How were people using computers to communicite with each other before the Internet was made public?

@Francis,

Francis wrote:

Back in the seventies, I was the youngest of the team that made the first transatlantic data base connection between the MIT and one of the major French research labs..

I thought your style sounded awfully familiar - you were with IRIA, now INRIA? They were the first French institute to connect with ARPANET.

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@parados,

Sheesh - cut the guy some slack. He never said that he used Compuserve in 1969. He's only around 30, so he says.

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@High Seas,

Delegate from EDF (DER-Direction des études et recherches)..

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@Francis,

It's been a long time, but there was always at least one of us graduate students (a.k.a. inveterate hackers) at the computer lab. Nice to see you again Smile

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@High Seas,

Didn't know you were there.. Very Happy

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@Francis,

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@Ragman,

Ragman wrote:

In 1987, I bought my house from an internal employee on the in-house bulletin board system at DEC (Digital Equp't Corp).

The first computer I really used in college was a Digital Rainbow. Had no hard drive (Winchester Disk) so OS was loaded by floppies.

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@Ticomaya,

The first computer I used was in 1979. This was actually a Tech school training device with which I was learning how to fix computers.

The next one I handled around then was a Radio Shack TRS-80 or maybe it was my friend's Apple IIc in '79-80.

Then, once I was hired by DEC as a Field Service Tech in my first 'serious' Tech support job, I had to fix one of their PDP-8 peripherals. Mercy, what an near-antique it was even then. DEC believed in cradle-to-grave FS support of whatever they created.

I remember those Rainbow PCs. Weren't they introduced in 1982? DEC muffed that one pretty bad, I thought.

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@Ragman,

Oops... somewhere in there was TI99/4a in '82 at my brother's...was that Texas Instrument?

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This was my first love. It ran basic, had 8K of Ram, displayed black and white on your CRT, stored programs on a cassette tape, and could drop into an assembly language mode at the touch of a button.

It's true you never forget you first one.

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I was spoiled. I had Darpa net access in 1980. When the first servers appeared in the early 90's I had a early dialup --5000 0r 6000 baud from Darpa. Servers where long distance so home access was as timely possible and usually short.

Before that there were some mainframe protocols used internally by TTYs...Noisy beasts, my hearing improved mightily when the CRT became available in the middle 70's.

My grandfather, an electrical engineer starting in the 20's used a number 2 Faber and legal pads, ham and commercial radio (he built and designed them), Morse code (an early form of ASCII), and a Smith Corona. They lived slower then and had a lot of fun doing it.

Rap

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@raprap,

For many apps we're also slow - processors are orders of magnitudes faster, but spaghetti code is slowing everything down. Are you familiar with REBOL?
http://www.rebol.com/cgi-bin/blog.r?index=0

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@High Seas,

Edit: this code seems to be so incredibly lightweight it may be ideal for multicore processors - though I haven't actually tested any apps in it.

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@Ragman,

I had a Commodore 64 computer as a kid and I had floppy disks.
I can recall in the '80s the Amiga computers were the most sophisticated computers out there on the market at the time. I had a program called Koala Paint, which was a forerunner to art programs like Corel Draw and MS Paint, and the Koala stylus pad was a forerunner to the Wacom Pad.

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@High Seas,

I've been on a search STOP Something reminded me of telegraphy in the nineteenth century STOP Ability to multiplex eight 60 wpm morse code messages simultaneously on a wire STOP granted, bandwidth is limited, but 60 wpm is significant STOP BTW some of these machines could transmit and receive images STOP

technology, is forgotten beauty and forgotten men STOP http://www.telegraph-history.org/george-m-phelps/.

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They had some precursors for web browsers in the late 80s and early '90s- I read an article about that and people were experimenting with them. How come not everyone was using them?

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@Francis,

Would you take a look at the French apps written in this language? There's a Rebol to Ruby comparison. I'd appreciate your opinion:
http://www.rebolfrance.info/

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@raprap,

Yes, speed is an old problem and still very much with us - that's ultimately the issue behind net neutrality; btw, any ideas on this approach:

Quote:

... Last summer I was working with someone on firing up a hosted virtual server. When I ran the speed.r test, I discovered that the disk/file test was only about 8 MB/S! (I've got 12 year-old 400 MHz PC's that run that fast.)

I contacted the ISP and after quite a lot of arm twisting I got them to measure the disk speed (using an independent method.) They were quite surprised how bad it was! We moved the server twice before landing on one that ran about 10 times faster... and, for the same price.

http://www.rebol.com/cgi-bin/blog.r

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How were people using computers to communicite with each other before the Internet was made public?

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