50 yrs. ago today

[allison]

On 10/29/19 8:21 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
>>> The first "internet" packet was certainly a significant event.
> 
> On Tue, 29 Oct 2019, Paul Koning wrote:
>> Indeed.  So "remote communication between heterogeneous computers"
>> would probably be a good description.
> 
> not so sure, . . . I think that there had been others.  BUT, first with
> the IP protocol, . . .

Maybe so, likely UUCP first.  IP networks were a thing that sorta grew
as standard developed.  Either way it was well before the late 70s.

Also Aloha-net was when?  I thought that was the first wide area network
that also used radios for links.

Generally "first" works if your specific enough.  But in the old
Arpanet days if you said that on a list and were incomplete or wrong
you got your head handed to you upside down.  Sometimes gently, maybe.
;-)

Allison

> 
>> I'm not sure it's "bogus" but you have to understand the qualifiers.
>> Columbus is a good example, because it's well known that other
>> Europeans traveled to America quite some time before he did.  However,
>> those earlier visits made no lasting impression on history, while the
>> one Columbus made did.
> 
> so, . . .
> "first" means earliest that WE are aware of, . . . "first" means the one
> that our schoolbooks talk about, . . . Being in the history books may
> mean "most important", but not "first"; the textbooks in the schools are
> astonishingly inaccurate.  And, yes, some of them are going to say that
> Steve Jobs invented computers.
> 
>> But it was first in the same sense that the Vikings were first to
>> America.
> 
> There were some Asians? quite a bit earlier.  The residents did not
> evolve here.