A Brief History of Me Computers and the Internet
When Good takes on Evil, Positive versus Negative, Light against Darkness - the worst outcome is equilibrium.
So it follows that when BAD things occur, only good things must come out of it; and so it is with The Internet.
Growing up in a Naval military town on the South coast of the UK in the 1960's I was privileged to witness things that most people never get to see or even realise exist.
In those days Everybody watched Dr Who and Star Trek but I wasn't a Sci-Fi nerd like most of my peers.
In some ways there was no point bothering about phaser guns and teleportation because there was (and still is) so much amazing technology evolving around me.
Having relatives in Naval Telecommunications and Signals I got to see, amongst other 'things', 'Cold War' underground command bunkers buried deep in chalk hills, which could communicate with the Fleet globally. I was also often shown the workings of the bridge of Destroyers and Cruisers and many other warships.
What I saw there as a kid was the UK's version of ARPANET - the backbone of the military internet, utilising the 'bomb proof' TCP/IP protocol - the very first WAN.
In the 1970's at University I was introduced to JANET the Joint Academic Network, by way of a massive Hitachi or Toshiba or something Japanese Mainframe the size of a house. They forced us to write these stupid FORTRAN programs that never even got compiled because some card punching typist had missed out a comma somewhere.
So you never even got to know if the program ran!
This was great because I hated it and could write any old rubbish knowing I'd get credit for the methodology without having to worry, like nowadays, about whether it was going to work or not!
Whilst there, one of my smoking buddies, and a complete electrical and mechanical engineering nerd, showed me green 'terminals', crude email and network data exchange requests using TCP/IP Unix , but we were more interested in the green screen animations using character sets.
I was still not impressed!
Into the late 70's and Eighties and all my friends sold out to become COBOL programmers and work for the Thatcher Government.
I went away and read books.
One in particular, Yep! - a SCI-FI book had a massive impact upon my vision of The Internet, and that was Dune by Frank Herbert.
Incredibily written in 1965 Dune introduces the reader to some incredible ideas, one being this universal database of knowledge with client server type attributes across linked networks that both the goodies and the baddies have access to, and which anyone can jump onto a terminal anywhere and access universal knowledge - WOW!
I resisted Computers for ten more years until the late eighties when PC's and DOS became affordable and suddenly seemed to appear everywhere, quickly followed by modems, Compuserve and lots of strange messaging!
So you see, when another Great Briton, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the hypertext transfer protocol in the early nineties and made Frank Herbert's dream a reality, Good has evolved out of evil.
Beat The System
So it follows that when BAD things occur, only good things must come out of it; and so it is with The Internet.
Growing up in a Naval military town on the South coast of the UK in the 1960's I was privileged to witness things that most people never get to see or even realise exist.
In those days Everybody watched Dr Who and Star Trek but I wasn't a Sci-Fi nerd like most of my peers.
In some ways there was no point bothering about phaser guns and teleportation because there was (and still is) so much amazing technology evolving around me.
Having relatives in Naval Telecommunications and Signals I got to see, amongst other 'things', 'Cold War' underground command bunkers buried deep in chalk hills, which could communicate with the Fleet globally. I was also often shown the workings of the bridge of Destroyers and Cruisers and many other warships.
What I saw there as a kid was the UK's version of ARPANET - the backbone of the military internet, utilising the 'bomb proof' TCP/IP protocol - the very first WAN.
In the 1970's at University I was introduced to JANET the Joint Academic Network, by way of a massive Hitachi or Toshiba or something Japanese Mainframe the size of a house. They forced us to write these stupid FORTRAN programs that never even got compiled because some card punching typist had missed out a comma somewhere.
So you never even got to know if the program ran!
This was great because I hated it and could write any old rubbish knowing I'd get credit for the methodology without having to worry, like nowadays, about whether it was going to work or not!
Whilst there, one of my smoking buddies, and a complete electrical and mechanical engineering nerd, showed me green 'terminals', crude email and network data exchange requests using TCP/IP Unix , but we were more interested in the green screen animations using character sets.
I was still not impressed!
Into the late 70's and Eighties and all my friends sold out to become COBOL programmers and work for the Thatcher Government.
I went away and read books.
One in particular, Yep! - a SCI-FI book had a massive impact upon my vision of The Internet, and that was Dune by Frank Herbert.
Incredibily written in 1965 Dune introduces the reader to some incredible ideas, one being this universal database of knowledge with client server type attributes across linked networks that both the goodies and the baddies have access to, and which anyone can jump onto a terminal anywhere and access universal knowledge - WOW!
I resisted Computers for ten more years until the late eighties when PC's and DOS became affordable and suddenly seemed to appear everywhere, quickly followed by modems, Compuserve and lots of strange messaging!
So you see, when another Great Briton, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the hypertext transfer protocol in the early nineties and made Frank Herbert's dream a reality, Good has evolved out of evil.
Beat The System
Labels: The Internet
posted by semguru at
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