"but they aren't sufficient to make you an ISP."

Of course they were. What does the I in ISP mean? "Internet".

If what you offer can interoperate with the network, you're an ISP. What do you think the ip network looked like before the web? Hint: nobody really used Gopher (other than .ca whois) and 99% of all activity was mail and news. Which came from uucp and was ported to IP. But until the web came along there was simply no reason for a pain in the ass SLIP or PPP connection cause you could do anything important with a uucp connection.

ftp wasn't the only way to move files around. And as a user of the network you couldn't tell if those other people were on uucp or the ip network, it was all transparent to you - Interoperability.

You weren't there. Clearly.

You're used to dialing with ISDN or DSL and have it connect?

That's adorable.

Know what you got 90% of the time when you dialed up with a modem back then? A busy signal.

That's cause for every modem that existed, 5 guys wanted to use it. This went on until cable and dsl, late 90s or so.

So it was considered rude to dial up, then go away and leave it connected when you weren't using it and people were waiting.

Free ISP's (there were many, Barry was just the first pay-for one) would jut disconnect you and fuck you that's why. And most didn't charge so they could do this. But if you were paying, yupi might not expect that o had to be aware of the rules, like don't spam and don't tie up the modem pool.

You don't like it? Open your own isp and you can do what you like and waste your very expensive phone lines on people that forgot to hang up when they went out.

All of the internet ran on stolen equipment and stolen phone lines back then. You made it work by whatever means possible.

Jesus Christ, Sun and Cisco were both formed on the commission of a federal crime - they stole the machines from Stanford.

The problem with the Internet is the unusual personalities of the people that built and use.*

Barry literally wrote the book on tcp/ip, and as he says, the net was small back then and we all knew each other.

who the fuck are you?

*This is probably true of Slashdot, too.

That's nice. It's still compu$serve.

If you knew what you were doing you didn't pay for net, that's the advantage to store and forward uucp over always-on IP.

No.

Anybody could connect to the uucp network, it was ad-hoc and came with unix all out of bell labs and written by private industry.

The TCP/IP network otoh, was paid for by USG research dollars which the USG thinks gives them statutory authority over it, hence the dns and ip regime in place now which is effectively government control, not the private industry control that exists over the network itself.

At the time the NSF regulated IP transit with the AUP; Steve Wolff, who Barry mentioned, was in charge of this and felt the network would grow more quickly if the NSF wasn't "in the loop" and withdrew the AUP thus handing over the network to private control.

I asked Wolff years later why he didn't liberate the DNS as well as the network, it remained under the auspices of the NSF which got us to where we are not. He said in retrospect he should have; he didn't think it was important back then but if he knew then what he knows now he would have done it.

You have to keep in mine too there was nothing ON the TCP/IP network. Both UUCP and TCP/IP had email (although the ip side lagged badly, mail was really invented at Bell, IP made very crude versions of this ad took forever to do it) but News had come out of UUCP and there wasn't much else on the network. You really only needed IP if you needed to telnet or ftp and in 90 not many people were being paid to do this. So dial up uucp sites were not uncommon even then - every city had them, and from there you could real mail and news. That's all the network was back then.

" It holds a very important place in history"

Only in fido-land. It was a pox to the rest of the net.

Q:How do you know when the Fido boys tried to gateway again?
A: there are 300 posts in alt.aquaria. 280 of them are the same.

Every. Friggin. Time.

And no I don't know why your tank is green.

Lots of guys did - Karl Denninger in Chicago and Greg Laskin LA. But they were UUCP not IP connections.

If /. allowed caps you'd see a BIFF@BIT.NET post here.

So you won't.

You know when they're using weasel words like this they're being disingenuous:

"Also, it puts to bed the supposed 'fact' that there's been a pause in temperature increase the last 17 years. Raw data shows it's still increasing."

"Since 2000, temperatures have been warmer than average, but they did not increase significantly. Data courtesy of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. Since the turn of the century, however, the change in Earth’s global mean surface temperature has been close to zero." Note also CO2 rose the entire tie, it just didn't get any warmer for 17 years.

This is an NOAA.gov stateent based on NOAA data. And they disagree with this? Ok, what's the source of their data? Have they told the NOAA they're wrong yet?

http://www.climate.gov/news-fe...

I've used a T61 Thinkpad for ages now and it almost alarming the difference between the laptop screen and say, a nice 24" external monitor at 1920 px.

Has anybody with a Y510p tried running of of those cheap Seiki 4K screens?

Or the $50 tv boxen on ebay that claim to do 4K, anyone tried those?

Duh.

Pollution? Corporations.

Global climate grant change? Scientists.

How bout we get back to the pollution issue which has been attenuated by climate discussion.

Pollution is not under dispute.

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...

The NTIA are the winners that gave us ICANN.

They're under the department of *commerce*.

IANA says you can't. Courts have said otherwise.

http://www.circleid.com/posts/...

http://www.internetgovernance....

http://domainincite.com/3936-m...