"John Allain" wrote: it depended on where you were. I have MIT host tables from way way back which certainly allow rfc802 (1981) style email addressing, i.e. jtw(a)xx.lcs.mit.edu style address. Us poor folk in UUCP land had to use "bang style" address. From most places on the internet you could reach me as "harvard!gcc-milo!brad". At one point there where hybrid bang/at addresses. Yuck. Here's one from a guy I worked with at the time, in '86: ucdavis!lll-crg!seismo!harvard!gcc-milo!zrm(a)ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Zigurd R. Mednieks) blech. still, I miss 'ihnp4' and will always wonder where Indian Hills is. -brad ps: Zigard, if you read this, email me! :-)

On Jan 12, 2005, at 1:57 PM, Brad Parker wrote: <snippity snip> Heh. Indian Hill is a Bell Labs location in Naperville, IL. This is where 5ESS (and other switching) development went on for AT&T/Lucent. (I worked there until late 2001.) Now I can't remember what ihnp4 was. It was either an Amdahl or a VAX, depending on era. Mike

At 03:57 PM 1/12/05, you wrote: For those of us in Chicagoland at the time, Indian Hill Network Processor 4 (ihnp4) was near and dear. It was a VAX running at AT&T Bell Labs in Naperville, Illinois and handled an enormous (for the time) amount of electronic mail. Later I managed to get a UUCP feed from Motorola in Schaumburg, which was closer to my house and thus a less expensive phone call. --Dan

AUTODIN - the network before the Arpanet. Made by... It was pretty damn complex, actually, and ran using modified model 28 Teletypes. The warehouse I cleared out in New Jersey a couple of years ago had some of the equipment, and the greenkeys people sopped them up. Some of the things were pretty cool - a 400 cps (!) paper tape punch, model 28s with a rare HEREIS feature, still others that could defer incoming messages to paper tape as temporary storage if the printer mechanism was in use, and so on. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

William> .... Some of the things were William> pretty cool - a 400 cps (!) paper tape punch, ... Wow. I've love to see one of those. The fastest I have seen was, I think, a 120 cps punch. Listening to one of those running at full speed is pretty impressive. Paper tape readers can go much faster (I've seen 2000 cps) but those are optical readers, so the job is far easier. paul

Yes, well, optical paper tape punches should be able to go really fast too, but they'd be rather expensive. The trick is to keep the paper

On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 14:25, Paul Koning wrote: At this stage I have to jump in with an impressive 5000cps example (albeit 5bit) from 1944; of course it is: http://www.picotech.com/applications/colossus.html (This is a nice page on the optical reader) -- Lawrence Wilkinson lawrence(a)ljw.me.uk The IBM 360/30 page http://www.ljw.me.uk/ibm360

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Tom Jennings wrote: This got me thinking. I can make a really good argument (at some point, not now, no time) that e-mail could never have gotten as big (universal, nearly ubiquitous, one common standard) as it did without the modern (1990+) Internet, which could not have gotten where it is today with Linux. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Tom Jennings wrote: Allow me to explain my premise. What Linux did was allow any nerd to now have their own unix box. The next step was then to be able to take advantage of this crazy cool thing called the Internet. Primarily, the killer-app was Usenet and e-mail, but of course for nerds there was other wondrous stuff online. So now these nerds started seeking out ways that they could connect to the internet. The ease of having your own unix box drove that. Now, some of these nerds realized if they added an extra phone line they could give friends access to the internet through their box. Some realized they could SELL internet access to other people. In fact, I was an investor in a pretty early ISP in the Sacramento area that was started by a very young friend of mine, and is still thriving today. This begat the Mom&Pop ISP boom. Pretty soon, big companies like the Bells, Sprint, MCI, etc. started to take notice that people were making money selling access to the Internet. Within a couple years (1995ish) they started to jump on the bandwagon. Then began a huge influx of new users to this thing called e-mail and the internet and, very soon after that, the World Wide Web, that only a couple years before didn't even know this thing existed. The rest is history. My contention, and again, I can make a good argument (much better than this) if I had more time, but if Linux had not come around, the adoption of the internet by the public at large would have been a lot longer in coming. Linux was the lubrication that enabled quick penetration of internet into the mainstream. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, John Foust wrote: But again, those "Insta-ISPs" would not have found a viable market before the Linux boom. There was simply no mainstream cognizance of this thing called the "Internet" until it slowly started seeping into the mainstream thanks to the infiltration allowed by an easy to get and use Unix, i.e. Linux. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Except that during the buildup of the corner ISPs, which I was intimately involved in, linux more or less didn't exist. The sharing-of-leased-lines-to-the-internet smallscale ISP thing started around 1992 (more or less) when it became obvious the CO/RE split was going to happen, converging with Moore's Law technology changes (9600+ modems and widespread and cheap systems capable of running TCP/IP). Torvalds announced his plan for linux in 1991. That same year, a full-blown unix was available, 386/bsd. By 1992, 1993, 1994, 386/bsd and then free, net, etc were around. http://www.computerhope.com/history/unix.htm This is no criticism of linux; it simply wasn't usable in 1992 like unix was. I love linux, it's great software, made for a huge activist-y community, plus it slapped the unix distros into line to some degree. My assumption is that CERTAINLY, RFC822 style TCP port 25 mail was deeply established as the de facto standard for "email" by the internet explosion, which was implemented 99% on unix, not linux. What you say is true, linux has had a massive effect, but well after such standards were in place. The linux world didn't have to "help convince the world RFC822 was the way to go", it was a done deal long before it arrived on the scene. I'm more thankful that the likes of Microsoft etc didn't get to determine much of this stuff. Whew!