Do they teach networking history classes yet? Or is it still too soon?
I was reading [Al]’s first installment of the Forgotten Internet series, on UUCP. The short summary is that it was a system for sending files across computers that were connected, intermittently, by point-to-point phone lines. Each computer knew the phone numbers of a few others, but none of them had anything like a global routing map, and IP addresses were still in the future. Still, it enabled file transfer and even limited remote access across the globe. And while some files contained computer programs, others files contained more human messages, which makes UUCP also a precursor to e-mail.
What struck me is how intuitively many of this system’s natural conditions and limitations lead to the way we network today. From phone numbers came the need for IP addresses. And from the annoyance of having know how the computers were connected, and to use the bang notation to route a message from one computer to another through intermediaries, would come our modern routing protocols, simply because computer nerds like to automate hassles wherever possible.
But back to networking history. I guess I learned my networking on the mean streets, by running my own Linux system, and web servers, and mail servers. I knew enough networking to get by, but that mostly focused on the current-day application, and my beard is not quite grey enough to have been around for the UUCP era. So I’m only realizing now that knowing how the system evolved over time helps a lot in understanding why it is the way it is, and thus how it functions. I had a bit of a “eureka” moment reading about UUCP.
In physics or any other science, you learn not just the status quo in the field, but also how it developed over the centuries. It’s important to know something about the theory of the aether to know what special relativity was up against, for instance, or the various historical models of the atom, to see how they inform modern chemistry and physics. But these are old sciences with a lot of obsolete theories. Is computer science old enough that they teach networking history? They should!
Just to clarify, email between users of different computers history) pre-dates UUCP (1976). SMTP came along later.
Where’s the “preview” button when you need it? “history)” should be “(history)”.
Was going to say that. Most technologies people think of coming to the consumer market existed in higher-end systems for decades prior.
The Mac 128K was the first (ish) computer to launch to consumers with a graphical desktop in 1984…………the same year that people at MIT were rewriting the pre-existing W windowing system into X to make it more portable.
Likewise, memory protection came to macs as standard with the IIx in 1988 and to windows…….with windows NT in 1993 (only a month early enough to predate it appearing with linux)……while it had been standard in high-end unix systems for nearly 20 years already (since at least the early 70’s, if not 1969 itself, pretty sure early unix required MMU units for the PDP11).
Linux is from 1991, not 1993. By 1993, at least FIVE distributions already existed
My beard may not be the grayest, but it’s grayer than yours.
Yeah no. From the need to have some kind of idea where the message was going to go came the need for both.
Distance vector routing protocols predate UUCP, and definitely predate UUCP email. The need to route packets is as old as packet switching, and dynamic routing protocols aren’t much older.
Telling yourself nice stories isn’t exactly history.
Ethernet and TCP/IP predated UUCP, as of course did ARPANET. Even the term “internet” was being used in reference to ARPANET when UUCP came out).
To be fair, none of those things would become remotely mainstream for years to come, and I do think UUCP deserves credit for introducing a lot of people to ideas about network routing, email, etc., for the first time. But I think its main – and significant! – achievement was tying all these existing concepts together in a way that was incredibly practical and affordable compared to other options of the time (though definitely with emphasis on “of the time”).
The author was saying that networking history should be taught, and a small article talking about that isn’t a claim to be doing it. Meanie.
“Telling yourself nice stories isn’t exactly history.”
My favorite bit of Internet history is a book by an old network boy, M.A. Padlipsky: The Elements of Networking Style. Lots of interesting bits including the battle with ISO RM.
Nice to have lived as a very small part of this history, the traces are faint.
I got my first unix account on a vax 750 running bsd unix around 1980.
My uucp address was ..mcvax!enea!erix!bosse
Became sysadmin for one of the first 3 Sun 1 that was brought to sweden by our company’s technical director.
I installed our first Ethernet with vampire ethernet connectors that connected our vax and the Sun.
Soon we had other workstations as ICL Perq and Apollos conneted.
I had a coworker that wrote a gateway program that allowed the IBM users to send messages to the uucp world,
He was also a sendmail guru who assisted with many fixes to it.
My small claim to fame is to have signed the contract between the SNUS organization and kinnevik that became the first commercial internet provider Swipnet in Sweden.
I worked first with system administration for our Sun systems and later with the security for the company wide connectivity to internet until I retired after 40 years with the same company.
❤️
I mean, we had a globe-spanning telephone network before computing even came around. I hope they teach people about that in school at some point. That’s where you should look for the roots, not some Unix users in the ’70s. The Connections Museum has a very cool YouTube channel about it.
This series of articles opened my eyes to exactly what you said – I read this because of another HaD comment (sorry, can’t find which post for credit). 10/10 highly recommend
https://www.filfre.net/2022/01/a-web-around-the-world-part-1-signals-down-a-wire/
Telephony IS networking – not something tangential to computer networks where very similar problems were solved.
ITIL being (originally) a telephony standard was always presented to me as a cute factoid, rather than a key insight into how computer networking came to be. Samuel Morse and the telegraph is the beginning of the story of computer networks.
I was a new grad, working at Data General when Ethernet became “a thing”. The DIX standard shortly became IEEE 802.3, and we had thick yellow cable and vampire taps, quickly replaced with crimp N connectors and 3Com transceivers. I designed DG’s microNova Ethernet interface card. Still have some of that thicknet in the attic and a couple hundred feet feeding some antennas in the back yard.
When I was in Honolulu a few years ago, I made a pilgrimage to the Univ of Hawaii at Manoa, where there’s a marker honoring the developers of ALOHANET, the precursor to Ethernet.
One thing people don’t seem generally aware of is the issues caused by the thickness of early ethernet cables (Thick Ethernet). For example, the University of East Anglia (UEA, UK – home of the ‘climategate’ stitch-up in 2009) had a Sun lab in the late 1980s, full of, I believe Sun 3s: 68020 based workstations all linked to each other by Thick Ethernet.
But you couldn’t see any cables! Certainly not! Thick Ethernet cables snaked around in big arcs so they had an entire mezzanine floor underneath the lab just for them! I’m sure we weren’t the only ones!
10BASE-T arrived to much rejoicing :-)
Many of us old guys have fond memories of the excitement in our youth. I used to stare at my ATT 3B1 in wonderment as it answered the line from asuvax where they were kind enough to give me access. Before that on IBM 360/75 but the 3B1 in my living room felt so much more personal.
Oh, the good old days. I remember “bang” notation for emails and configuring the modems to wake up and fetch email via UUCP from our connection to the backbone. In 1988 (well into the networked computers era), we were mostly an Apollo Domain Token Ring system at our shop. Nodes connected via a make-before-break-socket at the floor in each office. One fellow in Marketing had a Compaq Portable with an Apollo networking card installed that came with a BNC connector at the back of its case to connect to the token ring. The fellow in question couldn’t be bothered to disconnect with the socket at the floor, he just uncoupled the BNC from the Compaq and walked out the door at 5:00 pm. It drove the admins nuts because the Token Ring wasn’t a “ring” after that, and none of the other nodes could communicate with each other. The fellow’s name was Chuck, and we called it “chucking” the network. Things have gotten a lot better in the intervening 37 years.
I’ve been working on this, just to help me visualize the “other things going on” as I lived through ARPAnet and Internet (TCP/IP) history…
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jTVYl5sFJaUAzV5tWW5LgIxx7V9zg1uhz1nRoEGCZNs/edit?usp=sharing
Any story on networking history and UUCP, should probably at least mention USENET.