First Internet message and ...

Don't spoil the spirit of excitement over this sort of thing, even if they get every detail wrong. You weren't present for this event, and even "expert" historians routinely also get a _lot_ of things wrong. I lived through this era, and have spent the last two decades conveying the importance of such things to current-day scientific and engineering researchers, as well as the public, as a volunteer senior docent and restoration engineer at the Computer History Museum, as well as a STEM teacher. I'd commit some high crimes and misdemeanors if I could get any of my high school and college students to exhibit even one percent of this level of excitement about the stupendous things that happened just in 1969. Beyond the first successful remote login between heterogeneous computers via a standard interface (not the first time a "message" was sent over the "Internet"), that included the Apollo 11 Moon landing, the first Concorde test flight, the debut of the Boeing 747, the first version of UNIX being developed, the first microprocessor being produced, etc., etc., etc. It's not just about fawning over the past accomplishments for nostalgic reasons, but, to also learn from the mistakes that led to the advancements, and there are many more errors than there are successes. It has to be that way, but, we don't celebrate the goof-ups and we absolutely should - let those who have never failed cast the first stone, as it were. One of my special tours at the CHM is "Mistakes That Kept Getting Repeated" because, as we now know, those who don't learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. It's not so simple though, because history doesn't exactly repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and we have to be observant and clever enough to recognize the meter as well as the lyrics. Complaining about the small stuff doesn't contribute to that and should be avoided so that we don't scare off the enthusiastic newcomers and others not so steeped in the details as we are. All the Best, Jim On Sun, Nov 24, 2019 at 5:11 PM allison via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: