Edit: in HN titles, if you see a year at the end in parens, that indicates the year that the article originated. If you see a year that's not at the end in parens, that's part of the article title, meaning it's probably about something that happened that year. That's the convention anyhow.
My point: "Internet" wasn't very well-known "even" in 1988 outside of well-connected places.
Book: Scandinavian PC Systems, Valentino Berti: "Introduktion till datakommunikation"
https://archive.org/details/michigan-terminal-system-distrib...
What connection did the housing in the dorms at Kent have? I seem to remember serial ports in the rooms, but could have been ether?
You could, with a tiny amount of password hacking, joyride around the system quite easily, at least as far as getting to a login message on a remote host, possibly logging on with a guest account and having a text chat with surprised people in other countries.
I had an account on the NRS host machine to administer our site info.
At one point there was an outage of the Sprint connection to Sweden that the Nordic connection to the US went over, and the Nordic countries for several hours saturated connections throughout parts of Europe that were in no way at a scale suitable to be a functional backup for the traffic from the Nordic countries...
It was first later I realised how spoiled we'd been... Tens of Mbps FTP speeds to other Nordic countries was routine in 94/95, for example.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunet
https://internetmuseum.se/tidslinjen/nordunet-connects-the-n...
Peter was also responsible for the UK using .uk instead of the ISO country code "gb" which it should have been according to "the rules". But Peter insisted on .uk, as the official name of the country was "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", and he thought GB was not properly inclusive of Northern Ireland. It took until 2021 for UK to replace GB on car number plates (and stickers for travelling abroad).
Boy, those scalliwags would have got into a lot of trouble if they had got caught.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
(which of course applies to your comments as well)
As far as I can tell, Finland first got ARPANET connection via NORDunet in 1988 [1][2][3], though possibly indirectly a few years before as there was a connection to Sweden a few years earlier.
[1] https://siy.fi/history-of-the-finnish-internet/
[2] https://csc.fi/en/news/funets-anniversary-40-years-of-action...
[3] From [2]: "On Thursday December 1st, 1988, the first routing test was carried out, allowing IP packets to pass from Finland via Nordunet to the USA, in effect the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET and Arpanet networks. This connected Finland to the international Internet via the Funet network. The following message can be seen as the beginning of the Finnish Internet."
It’s awful, what’s wrong with having a chat, in person, over a nice cup of tea?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom
Pipex was established in 1990 and began providing dial-up Internet access in March 1992, the UK's first commercial Internet service provider (ISP).
That's about the same time it became available in the U.S. I got home internet service (dial-up) in the mid-1990's.
I know reading the article is very much out of fashion, but all the dates given in the article are in the 1970s.
Just like the dates in the Wikipedia article you linked.
Happy nights spent hacking in the Harvard graduate computer center next to the PDP-1/PDP-10 (Harv-1, Harv-10), getting calls on the IMP phone in the middle of the night from the BBN network operations asking me to reboot it manually as it had gotten wedged...
And, next to me, Bill Gates writing his first assembler/linker/simulator for the Altair 8080... (I tried talking him out of this microcomputer distraction -- we have the whole world of mainframes at our fingertips! -- without success.)
(Edit:) We also would play the game of telnet-till-you-die, going from machine to machine around the world (no passwords on guest accounts in the early days), until the connection died somewhere along the way.
Plus, once the hackers came along, Geoff Steckel (systems guy on the PDP-10) wrote a little logger to record all incoming guests keystrokes on an old teletype, so we could watch them attempting to hack the system.
The article doesn't mention the Coloured Book protocols, but I'm pretty sure this phrasing isn't accidental: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols
Also, now I feel very old. "Little black book" was an ubiquitous term when I grew up, and so using the term would just be a synonym to "address book" that nobody would think twice about.
[1] E.g. The House and Home: A Practical Book - Volume 1 (1896): "And there is a little black book with red lettering seen on every writing-table and carriage-cushion wherein puzzled mater-familias finds her bearings annually among her cherished acquaintances, many of whom the little black book alone keeps in her recollection!"
[2] Guess you got back (Guess you got) To my name (To my name) In your little black book
– the NPL couldn't set up a British inter-network because of pressure from GPO;
– they couldn't connect to ARPA via Norway because of the Foreign Office;
– then, UCL couldn't get funding from SERC;
– then, UCL couldn't get funding from DTI because it didn't have industrial interest (although, to be fair, it was the department of "industry")...
...and then nearly a decade later government bodies were trying to take it over.
(It looks like the IMP/TIP was literally funded by petty-ish £££ that the NPL superintendent could get his hands on without further approval. To be fair, GPO did fund the link to Oslo.)
That 5k GPB in 1973 is 77k in today's pound, or about 95k USD at current exchange rates.
In the article Peter talks about the temporary import license for the original ARPAnet equipment. The delayed VAT and duty bill for this gear prevented anyone else taking over the UK internet in the early days because the bill would have then become due. But he didn't mention that eventually if the original ARPAnet equipment was ever scrapped, the bill would also become due.
When I was first at UCL in the mid 1980s until well into the 90s, all that equipment was stored disused in the mens toilets in the basement. Eventually Peter decided someone had to do something about it, but he couldn't afford the budget to ship all this gear back to the US. Peter always seemed to delight in finding loopholes, so he pulled some strings. Peter was always very well connected - UCL even ran the .int and nato.int domains for a long time. So, at some point someone from UCL drove a truck full of obsolete ARPAnet gear to some American Air Force base in East Anglia that was technically US territory. Someone from the US air force gave them a receipt, and the gear was officially exported. And there it was left, in the US Air Force garbage. Shame it didn't end up in a museum, but that would have required paying the VAT bill.
His most preferred model of funding work was to have 9/10ths of it done or a sure-fure thing, and then use the funding to work on the next idea, so he was guaranteed to have goods to deliver at the end of the project. He didn't always carry it off but when it worked it was superlative. I was on at least one OSI (protocol) project with 6 partners across industry and research in Europe, and the work was very unequal. That said, very fine dinners. I have fond memories of INRIA canteen food having wine and fresh fruit. UCL had baked beans and pies, the staff club had the same baked beans and pies but you could eat them under a superb Stanley Spenser oil painting of the resurrection.
The first Cisco Router turned up one day, it had annoyingly noisy fans which blew air a useless direction compared to the rest of the racks. As Mark Handley has pointed out below the basement was full of trash: a fantastic Prism-wedge shaped digital copying stand used with the British Library to photograph rare works, and an unbelievably expensive CCD digital camera attached gathering dust, a BBN Butterfly (it was a heap of crap frankly) running pre-BGP routing, a BLIT terminal and depraz mouse, the first Dec and Sun workstations.
We ran a project with the slade school of art doing digital arts design with them, lovely people. I still have some of the reject works.
Peter liked inviting people to come and be at UCL. During my time Bob Braden (SATNET) was there, and Mike Lesk (UUCP) -and they were also very nice and approachable. Tiny tea-room, I caused a kurfuffle washing out the most disgustingly stained coffee mug there, the owner of which was bulding the patina both to see how thick it got, and to discourage others from using his cup.
Peter had one standing rule you did NOT break: If there was an inter-departmental meeting with the people from ULCC (at that time down at Lambs Conduit St) he expected you to "vote against" any proposal they brought to the table without question: Departmental politics ran deep.
Peter was a committed skier, he was hardly young when I got there and he was still avidly visiting the alps as often as possible.
UCL ran the gateway from JANET (X.25 based non internet) to the ARPANet which required you to login to a unix jump host and use kermit to connect across, and lodge FTP requests using JANET "grey book" FTP protocol to talk to the FTP client through a conversion script. The gateway got hacked every now and then. Some of us were a bit unkind and said it used Kermit because Peter, who was somewhat small, frog-like and had thick glasses he peered through, appreciated the joke that he was Kermit personified.
http://9ol.es/nuclear-myth.html
A bit more:
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15035/did-the-co...
I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that... After some searching I found the Conversation's RSS feed for technology[1] which says it was 2025 after searching the page for "internet" and looking through the results
<id>tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45404</id>
<published>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</published>
<updated>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</updated>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://theconversation.com/how-britain-got-its-first-internet-connection-by-the-late-pioneer-who-created-the-first-password-on-the-internet-45404"/>
<title>How Britain got its first internet connection – by the late pioneer who created the first password on the internet</title>