What to preserve from the pre-IP era

--On January 20, 2014 2:28:27 PM -0500 Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote: Another predecessor of the Internet as we know it was the Merit Computer Network in Michigan. There were probably other interesting regional networks, but Merit built its own hardware and had its own packet switching software and protocols before the Internet existed. It also ran the NSFNet backbone for a time, of course, but that was later. I expect that the hardware is all gone, but the software is probably still around. A predecessor of Merit at Michigan was the ConComp project which built a machine known as the Data Concentrator. [1] This is also interesting, partly because it was the first non-IBM product ever connected to an IBM 360 channel. It didn't do networking in the Internet sense, but provided terminal access to mainframe computers for years. The software for this might still be around somewhere too, papers about it certainly are. Dave's history at the link below is slightly misleading. The Data Concentrator actually predates the Model 67 at Michigan. It was first attached to a Model 50 in 1966. I was present for the event (since I wrote the supervisor it was talking to) and remember that it soon put the Model 50's microcode into a loop which was an interesting experience. Mike [1] <http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/gallery/gallery7.html>