... Two great quotes that were quoted within the article: (1) (2)
Many of the attendees were impressed by the demonstration, but not for the reasons that we, from our present-day vantage point, might assume. The key piece of context hard to keep in mind today is that, in 1972, being able to use a computer remotely, even from a different city, was not new. Teletype devices had been used to talk to distant computers for decades already. Almost a full five years before the ICCC, Bill Gates was in a Seattle high school using a teletype to run his first BASIC programs on a General Electric computer housed elsewhere in the city. Merely logging in to a host computer and running a few commands or playing a text-based game was routine. The software on display here was pretty neat, but the two scenarios I’ve told you about so far could ostensibly have been experienced without going over the ARPANET.
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To really appreciate why it was this aspect of the ARPANET project that was important and not the wires-across-the-country, physical connection thing that the host maps suggest (the wires were leased phone lines anyhow and were already there!), consider that, before the ARPANET project began in 1966, the ARPA offices in the Pentagon had a terminal room. Inside it were three terminals. Each connected to a different computer; one computer was at MIT, one was at UC Berkeley, and another was in Santa Monica. It was convenient for the ARPA staff that they could use these three computers even from Washington DC. But what was inconvenient for them was that they had to buy and maintain terminals from three different manufacturers, remember three different login procedures, and familiarize themselves with three different computing environments in order to use the computers. The terminals might have been right next to each other, but they were merely extensions of the host computing systems on the other end of the wire and operated as differently as the computers did. Communicating with a distant computer was possible before the ARPANET; the problem was that the heterogeneity of computing systems limited how sophisticated the communication could be.
Two great quotes that were quoted within the article:
(1)
The typical mainframe of the period behaved as if it were the only computer in the universe. There was no obvious or easy way to engage two diverse machines in even the minimal communication needed to move bits back and forth. You could connect machines, but once connected, what would they say to each other? In those days a computer interacted with devices that were attached to it, like a monarch communicating with his subjects. Everything connected to the main computer performed a specific task, and each peripheral device was presumed to be ready at all times for a fetch-my-slippers type command…. Computers were strictly designed for this kind of interaction; they send instructions to subordinate card readers, terminals, and tape units, and they initiate all dialogues. But if another device in effect tapped the computer on the shoulder with a signal and said, “Hi, I’m a computer too,” the receiving machine would be stumped.
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 12.
(2)
Possibly the most difficult task undertaken in the development of the ARPANET was the attempt—which proved successful—to make a number of independent host computer systems of varying manufacture, and varying operating systems within a single manufactured type, communicate with each other despite their diverse characteristics.
“Completion Report / A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade,” p. II-29.
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Two great quotes that were quoted within the article:
(1)
(2)