Internet Turns 35 Today

shadowspar writes "The CBC is reporting that the Internet turned 35 today. The story talks about the less-than-prophetic beginnings of the net: 'In order to log in to the two-computer network, which was then called ARPANET, programmers at UCLA were to type in 'log', and Stanford would reply 'in'. The UCLA programmers only got as far as 'lo' before the Stanford machine crashed.'"

unintended consequences

[circletimessquare]

It is not like the original ubergeeks sat around the U Berkeley lab setting up DARPANet in the 1960s and said "Hey! Let's invent an infinitely superior music distribution model that no one can make money off of!"

But that is exactly what they did.

"less-than-prophetic"?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck? Did you mean "less-than-auspicious" maybe?

Re:Internet Years Vs. Real years

[pixel.jonah]

PLEASE Remember:

Internet > WWW

Thank you.

AOL

[frankmu]

I thought AOL (internet) was alot younger than that.

it's amazing that their current ad campaign makes AOL=Internet

Re:What they meant to type...

[Anonymous Coward]

there's a difference?

Sure it was

[abb3w]

I'm not even sure its safe to called the ARPANET the internet, considering how limited it was

FTP is quite old [faqs.org], and was quite useful even before gopher and later http made zipping files back and forth trivial. The genius of Berners-Lee was rather like the mythical invention of the Recees Peanut Butter Cup. He figured out a way to combine a hypertext markup scheme [wikipedia.org] with internet file transfer. The individual component ideas had been lying around for at least seven years (and possibly since the dawn of ARPANET) when he put them together in a limited whole. Active scripting was a bit more clever an idea, but only marginally.

I will grant that it's a good thing TELNET is dying in favor of SSH-- security (network and computer alike) has made great progress since then. So has bandwidth. So has accessibility to the general public [catb.org]. But it's no more funamentally different in terms of power than modern desktop computers are compared to those of days of yore [computerhistory.org].

Now tell Joe Beer this.

[JessLeah]

Joe Beer thinks "the Internet" is around ten years old, since that's when he first heard of it. Smarter Joe-Beers would point to the date of the invention of the Web (not "the Internet" as a whole) and say "See? The Internet was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 199x... I read it on such-and-such"...

[cue OT rant]

Most bozos nowadays can't distinguish between:

* "The Internet" and "The Web"
* "PC" and "Windows"
* "Microsoft" and "Windows"
* "Macintosh" and "the Mac OS" (or "Mac OS X")
* "Apple" and "Macintosh"


Thus, you will hear things like "Yeah, I'm on the Web" (translation: "I have a connection to the Internet"), or "Are you running Windows or Mac?" (translation: "Windows or Mac OS X"), or "This game is only available for the PC" (read: "...for Windows").

However, these same functional computer illiterates (read: 99% of the US population) manage to think that "Linux", "Unix", "Red Hat" and "Solaris" (to give four examples) are completely different skillsets (talk to any typical "tech recruiter" and you'll see what I mean. I've met guys who have twenty years of experience in half a dozen commercial Unices, but can't get a job dealing with the one major flavor they've never touched... 'cuz as we all know, they don't all share 99% of the same stuff.... Oh, wait, they do...)

Re:Before the Stanford machine crashed...

[JQuick]

Apparently BSD has been dying for much longer than people realize.

Since I've been using FreeBSD, NeXT, and MacOS X, exclusively for the past 15 years this news gives me pause for thought. Each OS has been reliable, fast, low-maintenance and enjoyable. Because of this I was not terribly concerned by the sad news that BSD was dying. Honestly, it always seemed pretty healthy to me.

Hearing that this fatal condition has persisted for much longer than I had known about, perhaps I should finally heed the warnings of its demise.

If I decide to switch to another OS are there lingering health problems I should worry about?

I hear that Windows has long suffered from epilepsy, incontinence, narcolepsy. It also has a severely compromised immune system which leaves it prone to opportunistic infections.

Linux on the other hand, appears to suffer from schizophrenia.

Any recommendations?

Re:unintended consequences

[soliptic]

First, let me say I agree with your key point (unintended consequences) absolutely. It's one of the things that fascinates me most about the internet. What strikes me very clearly is how undeniably Marxist the whole thing is. Now, I know most people tend towards ill-informed knee-jerks at the mention of Marx, but try and forget all that silly Soviet nonsense, which really had precious little to do with Marx at all, and essentially nothing to do with the Marx I'm talking about.

In short (because I should be in bed already):

Changes in the means of production (ie. technological advances, eg. the internet) will alter the relations of production and eventually have a "cascade effect" which radically alters society itself (eg. notions of intellectual property).

But, that's not really what I wanted to pick up. Rather, I'm curious as to how a music distribution that "no one" can make money off can possibly be considered "infinitely superior".

I'm not trying to troll, I dont think P2P is theft, blah blah. Hell, I use P2P myself - yes, to download music. Yes, to download music which I'm not supposed to.

On the other hand, as a musician, there has to be money in there somewhere, or the consequences are potentially dire. Now you can say "real musicians will continue to make music for the love of it, even if they're not getting paid" all you like. You'd be right. They will.

But.... lets just say, I spent five years making music while a student/unemployed. In that time I consistently averaged one track every two weeks. Eleven months ago I got a full-time temping job; since then I've made five tracks in total. Three months ago I got a full-time "proper" job; since then I've made absolutely nothing.

It's simply a matter of time and energy. If you can earn money from your music, you can devote all your time to it. If you can't, you're faced with trying to come up with some meaningful in two or three snatched hours after work, with a head full of stress and that 7am alarm clock lurking at the back of your mind.

If nobody makes money from music, less music gets made. Sad but true.

What he means

[SmallFurryCreature]

Road network > Cars or Postal system > Junk Mail.

The internet is a number of inventions put together, the idea of a open protocol that any computer network could talk to the outside regardless of what it used internally. It is also the idea that it not centralized like more tradionional networks so that it could survive outage.

Just like junkmail != Postal system, the internet != WWW. Rather just like junkmail uses the postal system to work, the WWW uses the internet. HOWEVER, the two are entirely unrelated. It would be very easy for me to send junkmail without using the postal system, just dropping flyers in your neighbourhood does that and it is easy to make a WWW site wich does not use the internet (A website using local links would do that href=/home/user/mysite/page2.html).

The internet existed long before WWW. This makes those predicting the end of the Internet because of spam or IE exploits so fucking hilarious. It is like saying roads are going to be destroyed because of traffic jams. What you say? We might all use rail transport instead? Rails are roads. Just as anything that will replace the internet will be the internet.

The internet is not a thing, it is an idea. The idea that you can connect individual networks to a central network that connects them all.

If I implemented my connection with the revolutionary new tech off Avian IP it would still be part of the internet even if noone else has packet delays == cat digestive system.

Re:Now tell Joe Beer this.

[gr0k]

* "The Internet" and "The Web"

I found it kinda funny that on your website in your sig about UnixKit contains the following:

• Built from Unix programs already ported to Windows by coders around the Web