later DSL reached the San Francisco Outer Mission, she had a PC
at home, and she had just rented a spare room on Craigslist. She
reminded me of our previous conversation. "Years went by and I didn't
hear any more about the web, but now it's everywhere."

We were coming from an era where most technical people had been lead to
believed that a high-bandwidth retrofit of the existing twisted-pair
network was simply not feasible. Everybody knew there was a limit to
what could be sent over a voice circuit. The chimera that was always
just beyone the event horizon, ISDN, could speed up most internet
services, but the web needed more than that.

--
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not i
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. --Dwight Eisenhower, 1953
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265675 is a reply to message #265672] Fri, 29 August 2014 19:18 Go to previous messageGo to next message
wfw is currently offline  wfw
Messages: 125
Registered: March 2005
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Senior Member
On 8/29/2014 5:50 PM, Jack Myers wrote:
> Morten Reistad <first@last.name> wrote:
> We all could see the potential of the web, but I had the following
> anectdote in mind:
>
> An acquaintance, a graphic artist, was casting around for something more
> challenging to do. I suggested moving into computer graphics. "This
> worldwide web is going to be a big, big thing."
>
> She didn't want anything to do with computers.
>
> A decade later DSL reached the San Francisco Outer Mission, she had a PC
> at home, and she had just rented a spare room on Craigslist. She
> reminded me of our previous conversation. "Years went by and I didn't
> hear any more about the web, but now it's everywhere."
>
> We were coming from an era where most technical people had been lead to
> believed that a high-bandwidth retrofit of the existing twisted-pair
> network was simply not feasible. Everybody knew there was a limit to
> what could be sent over a voice circuit. The chimera that was always
> just beyone the event horizon, ISDN, could speed up most internet
> services, but the web needed more than that.
>

I remember predicting to one of my wife's outgoing personality aunts in the 1990's
that she would love email someday. I got the expected response that she would
never want a computer. I just smiled and let it go. Today she fills my email box
with trivia and runs her own Ebay store.
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265680 is a reply to message #265554] Fri, 29 August 2014 22:09 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Yeechang Lee is currently offline  Yeechang Lee
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Jack Myers wrote:
> Don't forget that long-haul telecommunications prices dropped
> significantly during that period.

How much did the "long-distance wars" of the era between AT&T, MCI,
Sprint, and others contribute to this? Or is it the other way around,
with consumers and data traffic both benefiting equally from
technological advances? I guess I'm asking how much post-divestiture
telecom competition influenced the growth of data traffic in the 1980s
and early 1990s.
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265681 is a reply to message #265614] Fri, 29 August 2014 22:37 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Michael Black is currently offline  Michael Black
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Senior Member
On Fri, 29 Aug 2014, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

> On 29-Aug-14 02:28, Jack Myers wrote:
>> Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> wrote:
>>> It is an error, but for most people, they had no idea there was
>>> something out there until the Web was in place.
>>
>> Yes, and it took years for the web to move from the research labs to
>> businesses and then to homes.
>
> Many people "knew" of the Internet, but perhaps not what it was called.
>
> In the late 1980s and early 1990s, hundreds of universities connected
> and provided free email to all students. Most didn't even know what
> that was at first but quickly figured out they could talk with former
> classmates at other universities--and with families using commercial
> services. A phone call to the same people could cost several dollars
> per minute, so that had a huge impact on communications--and
> expectations of cost. It was also far, far faster than letters.
>
> When those students left, though, most lost email access, so they pushed
> their employers to provide email. Many employers did but had draconian
> policies on how it could be used, which forced employees to get
> commercial service for personal use, driving that market. Few
> executives of the time understood how it would eventually transform
> their paper-based business processes.
>
That seems an important story.

When the Ottawa Freenet began in 1993, it was very early in the timeline
of internet access to the masses. I'm in Montreal, but there were
probably 2 ISPs at that time, basically glorified BBSs stuck in a closet
somewhere.

Yet once set up, the Ottawa Freenet was deluged with people wanting to
join. They didn't need hardware or technical help, they needed the
access.

I've always interpreted that as meaning there was a pool of people without
access but who'd had access or knew someone with access, so they were
familiar with it all. ONce they could get access, they did.

That contrats with Montreal, where in 1994 a group got together to create
a Montreal Freenet, based on what was happening in Ottawa. They even
aimed high, since they'd seen the growing pains in Ottawa as it rapidly
had to expand. So the Montreal group got provincial money, the largest
amount of any Freenet, but for various reasons, it took till August of
1996 for the money to arrive and the project to get online.

That's a massive difference from 1993. There were a lot of small local
ISPs by then, and Bell and the cable company had already made inroads
(sometimes by buying a small existing ISP). If I recall, many of the
small ISPs had been consolidated by 1996. So the Montreal Freenet lasted
four months, a massive failure. IN waiting for the big money for a big
system, they lost the early adopters who know of the internet, but had no
access. IN 1994, they'd have rushed to the Montreal Freenet. By 1996,
anyone who had the money was already at an ISP. So they lost that early
inrush of users, but also the early inrush of people willing to help
(which should have come from the early inrush of members). It gave me
internet access for the first time, but they couldn't sustain it for the
needed growth to happen. And the people who weren't online at that point
where the ones who needed much more help, to be convinced they needed the
internet, and to bring them in.

SOmetime in 1994, I'm pretty sure before the announcement that a group
would be creating a Montreal Freenet (that announcement came in the fall
of 1994), the general population did hear about the internet. At least,
that's what I remember, and since I knew about it, I'm pretty sure I'd
notice if it had come some other way. A women's group went to the press
to point out that there was porn on the internet, and suddenly people who
were first hearing about the internet heard about it in negative terms "we
have to do something about it, let's make rules". The women's group never
gave thought to how if porn can travel so easily on the internet, why
arent' they using it for their own cause?

Of course, we were kind of backward here in Montreal. There was no
internet here until Peter Deutsch (of Bunyip fame, not the one in Steven
Levy's "Hackers") and some others hooked them up in 1987. I think that
was the first instance of the INternet in Montreal; I know I later read an
article that credited him with bringing it here. So by 1991, at least,
there was an ISP as we know it, though obviously a tad too early for the
masses to notice.

Michael
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265684 is a reply to message #265656] Fri, 29 August 2014 23:03 Go to previous messageGo to next message
hancock4 is currently offline  hancock4
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On Friday, August 29, 2014 5:38:19 PM UTC-4, Charles Richmond wrote:

> I have an old Radio Shack Computer Store catalog. It listed a 64k Model 3 TRS-80 for $1999.95. The 10 meg hard disk in a shoebox enclosure was listed for $3000.

Sometimes the "list price" for expensive items is higher than the actual selling price at the store.
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265685 is a reply to message #265680] Fri, 29 August 2014 23:22 Go to previous messageGo to next message
hancock4 is currently offline  hancock4
Messages: 6746
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Senior Member
On Friday, August 29, 2014 10:09:42 PM UTC-4, Yeechang Lee wrote:

> How much did the "long-distance wars" of the era between AT&T, MCI, Sprint, and others contribute to this?

Far less than people think. Long distance rates dropped substantially in the 1980s for two main reasons:

1) Technological progress. The same factors that led to large drops in the price of electronics (and computers) made the equipment used for toll calls to be much cheaper yet more sophisticated and efficient; making the overall cost cheaper. As rates went down, call volume went up, leading to improved economies of scale.
Note that this wasn't anything new, but a continuation of progress since WW II. The Bell System had been continually lowering toll rates thanks to improved technology. The Bell System Technical Journal, available on-line, has many articles describing improvements that were developed before Divestiture, but deployed afterwards. For instance, the No. 4 ESS toll switch was a powerful tool. Later, fibre optic lines saved money.

2) Changed policy: Before Divestiture, toll rates cross subsidized local service. After Divestiture, this no longer took place, allowing toll rates to drop (and forcing local rates to increase, such as through the "FCC Line Charge")
Another policy change was charging more for special services, such as operator handled calls and long distance directory assistance. The old Bell System saw operators as a vital part of the system to serve callers. The post-Divestiture company couldn't afford that luxury.


> Or is it the other way around, with consumers and data traffic both benefiting equally from technological advances? I guess I'm asking how much post-divestiture telecom competition influenced the growth of data traffic in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Real time data transmission from one computer to another was expensive; each computer needed adequate horsepower to handle activity in real-time (as opposed to batch processing). But the cost of computers and auxillary gear dropped dramatically in the 1980s and their horsepower went up, so it became practical to support much more real-time services. More and more computers were interconnected, and more end-users had on-line terminals on their desks with access to more information. Industry was developing real-time applications in the 1980s that simply would've been too expensive to do earlier. All of this led to increased data traffic. At the same time, data lines and modems became faster and more reliable, contributing to the growth. Analog lines were replaced with digital lines.
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265686 is a reply to message #265554] Fri, 29 August 2014 23:39 Go to previous messageGo to next message
hancock4 is currently offline  hancock4
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On Friday, August 29, 2014 3:28:35 AM UTC-4, Jack Myers wrote:

> Yes, and it took years for the web to move from the research labs to businesses and then to homes.

Actually, decades.

Many of the services provided to consumers today via the Internet were conceived and publicized in the early 1960s. Back then, the services were expected to be provided by giant "public utility" computers in a time-sharing mode, reached by either Teletype or a Touch Tone telephone keypad.

IMHO, it basically took a long time because real-time computing was extremely expensive and it took years until the price dropped to be affordable.

In the 1960s, order entry was often done by batch processing and the mail.

Later, in the 1970s, more on-line entry was done. For instance, a business would have an 800 number and operators to enter customer orders from a hard copy catalog into a company computer for fulfillment. But, those screens back then were "green on glass", heavily abbreviated with codes, and not at all practical for an untrained customer at home to use. Further, the company computer only had to support the maximum number of clerks it employed, not a widespread public ordering all at once. In addition, the hardware for a terminal in the customer's home was very expensive in those days.

I dare say if the Internet--a system to connect everyone together--didn't exist, then we would have lots of dial up options for various vendors. It would be a little more cumbersome than merely typing in a URL, but otherwise it would work the same way.

Perhaps there would be "public utility" services, as Compuserve and Prodigy aspired to be, acting as a central site.
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265687 is a reply to message #265684] Fri, 29 August 2014 23:57 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Michael Black is currently offline  Michael Black
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On Fri, 29 Aug 2014, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:

> On Friday, August 29, 2014 5:38:19 PM UTC-4, Charles Richmond wrote:
>
>> I have an old Radio Shack Computer Store catalog. It listed a 64k Model 3 TRS-80 for $1999.95. The 10 meg hard disk in a shoebox enclosure was listed for $3000.
>
> Sometimes the "list price" for expensive items is higher than the actual
> selling price at the store.
>
>
But at Radio Shack, it wsa the regular price. It likely did go on sale
from time to time, but the price in the catalog was the regular price.

Michael
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265699 is a reply to message #265672] Sat, 30 August 2014 04:51 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Charles Richmond is currently offline  Charles Richmond
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"Jack Myers" <jmyers@n6wuz.net> wrote in message
news:smc7db-b6a.ln1@n6wuz.net...
>
> [snip...] [snip...]
> [snip...]
>
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
> signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
> fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. --Dwight Eisenhower, 1953

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It's spending the sweat
of it's laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
-- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

--

numerist at aquaporin4 dot com
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265702 is a reply to message #265675] Sat, 30 August 2014 04:55 Go to previous messageGo to next message
GreyMaus is currently offline  GreyMaus
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On 2014-08-29, Texas <a@b.com> wrote:
> On 8/29/2014 5:50 PM, Jack Myers wrote:
>> Morten Reistad <first@last.name> wrote:
>> We all could see the potential of the web, but I had the following
>> anectdote in mind:
>>
>> An acquaintance, a graphic artist, was casting around for something more
>> challenging to do. I suggested moving into computer graphics. "This
>> worldwide web is going to be a big, big thing."
>>
>> She didn't want anything to do with computers.
>>
>> A decade later DSL reached the San Francisco Outer Mission, she had a PC
>> at home, and she had just rented a spare room on Craigslist. She
>> reminded me of our previous conversation. "Years went by and I didn't
>> hear any more about the web, but now it's everywhere."
>>
>> We were coming from an era where most technical people had been lead to
>> believed that a high-bandwidth retrofit of the existing twisted-pair
>> network was simply not feasible. Everybody knew there was a limit to
>> what could be sent over a voice circuit. The chimera that was always
>> just beyone the event horizon, ISDN, could speed up most internet
>> services, but the web needed more than that.
>>
>
> I remember predicting to one of my wife's outgoing personality aunts in the 1990's
> that she would love email someday. I got the expected response that she would
> never want a computer. I just smiled and let it go. Today she fills my email box
> with trivia and runs her own Ebay store.
>
>
>

OTOH, some critical systems are going back to Fax.. unhackable, discreet,
and a clear path.


--
Maus
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265710 is a reply to message #265702] Sat, 30 August 2014 05:45 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Andrew Swallow is currently offline  Andrew Swallow
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On 30/08/2014 09:55, greymaus wrote:
> On 2014-08-29, Texas <a@b.com> wrote:
>> On 8/29/2014 5:50 PM, Jack Myers wrote:
>>> Morten Reistad <first@last.name> wrote:
>>> We all could see the potential of the web, but I had the following
>>> anectdote in mind:
>>>
>>> An acquaintance, a graphic artist, was casting around for something more
>>> challenging to do. I suggested moving into computer graphics. "This
>>> worldwide web is going to be a big, big thing."
>>>
>>> She didn't want anything to do with computers.
>>>
>>> A decade later DSL reached the San Francisco Outer Mission, she had a PC
>>> at home, and she had just rented a spare room on Craigslist. She
>>> reminded me of our previous conversation. "Years went by and I didn't
>>> hear any more about the web, but now it's everywhere."
>>>
>>> We were coming from an era where most technical people had been lead to
>>> believed that a high-bandwidth retrofit of the existing twisted-pair
>>> network was simply not feasible. Everybody knew there was a limit to
>>> what could be sent over a voice circuit. The chimera that was always
>>> just beyone the event horizon, ISDN, could speed up most internet
>>> services, but the web needed more than that.
>>>
>>
>> I remember predicting to one of my wife's outgoing personality aunts in the 1990's
>> that she would love email someday. I got the expected response that she would
>> never want a computer. I just smiled and let it go. Today she fills my email box
>> with trivia and runs her own Ebay store.
>>
>>
>>
>
> OTOH, some critical systems are going back to Fax.. unhackable, discreet,
> and a clear path.
>
>
It is easy for the government to order the phone company to tap the link.
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265714 is a reply to message #265454] Sat, 30 August 2014 08:18 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Charlie Gibbs is currently offline  Charlie Gibbs
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On 2014-08-29, Soupe du Jour <soupedujour2000@gmail.com.invalid> wrote:

> I dialed into local BBSs that were Fidonet nodes, or later on nodes of
> other echo nets, and it made me very aware of the international nature
> of networks. I exchanged messages with quite a few people in other
> countries at the time.
>
> However, it wasn't until I was on the Internet that things like e-mail
> worked immediately. I could have a conversation with someone in
> another country and have e-mails passing back and forth as fast as we
> could read and type. So the Internet was much more live in the way it
> allowed long-distance interactions between people.

I was aware of Fidonet but never got into it, being content with
local BBSes in the mid '80s. However, one large BBS, Mind Link,
connected itself to the backbone in 1989, making several newsgroups
look like local forums. That's when I first appeared here in a.f.c.

--
/~\ cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265717 is a reply to message #265482] Sat, 30 August 2014 08:18 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Charlie Gibbs is currently offline  Charlie Gibbs
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On 2014-08-28, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, August 28, 2014 10:24:57 AM UTC-4, Seymour J. Shmuel Metz wrote:
>
>>> In fact, 1984 was 10 years before the World Wide Web (commonly
>>> called the internet)
>>
>> The web is not and never was the Internet.
>
> True. But I think in the minds of the vast majority of today's users,
> the web is the Internet; indeed, the terms are used interchangeably.

You forgot e-mail; in most users' minds, the Internet is the Web
plus e-mail. Mind you, for those who use webmail exclusively,
even that distinction has become blurred.

--
/~\ cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265724 is a reply to message #265717] Sat, 30 August 2014 11:01 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Michael Black is currently offline  Michael Black
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On Sat, 30 Aug 2014, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2014-08-28, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thursday, August 28, 2014 10:24:57 AM UTC-4, Seymour J. Shmuel Metz wrote:
>>
>>>> In fact, 1984 was 10 years before the World Wide Web (commonly
>>>> called the internet)
>>>
>>> The web is not and never was the Internet.
>>
>> True. But I think in the minds of the vast majority of today's users,
>> the web is the Internet; indeed, the terms are used interchangeably.
>
> You forgot e-mail; in most users' minds, the Internet is the Web
> plus e-mail. Mind you, for those who use webmail exclusively,
> even that distinction has become blurred.
>
But doesn't it depend on when someone arrived?

As access increased, and the internet popularized, I think there was a
period when email was a key reason to get online. The people who wanted
to keep in touch with their grandparents, and the like. These were the
people who didn't write their grandparents, so at best email replaced
phoning them.

I remember coming across specialized mailing lists from local groups in
1996 or so, the PIRG had one, a Jewish group had one. So people could
come to the internet, but really stay in their own circles, except when
they went shopping on the web.

I think later, email has been lowered in status. Just like 20 years ago
and if anyone talked about Usenet in a mainstream place it would be "too
much spam, too much flaming", now people complain about 'too much spam" in
the email. So they want to use other things. Lots of commercial webpages
don't have an email address, you have to use a form on their page, though
they'll send you email. Or people are announcing their "twitter handle"
where they can be contacted.

I'm not sure if that's a generational thing (internet generation that is)
where people coming after a certain point have no time for email, or the
mass having decided email is too much trouble.

I tried to email someone at the local paper last week, following the
scheme for addressing email to staff, and it bounced. Gone is the time
when the online byline would provide the email address, and gone is the
time when the email addresses were listed on that contact page. It is as
if they don't want to bother with email.

Michael
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265743 is a reply to message #265714] Sat, 30 August 2014 15:55 Go to previous messageGo to next message
GreyMaus is currently offline  GreyMaus
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On 2014-08-30, Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:
> On 2014-08-29, Soupe du Jour <soupedujour2000@gmail.com.invalid> wrote:
>
>> I dialed into local BBSs that were Fidonet nodes, or later on nodes of
>> other echo nets, and it made me very aware of the international nature
>> of networks. I exchanged messages with quite a few people in other
>> countries at the time.
>>
>> However, it wasn't until I was on the Internet that things like e-mail
>> worked immediately. I could have a conversation with someone in
>> another country and have e-mails passing back and forth as fast as we
>> could read and type. So the Internet was much more live in the way it
>> allowed long-distance interactions between people.
>
> I was aware of Fidonet but never got into it, being content with
> local BBSes in the mid '80s. However, one large BBS, Mind Link,
> connected itself to the backbone in 1989, making several newsgroups
> look like local forums. That's when I first appeared here in a.f.c.
>

news.individual.net has lots of fido sites, gatewayed I suppose.[*]
Before broadband, fido was the best ssolution.



[*] mostly east of the oder-neisse.

--
Maus
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265746 is a reply to message #265699] Sat, 30 August 2014 10:26 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel is currently offline  Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel
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"Charles Richmond" <numerist@aquaporin4.com> writes:
> This world in arms is not spending money alone. It's spending the sweat
> of it's laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
> -- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

i.e. in his "good by" speech he warned about the "military industrial"
complex (diverting enormous resources into their pockets) ... folklore
is that he originally was going to say "military industrial
congressional" complex ... but shortened it at the last minute.

past posts mentioning "military industrial congressional" complex
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#military.industrial .complex
associated theme is MICC objective for "perpetual war" to keep
revenue flowing
http:///www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#perpetual.war

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265748 is a reply to message #265685] Sat, 30 August 2014 09:52 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel is currently offline  Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel
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hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
> Real time data transmission from one computer to another was
> expensive; each computer needed adequate horsepower to handle activity
> in real-time (as opposed to batch processing). But the cost of
> computers and auxillary gear dropped dramatically in the 1980s and
> their horsepower went up, so it became practical to support much more
> real-time services. More and more computers were interconnected, and
> more end-users had on-line terminals on their desks with access to
> more information. Industry was developing real-time applications in
> the 1980s that simply would've been too expensive to do earlier. All
> of this led to increased data traffic. At the same time, data lines
> and modems became faster and more reliable, contributing to the
> growth. Analog lines were replaced with digital lines.

sprint layed fiber along railroad right-of-ways ... and others started
putting in fiber. enormous capacity came available. in the early 80s
there started to appear references to "dark fiber" ... fiber that was
just sitting there unused ("dark", "unlit", fiber bundle capacity
enormously larger than same dimension copper bundle).

old email from later part of 80s ... and the appearance of T3

Date: 01/25/89 16:50
To: wheeler
SUBJECT: Your Note to "Tony" On T-1 Analysis

OK, nice. I might "quibble" with your comments on "low-balling". The
decline in inter-LATA communications costs are quite consistent across
the market -- long distance calls as well as data. The "long distance
subsidy" of local service is being phased out. intra-LATA rates for high
speed circuits are also dropping (the local carriers are monopolies and
are NOT driven by "market share competition). Furthermore, IBM has/is
been negotiating long term "bulk rate" contracts with the carriers. In
addition, the carriers are beginning to offer tarrifs for DS-3 (45mbps)
and even "dark fiber" -- it has always been advantageous to the carriers
to "sell in bulk" and there is no reason to doubt that this won't
continue. The carriers' fiber networks are quite extensive now --
almost complete and they suddenly have VAST bandwidth available.

I think the price drops are real and will continue (although not at
the same precipitous rates of the past 2-3 years).

.... snip ...

it was around 85 time-frame when noticed that tariff for leased T1 was
about the same as 5-6 56kbit (sort of the "bulk rate" contracts theme).
http://www.garlic.com/2014j.html#66 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984

I've mentioned before internal politics prevented us from bidding on the
original NSF contract to connect the NSF supercomputer centers ...
which morphs into NSFNET backbone as regional networks start connecting
to the nodes (and precursor to the modern internet). The winner of that
contract didn't actually install T1 links ... they installed 440kbit
links and then sort of to appear to meet the letter of the RFP installed
T1 trunks and used telco multiplexors to run multiple 440kbit links).
Even the director of NSF (with backing from other agencies) wasn't able
to overcome the internal political problems. past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#nsfnet

Then NSF releases RFP for upgrade to T3 (nsfnet-II/nsfnet-2). I'd been
making lots of snide remarks about the existing implementation ... so
possibly contributed to being asked to be the "red team" for NSFNET2
response (possibly planning on showing me up). The "blue team" was
couple dozen people from half dozen labs around the world. At the final
executive review, I presented first followed by the blue team. 5-10
minutes into the "blue team" presentation, the executive pounded on the
table and said he would lay down in front of a garbage truck before he
allowed anything but the "blue team" response to go forward (provided me
and a few others the justification to leave the room).

past posts mentioning being "red team" for NSFNET2 (t3 upgrade)
response:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#37a Internet and/or ARPANET?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004g.html#12 network history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#1 Xah Lee's Unixism
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#13 Cerf and Kahn receive Turing award
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#53 OSI model and an interview
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#38 The Pankian Metaphor
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#12 Barbaras (mini-)rant
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#18 TOD Clock the same as the BIOS clock in PCs?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#56 Ranking of non-IBM mainframe builders?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#69 nouns and adjectives
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008g.html#42 Was CMS multi-tasking?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009l.html#47 SNA: conflicting opinions
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#10 Happy DEC-10 Day
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#34 Colossal Cave Adventure in PL/I
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#66 IBM100 - Rise of the Internet
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#34 Early mainframe tcp/ip support (from ibm-main mailing list)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012f.html#54 Hard Disk Drive Construction
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012g.html#23 VM Workshop 2012
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012k.html#11 Obama Was Right: The Government Invented the Internet
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012o.html#48 PC/mainframe browser(s) was Re: 360/20, was 1132 printerhistory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013d.html#52 Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Internet, 1974
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#3 We need to talk about TED

other posts in this thread:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#59 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#60 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#61 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#62 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#63 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#66 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#68 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#69 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#71 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265749 is a reply to message #265686] Sat, 30 August 2014 10:22 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel is currently offline  Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel
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Senior Member
hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
> Actually, decades.
>
> Many of the services provided to consumers today via the Internet were
> conceived and publicized in the early 1960s. Back then, the services
> were expected to be provided by giant "public utility" computers in a
> time-sharing mode, reached by either Teletype or a Touch Tone
> telephone keypad.
>
> IMHO, it basically took a long time because real-time computing was
> extremely expensive and it took years until the price dropped to be
> affordable.
>
> In the 1960s, order entry was often done by batch processing and the mail.
>
> Later, in the 1970s, more on-line entry was done. For instance, a
> business would have an 800 number and operators to enter customer
> orders from a hard copy catalog into a company computer for
> fulfillment. But, those screens back then were "green on glass",
> heavily abbreviated with codes, and not at all practical for an
> untrained customer at home to use. Further, the company computer only
> had to support the maximum number of clerks it employed, not a
> widespread public ordering all at once. In addition, the hardware for
> a terminal in the customer's home was very expensive in those days.
>
> I dare say if the Internet--a system to connect everyone
> together--didn't exist, then we would have lots of dial up options for
> various vendors. It would be a little more cumbersome than merely
> typing in a URL, but otherwise it would work the same way.
>
> Perhaps there would be "public utility" services, as Compuserve and
> Prodigy aspired to be, acting as a central site.

simple chip processors enabled drastic drop in price/performance
computing power ... and enabled all sorts of vendors to start producing
PCs, workstations, and mini-computers (and little later appearance of
supercomputers with massive numbers of single chip computers).

drastical drop in prices result in growing explosion in PCs and
workstation ... along with corresponding drop in telco prices helps grow
the spreading internet capacity.

I've periodically referred to "NSFNET" had "acceptable use" policies
that tried to prevent commercial use. Part of that actual resources put
into original ("T1") NSFNET was 4-5 times the RFP ... basically telcos
contributing/donating enormous additional resources. Part of the issue
was telcos had significant fixed capital costs and monthly operational
costs ... which were recovered based on tarrifed "use charges". The
enormous available capacity (in large part provided to change-over to
fiber) wasn't being used because of the lack of high-bandwidth
applications. The telcos were in sort of chicken&egg situation, to
enormously increase use, they would have to drastically reduce the "use
charges" ... but the transition could take a decade while they would
operate in the red. The NSFNET then became a technology incubator
.... allow lots of people to use it effectively for free which would
provide an environment for the evolution/birth of the newer generation of
bandwidth hungry applications. posts mentioning NSFNET
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#nsfnet

in the early 90s, we were doing cluster scaleup ... reference
here regarding meeting in Ellison's conference room Jan1992
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13
in our ha/cmp project
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

then over a period of a couple weeks, the cluster scaleup is
transferred, announced as supercomputer (for scientific and technical
only ... preempting the commerical use) and we are told we can't work on
anything with more than four processors ... some old email ... also
showing we were involved with national labs for scientific and technical.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

which contribute significantly to our decision to leave. A little later
two of the other people (from Ellison's meeting) also leave and are at a
small client/server startup responsible for something called the
"commerce server". We are brought in as consultants because they want to
do payment transactions on the server, the startup had also invented
this technology called "SSL" they wanted to use ... the result is now
frequently called "electronic commerce".

It is doing this period that there is steady increase in web use ... and
for several months there is "finwait" problem. Most of the internet
webservers are various kinds of workstations and are running BSD TCP/IP
support (either directly running BSD or workstation vendor has borrowed
the BSD TCP/IP code for their product). HTTP is using session/connect
TCP for operation ... even tho it is much more of connectionaless.
Existing TCP FINWAIT list processing assumed very few session drops per
minute ... HTTP was resulting in thousands ... resulting in possible of
tens of thousands of entries on the FINWAIT list. The BSD processing of
the FINWAIT list was sequential/linear ... and with thousands of entries
was beginning to consume 95+% of available processor power. a few
recent posts mentioning FINWAIT
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#7 Last Gasp for Hard Disk Drives
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014g.html#13 Is it time for a revolution to replace TLS?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#26 There Is Still Hope

recent posts mentioning "electronic commerce" and/or "SSL"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#65 Washington Post on Target store data thefts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#66 Royal Pardon For Turing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014b.html#23 Quixotically on-topic post, still on topic
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014b.html#26 Royal Pardon For Turing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014b.html#35 OODA
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014c.html#60 Bloat
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#0 Tech Time Warp of the Week: Check Out Mid-'90s Netscape, the Coolest Startup in Silicon Valley
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#3 Let's Face It--It's the Cyber Era and We're Cyber Dumb
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#13 Royal Pardon For Turing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#19 Write Inhibit
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#40 Missed Alarms and 40 Million Stolen Credit Card Numbers: How Target Blew It
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#101 Reflexivity
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#102 How the IETF plans to protect the web from NSA snooping
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#6 Credit Card Breach at California DMV Provides Yet Another Warning of Cyber Insecurities
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#7 Last Gasp for Hard Disk Drives
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#25 Is there any MF shop using AWS service?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#27 TCP/IP Might Have Been Secure From the Start If Not For the NSA
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#30 Zeus malware found with valid digital certificate
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#45 TCP/IP Might Have Been Secure From the Start If Not For the NSA
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#47 TCP/IP Might Have Been Secure From the Start If Not For the NSA
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#56 "NSA foils much internet encryption"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#57 NSA and Heartbleed
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#64 How the IETF plans to protect the web from NSA snooping
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#78 How the Internet wasn't Commercial Dataprocessing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#8 Is cybersecurity the next banking crisis in the making?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#11 Before the Internet: The golden age of online services
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#13 Before the Internet: The golden age of online services
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#19 Is cybersecurity the next banking crisis in the making?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#25 Before the Internet: The golden age of online services
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#70 Obama Administration Launches Plan To Make An "Internet ID" A Reality
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#74 Is end of mainframe near ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#83 Slashdot this day in history: Microsoft Asks Slashdot To Remove Readers' Posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014g.html#7 [Cryptography] Is it time for a revolution to replace TLS?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014g.html#13 Is it time for a revolution to replace TLS?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014g.html#15 Is it time for a revolution to replace TLS?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014g.html#17 Is it time for a revolution to replace TLS?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#25 How Comp-Sci went from passing fad to must have major
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#40 Named Memory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#90 Friden Flexowriter equipment series
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014i.html#61 A computer at home?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#63 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265750 is a reply to message #265710] Sat, 30 August 2014 13:43 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel is currently offline  Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel
Messages: 3156
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Andrew Swallow <am.swallow@btinternet.com> writes:
> It is easy for the government to order the phone company to tap the link.

early 80s, one of the claimed justification that all corporate links
required encryption ... was major longhaul microwave communication hub
in San Francisco was line-of-sight from certain nearby foreign consulate
.... the could tap the communication.

as i've mentioned, the internal network was larger than the
arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until possibly sometime
late 85 or early 86 ... at arpanet/internet change-over to tcp/ip on
01jan1983, there were approx. 100 IMPs and 255 connected hosts, while
the internal network was quickly approaching 1000 nodes.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internet

also was told mid-80s that over half of all link encryptors in the world
were on internal network links (which resulted in periodic problems with
new links in various parts of the world especially when they crossed
national boundaries).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

in the early to mid 80s, i could just barely get link encryptors for
T1 links for HSDT
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

and would need to pay an arm and leg for them. somewhat as a result got
involved in link encryptor board that would go for $100 dollars and
handle several mbytes/sec. then the corporate crypto group got involved
and claimed that it significantly weakened standard encryption strength.
It took me three months to figure out how to explain to them what was
actually happening ... that it actually significantly increased standard
encryption strength ... however it was hollow victory ... about the
first time I realized that there were three kinds of crypto 1) they kind
they don't care about, 2) the kind you can't do and 3) the kind you can
do only for them. I was told that I could build as many boards as I
wanted to ... but couldn't use any ... all of them would have to be sent
to certain address on the east coast. misc. old email mentioning crypto
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#crypto

misc. past posts mentioning three kinds of crypto
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#57 RealNames hacked. Firewall issues.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004j.html#35 A quote from Crypto-Gram
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#4 private key encryption - doubts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#22 What if phone company had developed Internet?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008h.html#87 New test attempt
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008i.html#86 Own a piece of the crypto wars
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#43 What is "timesharing" (Re: OS X Finder windows vs terminal window weirdness)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#32 Getting Out Hard Drive in Real Old Computer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#27 Favourite computer history books?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#43 Internet Evolution - Part I: Encryption basics
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#20 TELSTAR satellite experiment
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#60 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#0 We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011n.html#63 ARPANET's coming out party: when the Internet first took center stage
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011n.html#85 Key Escrow from a Safe Distance: Looking back at the Clipper Chip
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012.html#63 Reject gmail
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012i.html#70 Operating System, what is it?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012k.html#47 T-carrier
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013g.html#31 The Vindication of Barb
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013i.html#69 The failure of cyber defence - the mindset is against it
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013k.html#77 German infosec agency warns against Trusted Computing in Windows 8
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013k.html#88 NSA and crytanalysis
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013m.html#10 "NSA foils much internet encryption"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013o.html#50 Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#9 NSA seeks to build quantum computer that could crack most types of encryption
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#7 Last Gasp for Hard Disk Drives
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#25 Is there any MF shop using AWS service?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#27 TCP/IP Might Have Been Secure From the Start If Not For the NSA
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014i.html#54 IBM Programmer Aptitude Test

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265753 is a reply to message #265749] Sat, 30 August 2014 17:14 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel is currently offline  Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel
Messages: 3156
Registered: January 2012
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Senior Member
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
> I've periodically referred to "NSFNET" had "acceptable use" policies
> that tried to prevent commercial use. Part of that actual resources put
> into original ("T1") NSFNET was 4-5 times the RFP ... basically telcos
> contributing/donating enormous additional resources. Part of the issue
> was telcos had significant fixed capital costs and monthly operational
> costs ... which were recovered based on tarrifed "use charges". The
> enormous available capacity (in large part provided to change-over to
> fiber) wasn't being used because of the lack of high-bandwidth
> applications. The telcos were in sort of chicken&egg situation, to
> enormously increase use, they would have to drastically reduce the "use
> charges" ... but the transition could take a decade while they would
> operate in the red. The NSFNET then became a technology incubator
> ... allow lots of people to use it effectively for free which would
> provide an environment for the evolution/birth of the newer generation of
> bandwidth hungry applications. posts mentioning NSFNET
> http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#nsfnet

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#76 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984

so there were increasing use of browsers that were much more bandwidth
hungry ... and then in parallel was CIX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Internet_eXchange

moving use into business environment and out of the acceptable use
policies stopping commercial use of NSFNET ... past internet
posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internet

other related recent posts about first webserver in the US
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#34 World Wide Web turns 25 years old
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#44 [CM] Ten recollections about the early WWW and Internet
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#88 Silicon Valley: an army of geeks and 'coders' shaping our future
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014g.html#98 After the Sun (Microsystems) Sets, the Real Stories Come Out
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#61 No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984

old posts with AUP references (even copies of some of the AUPs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#26 The first "internet" companies?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#5 Is Al Gore The Father of the Internet?^
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#29 Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn and their political opinions
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#66 UUCP email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#40 Why did OSI fail compared with TCP-IP?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#5 Coulda, Woulda, Shoudda moments?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#80 Al Gore and the Internet
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#1 Xah Lee's Unixism
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#30 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#45 Arpa address
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#46 Arpa address

recent posts mentioning CIX
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#3 We need to talk about TED
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#35 World Wide Web turns 25 years old
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#7 Last Gasp for Hard Disk Drives

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265756 is a reply to message #265724] Sat, 30 August 2014 18:00 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Charlie Gibbs is currently offline  Charlie Gibbs
Messages: 5313
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On 2014-08-30, Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> wrote:

> I tried to email someone at the local paper last week, following the
> scheme for addressing email to staff, and it bounced. Gone is the time
> when the online byline would provide the email address, and gone is the
> time when the email addresses were listed on that contact page. It is as
> if they don't want to bother with email.

A local radio station removed the comments section from their web site,
and my last attempt to e-mail them was ignored. They're trying to get
everyone to use Facebook instead - and I refuse to use Facebook under
any circumstances, not just because they've decided to turn their
communications over to a third-party monopoly.

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Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265762 is a reply to message #265587] Sat, 30 August 2014 20:30 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Shmuel (Seymour J.) M is currently offline  Shmuel (Seymour J.) M
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In <1mg6db-ck6.ln1@sambook.reistad.name>, on 08/29/2014
at 02:52 PM, Morten Reistad <first@last.name> said:

> In article <8ec3a1be-22d5-4235-85bf-09add1ecb75a@googlegroups.com>,
> <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:

>> I really don't think the 'netheads' understand the old Bell
>> System (and old mainframe) philosophy,

There is no such thing; there is a Bell philosophy and a mainframe
philosophy, and never the twain shall meet.

>> indeed, if anything they denigrate legacy practices and
>> technology.

As an old mainframer who had the misfortune to deal with the
pre-divestiture Bell System, *I* certainly denigrate the Bell
philosophy as visible from the outside.

What's wrong with this picture?

* Order a leased line for submitting jobs from Wisconsin to
Maryland.

* Get a checksheet from C&P. There is no provision for specifying
208A plugging option.

* Engineers in Maryland and Wisconsin independently read copies
of the checksheet. They talk neither to you nor to each other.
The one in Wisconsin plugs for new syn[1]; the one in
Maryland does not.

* You are not allowed[2] to remove the cover from the modem and
examine the jumper settings.

Had I played by their anal retentive monopolistic rules it would have
taken us weeks or months to get on the air.

[1] No, it was not multidrop; maybe he was drunk.

[2] I did anyway. So sue me.


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>

Unsolicited bulk E-mail subject to legal action. I reserve the
right to publicly post or ridicule any abusive E-mail. Reply to
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Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265766 is a reply to message #265672] Sat, 30 August 2014 20:40 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Shmuel (Seymour J.) M is currently offline  Shmuel (Seymour J.) M
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In <smc7db-b6a.ln1@n6wuz.net>, on 08/29/2014
at 03:50 PM, "Jack Myers" <jmyers@n6wuz.net> said:

> We were coming from an era where most technical people had been
> lead to believed that a high-bandwidth retrofit of the existing
> twisted-pair network was simply not feasible.

I never ran into such a person.

> Everybody knew there was a limit to what could be sent over a
> voice circuit.

Indeed, just as everybody knew that you could get higher rates by not
trying to encode your data as voice, and everybody knew that limits
claimed in the past had been fallacious.

Now, there were people expecting an X.21 and X.25 world, but they
didn't expect that world to be low speed.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>

Unsolicited bulk E-mail subject to legal action. I reserve the
right to publicly post or ridicule any abusive E-mail. Reply to
domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+news to contact me. Do not
reply to spamtrap@library.lspace.org
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265769 is a reply to message #265614] Sat, 30 August 2014 20:56 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Quadibloc is currently offline  Quadibloc
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Registered: June 2012
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On Friday, August 29, 2014 11:59:55 AM UTC-6, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

> There are still execs out there that have a secretary print out their
> emails and dictate responses, and have probably never used the Web, but
> they are literally a dying breed.

Hmm...

"Touch-typing: the new literacy?"

John Savard
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265774 is a reply to message #265724] Sat, 30 August 2014 21:22 Go to previous messageGo to next message
hancock4 is currently offline  hancock4
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On Saturday, August 30, 2014 11:01:11 AM UTC-4, Michael Black wrote:

> I tried to email someone at the local paper last week, following the scheme for addressing email to staff, and it bounced. Gone is the time when the online byline would provide the email address, and gone is the time when the email addresses were listed on that contact page. It is as if they don't want to bother with email.

Our city's newspaper prints the reporter's email and telephone number at the end of most articles. I don't know if other papers do it.

One reason they _can_ do it is, sadly, circulation is down so much that a reporter won't be flooded with email. Further, they want to maintain good relations with their readers to keep as many as they can. Lastly, I think the reporters do appreciate the feedback to their work.


But yes, many web pages no longer offer an email address, rather, they have a contact form. Many require one to enter a number from a masked field, apparently to prevent spamming or intentional flooding. Indeed, I suspect the decline of email is due to spamming.

The former PC Expo in NYC distributed my email and for _years_ afterwards my account was flooded with spam. A trade press magazine likewise gave out my email and again a ton of spam for years. Fortunately for me, that account was closed.
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265775 is a reply to message #265756] Sat, 30 August 2014 21:30 Go to previous messageGo to next message
hancock4 is currently offline  hancock4
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On Saturday, August 30, 2014 6:00:14 PM UTC-4, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> ... and I refuse to use Facebook under any circumstances, not just because they've decided to turn their communications over to a third-party monopoly.

Could I ask why you won't use Facebook?

While I don't use it, everyone I know does. There are all sorts of reunion groups--people from my old neighborhood now have reunions, thanks to Facebook.

By the way, what happened to Myspace?

What is the difference between Twitter and Instagram?
Re: No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984 [message #265776 is a reply to message #265680] Sat, 30 August 2014 21:42 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
hancock4 is currently offline  hancock4
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On Friday, August 29, 2014 10:09:42 PM UTC-4, Yeechang Lee wrote:

> How much did the "long-distance wars" of the era between AT&T, MCI, Sprint, and others contribute to this?

I forgot to mention a key point--in the early years, MCI and Sprint were guilty of "cream skimming" AT&T's most profitable services. See, AT&T was tightly regulated and it took a long time to get out from it. As a matter of deliberate policy, AT&T's inter-state rates were averaged over the entire country. So, while a call between New York City and Boston was relatively cheap to carry as compared to one between North and South Dakota, everyone paid the same rate (per distance) regardless of acutal costs.

In contrast, MCI and Sprint had much less, if any, regulation. Indeed, MCI and Sprint had certain advantages thanks to court orders giving them favored treatment to break AT&T's "monopoly". So, MCI and Sprint would go after the high profit business between, say, Boston and NYC, leaving AT&T with the costly routes.
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