alt.hn

1/9/2025 at 8:02:36 PM

How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)

 https://theconversation.com/how-britain-got-its-first-internet-connection-by-the-late-pioneer-who-created-the-first-password-on-the-internet-45404

by samizdis

1/9/2025 at 9:15:30 PM

That March 1977 map always brings back a flood of memories to this old-timer.

Happy nights spent hacking in the Harvard graduate computer center next to the PDP-1/PDP-10 (Harv-1, Harv-10), getting calls on the IMP phone in the middle of the night from the BBN network operations asking me to reboot it manually as it had gotten wedged...

And, next to me, Bill Gates writing his first assembler/linker/simulator for the Altair 8080... (I tried talking him out of this microcomputer distraction -- we have the whole world of mainframes at our fingertips! -- without success.)

(Edit:) We also would play the game of telnet-till-you-die, going from machine to machine around the world (no passwords on guest accounts in the early days), until the connection died somewhere along the way.

Plus, once the hackers came along, Geoff Steckel (systems guy on the PDP-10) wrote a little logger to record all incoming guests keystrokes on an old teletype, so we could watch them attempting to hack the system.

by cpr

1/10/2025 at 1:28:16 PM

On the subject of that last item, it is to my amusement that modern internet scanners are completely confused by a 1970s operating system. They record a "hit" when they find an open telnet port, but then get stuck because there is no recognizable prompt after the system banner message prints. They find a running FTP server but get confused that it does not use recognizable filesystem semantics. They get even more confused when it ignores passwords because the system has none. By all rules and tenets of security doctrine this system should be the internet equivalent to a smoking crater, instantly and utterly destroyed by advanced security threats beyond the imaginations of its creators.

PS: It is also amusing that an unmodified 1970s SMTP server can still deliver messages to gmail and receive responses back, given only the provision of a SPF record. Sadly, the coming mandatory requirement for DKIM will finally make this no longer a possibility.

PPS: It is much less amusing to attempt to read the gmail user's responses on a terminal.

by Suzuran

1/10/2025 at 5:57:18 PM

Surprisingly, as I discovered earlier today, Gmail (still? newly?) supports sending plaintext-only messages!

by lxgr

1/10/2025 at 6:41:18 PM

Really? How?

by Suzuran

1/10/2025 at 7:22:42 PM

"Plain text mode", hiding in the "kebab menu" (i.e. the three vertically stacked dots) on the bottom of the message composition window. It even seems to stay on as a default once activated!

Very useful for the few times I actually need to send email to mailing lists with strong opinions about newfangled MIME multipart messages :)

by lxgr

1/10/2025 at 7:26:03 PM

Yes, that's very useful, thanks for pointing that out.

by Suzuran

1/9/2025 at 10:11:17 PM

Dear Sir, could you just, you know, continue writing? I just love these stories, would love to hear more!

by ManuelKiessling

1/10/2025 at 4:57:56 PM

Nah, it'd come out too much as "almost famous".

I did manage to avoid being Microsoft employee #12 or so (my buddy Bob Greenberg was #8, I think?, and encouraged me to come join them), and Adobe employee #8 (I knew Chuck Geschke from some earlier work done as an undergrad extending his PhD thesis to Harvard's extensible language ECL), due to various life circumstances. I guess God didn't want be to be a spoiled rotten billionaire.

Another near miss was co-consulting with Len Bosack at HP setting up Lisp Machine networking, and wondering how the heck the then-nascent Cisco was ever going to sell more than a few hundred routers (based on the same Sun-1 boards developed by Andy Bechtolstein at Standford that we used at Imagen, the first typeset-quality laser printers, a spinoff from Don Knuth's research at Stanford) to universities and government labs.

As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.

by cpr

1/16/2025 at 10:14:01 AM

> As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.

Well, I wasn't even close to the technology nexus that you describe, neither in time nor in place, but this really resonates with me.

I RELIABLY manage to "not get" stuff in my own bubble, not because I'm too far away from it or because I don't understand it, but the exact opposite.

For example, I clearly remember how in the early 2000s I thought/felt "well, of course Amazon/eBay/Google is a great business, but everyone is already using them anyway, so what's the upside" and similiar other Thoughts Of Great Wisdom And Foresight.

by ManuelKiessling

1/10/2025 at 6:47:01 PM

You worked at Imagen? I had to write a partial Impress emulator a little while ago so I could make waste paper from my lispm. It only supported the image format since that was the only thing the lispm sent when printing the screen, but it beat the heck out of taking photos of a CRT.

by Suzuran

1/10/2025 at 9:33:43 PM

Yes, helped start it (first or second employee back in 1980(?)).

Wild! I had forgotten the LispMs had Impress support; I think that came out of the time when we worked with Janet Walker, head of documentation at Symbolics.

by cpr

1/10/2025 at 1:31:42 AM

Yes, please! I love these comments on HN, this is blog material.

by mromanuk

1/10/2025 at 3:54:47 AM

If this man wrote a book I’d read it.

by coffeecantcode

1/9/2025 at 11:31:50 PM

I worked for Peter Kirstein for many years - he always had wonderful stories to tell.

In the article Peter talks about the temporary import license for the original ARPAnet equipment. The delayed VAT and duty bill for this gear prevented anyone else taking over the UK internet in the early days because the bill would have then become due. But he didn't mention that eventually if the original ARPAnet equipment was ever scrapped, the bill would also become due.

When I was first at UCL in the mid 1980s until well into the 90s, all that equipment was stored disused in the mens toilets in the basement. Eventually Peter decided someone had to do something about it, but he couldn't afford the budget to ship all this gear back to the US. Peter always seemed to delight in finding loopholes, so he pulled some strings. Peter was always very well connected - UCL even ran the .int and nato.int domains for a long time. So, at some point someone from UCL drove a truck full of obsolete ARPAnet gear to some American Air Force base in East Anglia that was technically US territory. Someone from the US air force gave them a receipt, and the gear was officially exported. And there it was left, in the US Air Force garbage. Shame it didn't end up in a museum, but that would have required paying the VAT bill.

by mhandley

1/10/2025 at 1:53:24 AM

If only it could have disappeared into a vault until now... the bill could have been inflated away!

by nxobject

1/9/2025 at 10:46:54 PM

The most hilari-depressing part of the story was the funding politics and grantwriting headaches that have never changed:

– the NPL couldn't set up a British inter-network because of pressure from GPO;

– they couldn't connect to ARPA via Norway because of the Foreign Office;

– then, UCL couldn't get funding from SERC;

– then, UCL couldn't get funding from DTI because it didn't have industrial interest (although, to be fair, it was the department of "industry")...

...and then nearly a decade later government bodies were trying to take it over.

(It looks like the IMP/TIP was literally funded by petty-ish £££ that the NPL superintendent could get his hands on without further approval. To be fair, GPO did fund the link to Oslo.)

by nxobject

1/10/2025 at 12:12:42 AM

Peter once told me that in 1973, the only two organizations permitted to do telecommunications were the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense. So to legally connect UCL to the ARPAnet, he needed an exception clause. Somehow he got both the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense to sign off that they were not interested in computer-to-computer communications, in perpetuity, so that UCL could do so instead. He said he never tried to hold them to it later.

by mhandley

1/10/2025 at 1:01:34 AM

Spot on. Would be interesting to see what sort of hoops you'd have to jump through in an academic lab today to secure similar money.

That 5k GPB in 1973 is 77k in today's pound, or about 95k USD at current exchange rates.

by Full_Clark

1/10/2025 at 2:55:29 PM

Every time I have a meeting with government, especially regulatory agencies about getting something done, it isn't easy because these words have very different meanings, which can lead you into bad places quickly:

support - engineer means "compatible, works with" govt means "aiding a cause"

business rules - engineer means logic, govt means literal rules that have force of law

If you want to get results, you have to be really careful - if you say you are supporting something, the govt people may think you are aiding a cause they or whoever appointed them oppose. If you talk about rules, govt people assume a 2 year fight, expensive process, and lots of hearings - so it gets weird.

by indymike

1/9/2025 at 10:19:15 PM

The trouble was that it was quite unclear to a researcher, even in one of the research council networking hubs, how to get access to the gateway, and it may have cost. I gave up trying before going to work in Oak Ridge for the summer (where I was taken aback by the primitive computing, at least "outside the fence"). For some time (mid-80s to early 90s? I don't remember) we were generally dependent on the infamous BITNET email gateway to communicate with the rest of the world from the well-developed UK network. It was "interesting" to deal with code in a Swedish 6-bit character set sent through the EBCDIC gateway to ISO 646-GB. (The Fortran Hollerith formats were added interest...)

by gnufx

1/9/2025 at 8:22:33 PM

So I was just reading through a 1988 Swedish popular book on "data communications". Not a single word on Arpanet/etc. Many other network technologies and attempts at global networks described.

My point: "Internet" wasn't very well-known "even" in 1988 outside of well-connected places.

Book: Scandinavian PC Systems, Valentino Berti: "Introduktion till datakommunikation"

by lysace

1/9/2025 at 8:40:05 PM

The inter-networking part of Internet was specialist knowledge restricted to those researchers actively working in the space. But countries had rich national networks back then, e.g. UK universities had a thing called JANET (joint academic network) that allowed, say, someone at the University of Kent to send files to someone at the University of Durham. The hosts were heterogeneous but the protocols were kinda sorta in place (there was a lot of X.25 leased lines and UUCP dialup, if I recall). Kent sticks in my memory because they could do commercial email in the old path!to!destination style if you knew the right guy to call. And Durham because they had this incredibly wacky mainframe OS, Michigan Terminal System, which I have never seen anywhere except there and at Newcastle (a town 40km up the road from Durham).

by kjellsbells

1/9/2025 at 9:23:52 PM

Any idea when JAnet connected to the Internet? When I first used it ~1994 I remember they had a single 2Mbps connection to the USA for the whole of JAnet.

What connection did the housing in the dorms at Kent have? I seem to remember serial ports in the rooms, but could have been ether?

by qingcharles

1/9/2025 at 11:46:55 PM

UCL was on both the JAnet X.25 network and the Internet when I joined in 1985, and provided a relay service between the two for email and for telnet. Maybe others - not sure. Relaying email required translating the address order as the UK used big-endian "foo@uk.ac.ucl.cs" and the rest of the world used little-endian "foo@cs.ucl.ac.uk". There were a whole set of heuristics to figure out which order the destination should be, which worked fine up until Czechoslovakia joined with their .cs domain. I think it was probably in the early 90s when JAnet fully deployed IP-over-X.25, and all UK universities became IP-reachable, but some would have been reachable before then.

Peter was also responsible for the UK using .uk instead of the ISO country code "gb" which it should have been according to "the rules". But Peter insisted on .uk, as the official name of the country was "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", and he thought GB was not properly inclusive of Northern Ireland. It took until 2021 for UK to replace GB on car number plates (and stickers for travelling abroad).

by mhandley

1/10/2025 at 3:20:47 PM

> UCL was on both the JAnet X.25 network and the Internet when I joined in 1985

Same for Royal Holloway out in Egham when I went up, also in 1985.

I was foo@vaxa.rhbnc.ac.uk or uk!ac!rhbnc!vaxa@foo (or something like that).

by lproven

1/10/2025 at 12:33:22 AM

There was an FTP relay as well.

by rjsw

1/9/2025 at 11:08:02 PM

I have fond memories of the Nordic university network (NORDUnet) when the US<-->Sweden link was upgraded to 34Mbps in '95 (NORDUnet kept 24Mbps of the cable initially). At the time the fastest connection between the US and elsewhere in Europe was 6Mbps, according to the NORDunet 25 year report....

At one point there was an outage of the Sprint connection to Sweden that the Nordic connection to the US went over, and the Nordic countries for several hours saturated connections throughout parts of Europe that were in no way at a scale suitable to be a functional backup for the traffic from the Nordic countries...

It was first later I realised how spoiled we'd been... Tens of Mbps FTP speeds to other Nordic countries was routine in 94/95, for example.

by vidarh

1/10/2025 at 7:38:09 AM

I've never heard of NORDUnet - but googling it seems to be the international facing part of the more (in Sweden at least) famous SUNET!

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunet

https://internetmuseum.se/tidslinjen/nordunet-connects-the-n...

by mrmlz

1/10/2025 at 8:20:19 AM

Well, not just SUNET. It includes SUNET (Sweden), UNINETT (Norway), FUNET (Finland), Forskingsnettet (Denmark) and RHnet (Iceland), and was how the Nordic networks arranged internet access - before NORDUnet only Norway had internet/Arpanet access (largely due to NATO - the NORSAR connection from the early 70's was because the seismic array was a way of keeping track of Soviet missile tests), and only to a few institutions.

by vidarh

1/10/2025 at 12:23:28 AM

Fascinating, do you think this is the reason why Linux started there?

by llm_trw

1/10/2025 at 7:37:07 AM

I mean, it can't have hurt, but Linus started programming long before he started university, and I assume he had no access before he started so odds are he had the interest already. It might have eased access to some material he needed, but you slower connections weren't a huge limitation back then either.

by vidarh

1/10/2025 at 11:24:47 AM

When I was at Kent (88-91) the few rooms which did have connections (only available in the new-build Darwin Houses at the time, IIRC) had basic serial ports. The colleges (not dorms, if you please!) had dedicated computer rooms (using mostly old TA Alphatronics as terminals) with a PAD connecting them to the Cambridge Ring campus network. We had full email/FTP privileges for the Internet (the term 'JANET' was still used, but it was becoming less prominent) but mostly only read-only Usenet privileges, unless you asked the right person very nicely.

by UncleSlacky

1/9/2025 at 10:04:11 PM

JANET went live in 1984. Before then, UK universities were connected by X.25 links with ARPAnet gateways to Rest of World. (Such as it was then - basically the US and Scandinavia.)

You could, with a tiny amount of password hacking, joyride around the system quite easily, at least as far as getting to a login message on a remote host, possibly logging on with a guest account and having a text chat with surprised people in other countries.

by TheOtherHobbes

1/9/2025 at 10:29:17 PM

Yes, SRCNET/SERCNET/JANET were great as a physics researcher, despite what people have said about X.25. A potentially interesting point is that TCP/IP on JANET originally ran over X.25 until X.25 was finally phased out.

by gnufx

1/9/2025 at 11:36:11 PM

You could also connect to JANET hosts from commercial machines over X.25.

I had an account on the NRS host machine to administer our site info.

by rjsw

1/10/2025 at 3:34:28 AM

I don't remember all the details, but allegedly some undergraduates at a college very close to me in the late 80s were able to get limited Internet access by snagging the passwords of CS postgrads who had remote accounts at UCL via Janet, and logging in when they weren't around.

Boy, those scalliwags would have got into a lot of trouble if they had got caught.

by dannyobrien

1/10/2025 at 1:22:46 AM

JANET started running IP-over-X25 in 1991 and within a year the volume of IP traffic was greater than the volume of native JANET traffic.

by fanf2

1/10/2025 at 11:49:05 AM

It was certainly in place at the launch of SuperJanet in 1993, where 55 Universities each got a 34Mbps connection. I could believe only 2Mb to the USA, but it had a number of connections to europe and UK ISPs that were faster.

by matt-p

1/10/2025 at 12:01:12 PM

NB by 1999 is was 2X 155Mb to the US, and by Feb 2002 became 2X 2.5Gbps.

by matt-p

1/10/2025 at 7:40:04 PM

The connections to Europe were great. Relied on all those lovely FTP archives in Scandinavia.

by qingcharles

1/9/2025 at 10:24:12 PM

The "fat pipe" didn't look so fat at that stage! (I don't remember when you could first easily interact with the Internet.)

by gnufx

1/9/2025 at 9:17:14 PM

I was in the basement of UCL computer science (in the Pearson building) in 1988. Our lab had a very special yellow (Don't ever touch that!!) cable that ran across the ceiling between joists, then off under UCH toward Telecom tower. Of course we hung bits of origami on it with cotton. Apparently that was JANET. I never heard anyone say "The Internet" back then, but we did have a coms lecture where "inter-networking" was a thing. Nice to read some old names in that piece.

by nonrandomstring

1/9/2025 at 9:30:48 PM

Until relatively recently I worked with JANET (or Janet - lower case - as it is now) as part of Jisc, the UK's NREN. I also worked with the wider European org, GEANT, that runs the academic networks across Europe. We were (and still are ) very proud of Janet.

by grumblepeet

1/11/2025 at 4:50:05 PM

Thanks for your service. I did not know JANET was formed in April 1984. Then I was still at school, and we had a teletype that you could send emails. Of course those days no one had email so we had a class of kids sending emails to each other to print out on tty paper. I think the broader implications may have been lost in that lesson. It wes probably a BBS rather than JANET.

by nonrandomstring

1/10/2025 at 12:05:46 AM

I was also in one of those basement labs in the Pearson building in 1988. Not exactly the nicest place to work, but some great equipment. I particularly remember that year coding a graphical application in NeWS (Sun's original network window system, long before it became X/NeWS) on a Sun Workstation there, which was an amazing piece of kit for its time. Also remember the DecStation 3100s we had down there that would periodically catch fire.

by mhandley

1/10/2025 at 7:55:22 AM

Nice to meet you. Yeah the smell of overcooked circuits down there was something eh? I forget my room number now but there was something called the Pyramid next door that was mysterious and hush-hush. Phil Treleaven was my prof (saw him outside Waterstones last time I was around ULU so he must still be there).

by nonrandomstring

1/10/2025 at 10:37:34 AM

Haha, yes, the Pyramid was alien technology, but the cover story was that it was a multiprocessor RISC minicomputer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Technology When I arrived at UCL, there were three PDP 11/44s of which one (?) was shared by all the undergrads. The pyramid replaced those circa 1987 and was a huge improvement.

If I recall correctly, the main workstation lab was B10A, where I spent a lot of time. Then there was a narrow room, B09 I think, that had mission control on the right hand side with a machine room behind it, and a second machine room on the left side. Can't remember which machine room the Pyramid was in.

And yes, Phil is still around.

by mhandley

1/10/2025 at 3:22:02 PM

The POP11s were a rack of ribs when I saw them, so I figure you must be one of the older boys. Awesome. Totally pm me man. im at @cybershow.uk

by nonrandomstring

1/10/2025 at 12:40:13 AM

Memories. I had an unfiltered 100Mbit ethernet port, with public static IP, in my dorm room at Manchester Uni in 2000 thanks to JANET. It was amazing compared to the ISDN line at home (...which until then I had thought was the bees knees). It took almost another 15 years before I could get something faster at home than what I'd had at uni (!)

by corford

1/10/2025 at 2:19:19 AM

I even hosted a mirror of the original Mozilla source code dump from St. Anselm Hall, and nobody ever complained ;P

by peterstjohn

1/10/2025 at 1:54:26 PM

I think knowledge was more localised to certain universities or researchers.

Norway was the first country outside of USA to be connected to Arpanet in 1973 to share seismic data, but the universities did not gain general access until 1983.

I posted submitted a link to a story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655568

by qw

1/9/2025 at 8:49:32 PM

IIRC Finland was connected by then.

by euroderf

1/10/2025 at 8:32:09 AM

By '73? My understanding is the only other country outside the US to have a connection at that point was Norway, and only NORSAR and maybe one other location. NORSAR only because it was a critically important seismic array used by NATO to monitor Soviet missile tests.

As far as I can tell, Finland first got ARPANET connection via NORDunet in 1988 [1][2][3], though possibly indirectly a few years before as there was a connection to Sweden a few years earlier.

[1] https://siy.fi/history-of-the-finnish-internet/

[2] https://csc.fi/en/news/funets-anniversary-40-years-of-action...

[3] From [2]: "On Thursday December 1st, 1988, the first routing test was carried out, allowing IP packets to pass from Finland via Nordunet to the USA, in effect the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET and Arpanet networks. This connected Finland to the international Internet via the Funet network. The following message can be seen as the beginning of the Finnish Internet."

by vidarh

1/11/2025 at 11:30:25 AM

> My understanding is the only other country outside the US to have a connection at that point was Norway

I speak enough Norwegian to have gone around a few museums that tourists and other foreigners don't usually visit, and this is my understanding too.

by lproven

1/10/2025 at 10:49:36 AM

That sounds about right. I was working at the NSF in the late 80s, around when they were uniting all the scattered mini nets into Teh Interwebz, and I was trading emails with Finns. And BTW I was not trying to compete.

by euroderf

1/9/2025 at 8:53:30 PM

I do understand your urge to turn this into a competition - but let's not.

by lysace

1/9/2025 at 9:16:58 PM

Far be it from me to step between Sweden and Finland but this might be a moment to mention from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

(which of course applies to your comments as well)

by dang

1/9/2025 at 9:20:42 PM

Fair.

by lysace

1/10/2025 at 1:14:40 AM

But I think we had it handled.

by lysace

1/9/2025 at 9:16:16 PM

> The little black book of the internet

The article doesn't mention the Coloured Book protocols, but I'm pretty sure this phrasing isn't accidental: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols

by timthorn

1/10/2025 at 8:45:17 AM

While it could be, "little black book" commonly refers to an address book, and has since long before the internet. While it's hard to established when it became a commonly understood term for that, -as it was used in a more general sense before that, and often simply referred to small notebooks -, it has seen use to refer to address books since at least the 19th century[1]. (EDIT: It's also mentioned in Aretha Franklin's "Runnin' Out of Fools[2] from 1964)

Also, now I feel very old. "Little black book" was an ubiquitous term when I grew up, and so using the term would just be a synonym to "address book" that nobody would think twice about.

[1] E.g. The House and Home: A Practical Book - Volume 1 (1896): "And there is a little black book with red lettering seen on every writing-table and carriage-cushion wherein puzzled mater-familias finds her bearings annually among her cherished acquaintances, many of whom the little black book alone keeps in her recollection!"

[2] Guess you got back (Guess you got) To my name (To my name) In your little black book

by vidarh

1/10/2025 at 10:00:21 AM

> "Little black book" was an ubiquitous term when I grew up, and so using the term would just be a synonym to "address book" that nobody would think twice about.

Indeed, I'm aware of that meaning and its ubiquity. But amongst UK university computing staff at that time, knowledge of the Coloured Books was as embedded. Remember that JANET network addresses were the other way round, so rather than cam.ac.uk it used to be uk.ac.cam - the author of this piece will have been well aware of the double meaning.

It's that double meaning that gives the headline it's precise relevance and a dash of humour.

by timthorn

1/10/2025 at 11:35:43 AM

I don't see why the order makes any difference with respect to the use of the term, nor do I get from description what you think is humorous about it.

It still reads to me like just a synonym for "address book" to refer to a mapping.

by vidarh

1/10/2025 at 4:26:07 PM

The order of the addresses was linked to the Coloured Books and needed translation to interwork with SMTP, and eventually the users needed to change their addresses. The point being, that anyone involved in UK scientific computing will have been aware of the UK protocols - many will have been involved in their creation and maintenance.

The humour comes from a (non-risqué) double entendre.

by timthorn

1/11/2025 at 2:40:02 AM

I don't think we'll agree here. To me this just looks like a straightforward use of a common metaphor for an address lookup that isn't funny to me whether or not it was intended to link it to the coloured books.

by vidarh

1/9/2025 at 10:22:32 PM

Red book was particularly interesting (modulo lack of security) long before "the Grid"; it worked between various computer centres.

by gnufx

1/10/2025 at 7:33:15 AM

> (2018)

I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that... After some searching I found the Conversation's RSS feed for technology[1] which says it was 2025 after searching the page for "internet" and looking through the results

   <id>tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45404</id>
    <published>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</published>
    <updated>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</updated>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://theconversation.com/how-britain-got-its-first-internet-connection-by-the-late-pioneer-who-created-the-first-password-on-the-internet-45404"/>
    <title>How Britain got its first internet connection – by the late pioneer who created the first password on the internet</title>
[1] https://theconversation.com/uk/technology/articles.atom

by Its_Padar

1/10/2025 at 9:01:13 AM

The preface says it was originally written "a few years before [the author] died", but never published (until now - having been (re)edited), so the (2018) makes sense.

by pxeger1

1/10/2025 at 3:18:45 PM

> I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that

You seem to be confusing the date it was written with the date it was published.

I believe there are multiple works where that interval is over 50 years. I would not be surprised if a gap of a century has been surpassed.

by lproven

1/11/2025 at 12:10:50 PM

Not relevant to the article, but for the history of UK academic networking mentioned in various comments, Wikipedia's account looks about right, though I'm not sure it's up-to-date concerning the regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET

I was using SRCnet in 1981, when Liverpool Physics had a dedicated link to Daresbury (national lab) whose speed I don't remember at that stage. Unfortunately the infamous PDP11 "terminal concentrators" for interactive use then were horribly unreliable. RJE to the cloud, where analyses ran, worked well.

by gnufx

1/10/2025 at 12:52:47 PM

The story has it all. Government stupidity and shortsightedness. Nonsensical self-harming bureaucracy. A plucky, persistent, woefully underfunded Brit who eventually succeeded in spite of the state.

by nickdothutton

1/10/2025 at 10:46:19 AM

> he was prevented from extending his project outside the lab by pressure from the British Post Office, which then held a monopoly on telecommunications.

The UK and telecoms don't make a happy pairing - we always seem to do the wrong thing:

https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

Dr Cochrane knew that Britain's tired copper network was insufficient: "In 1974 it was patently obvious that copper wire was unsuitable for digital communication in any form, and it could not afford the capacity we needed for the future."

He was asked to do a report on the UK's future of digital communication and what was needed to move forward.

"In 1979 I presented my results," he tells us, "and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort - that spanned in six years - involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation.

"In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop".

by DrBazza

1/10/2025 at 3:04:45 PM

BT let me off a £2,000 bill 'cus my dialer.exe got hijacked and I was calling a Seychelles premium line. I'd turned off the sound on my 56k? modem and didn't spot the extremely long beeps and boops. That's what got me started on basic security...zone alarm (pre-shitty-ness), proxomitron, hosts files (and other blocking lists/ banner blockers), autoexec.bat to delete histories, being caught out by dark patterns etc. Fun times....'cus the internet was fun at the time, too. Nowadays, despite a trove of bookmarks, I visit very, very, very few new-to-me sites.

by Ylpertnodi

1/10/2025 at 10:14:02 AM

I really hope cable management has improved at LLNL since the 70s when that picture was taken.

by ryao

1/9/2025 at 10:06:03 PM

Time-sharing is interesting. The same kind of thing is happening now with AI.

by sourraspberry

1/10/2025 at 8:31:54 AM

let's thank him for making some absolutely god-mode architectural calls (protocol layering, manufacturer agnosticism, etc.)

by justinl33

1/10/2025 at 2:31:36 AM

I had the great fortune to work at UCL in the early 1980s, just as SATNET came to an end as a project. I worked on what became ISODE, and related stuff as well as doing operations bits and pieces. I was far too junior to figure in Peter's planning but I will say, he was a very interesting HoD: he didn't suffer fools gladly (and I am one) but at the same time could be quite forgiving, if you were at least entertaining about your foolishness.

His most preferred model of funding work was to have 9/10ths of it done or a sure-fure thing, and then use the funding to work on the next idea, so he was guaranteed to have goods to deliver at the end of the project. He didn't always carry it off but when it worked it was superlative. I was on at least one OSI (protocol) project with 6 partners across industry and research in Europe, and the work was very unequal. That said, very fine dinners. I have fond memories of INRIA canteen food having wine and fresh fruit. UCL had baked beans and pies, the staff club had the same baked beans and pies but you could eat them under a superb Stanley Spenser oil painting of the resurrection.

The first Cisco Router turned up one day, it had annoyingly noisy fans which blew air a useless direction compared to the rest of the racks. As Mark Handley has pointed out below the basement was full of trash: a fantastic Prism-wedge shaped digital copying stand used with the British Library to photograph rare works, and an unbelievably expensive CCD digital camera attached gathering dust, a BBN Butterfly (it was a heap of crap frankly) running pre-BGP routing, a BLIT terminal and depraz mouse, the first Dec and Sun workstations.

We ran a project with the slade school of art doing digital arts design with them, lovely people. I still have some of the reject works.

Peter liked inviting people to come and be at UCL. During my time Bob Braden (SATNET) was there, and Mike Lesk (UUCP) -and they were also very nice and approachable. Tiny tea-room, I caused a kurfuffle washing out the most disgustingly stained coffee mug there, the owner of which was bulding the patina both to see how thick it got, and to discourage others from using his cup.

Peter had one standing rule you did NOT break: If there was an inter-departmental meeting with the people from ULCC (at that time down at Lambs Conduit St) he expected you to "vote against" any proposal they brought to the table without question: Departmental politics ran deep.

Peter was a committed skier, he was hardly young when I got there and he was still avidly visiting the alps as often as possible.

UCL ran the gateway from JANET (X.25 based non internet) to the ARPANet which required you to login to a unix jump host and use kermit to connect across, and lodge FTP requests using JANET "grey book" FTP protocol to talk to the FTP client through a conversion script. The gateway got hacked every now and then. Some of us were a bit unkind and said it used Kermit because Peter, who was somewhat small, frog-like and had thick glasses he peered through, appreciated the joke that he was Kermit personified.

by ggm

1/9/2025 at 8:06:38 PM

I've put 2018 as an approximation above because the intro says "a few years before he died" in 2020. If anybody can figure out the actual year, we can change it.

Edit: in HN titles, if you see a year at the end in parens, that indicates the year that the article originated. If you see a year that's not at the end in parens, that's part of the article title, meaning it's probably about something that happened that year. That's the convention anyhow.

by dang

1/9/2025 at 9:07:13 PM

"The impact of the internet on our way of life in its first 40 years has been immeasurable. It has expanded and developed in a way none of us envisaged in 1975", suggesting 2015?

by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn

1/9/2025 at 9:23:33 PM

Not sure how literally to take the 40 but that's at least more precise than "a few" so I've switched to 2015 above. Thanks!

by dang

1/9/2025 at 9:01:04 PM

It says it was newer published (before now), so would not 2025 be correct?

by hildenae

1/9/2025 at 9:14:33 PM

We usually try for the year that the article originated.

by dang

1/9/2025 at 9:15:12 PM

[stub for offtopicness]

by dang

1/9/2025 at 8:54:20 PM

Sorry if I'm unclear on what 2018 is supposed to mean (understand it's an approximation). But internet service is much older than that. According to Wikipedia,

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

Pipex was established in 1990 and began providing dial-up Internet access in March 1992, the UK's first commercial Internet service provider (ISP).

That's about the same time it became available in the U.S. I got home internet service (dial-up) in the mid-1990's.

by crankyOldGuy

1/9/2025 at 8:56:36 PM

2018 is the estimated year of the article, not the events described in the article.

by philipkglass

1/9/2025 at 8:58:43 PM

Some of the other comments are joking around, but 2018 refers to the original date the article was published :)

by jlund-molfese

1/9/2025 at 9:11:47 PM

> Pipex was established in 1990

I know reading the article is very much out of fashion, but all the dates given in the article are in the 1970s.

Just like the dates in the Wikipedia article you linked.

by Symbiote

1/9/2025 at 8:19:38 PM

I’m happy that you Brits finally got the Internet in 2018. It took a while, but I hope it was worth the wait.

by xp84

1/9/2025 at 8:44:10 PM

> I hope it was worth the wait

It’s awful, what’s wrong with having a chat, in person, over a nice cup of tea?

by louthy