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On this day in 1969 — The first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
Since that effectively marked the birth of the Internet, you could say it's 40 years old today.
So naturally, I had to go and find one of the cheesiest YouTube renditions of Happy Birthday:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKpHzbLtybU
-oOo-
And in transport of a different kind, 23 years ago (1986) — British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opened the last stretch of the M25 motorway. Yes, the "World's Biggest Carpark" or "Road to hell" (as Chris Rea so affectionately put it) was also completed today in history...
Comments
Makes me feel old
I first used Arpanet in the late 1970's....OTOH I was 13/14 so maybe not THAT old...
the old days
I started using the internet backin 1988 with telnet, ftp, and lynx. I did this using a 2400 baud modem dialing into a cyber 10 super computer over Florida State University. This was on an ibm 386/33 with bsd unix which was a precursor to what is now Linux. The first days of html browsing was really rough. I still program periodically on my Commodore 64 and Commodore 128. My little timex sinclar 1000 died and burnt up after years of use.
Hugs,
Jenna From FL (just turned 39)
Moderator/Editor
TopShelf BigCloset
Hugs,
Jenna From FL
Moderator/Editor
TopShelf BigCloset
It is a long road ahead but I will finally become who I should be.
I am fascinated by the technical stuff, remembering 386
along with the little flashing lines on the bottom of the screen that seemed hours to disappear. But the reason I wrote is to wish YOU a belated happy birthday!!! Buon compleanno e molti altri, cari dolce sorella!
She was born for all the wrong reasons but grew up for all the right ones.
Tutto il mio apprezzamento, cari, Andrea
Love, Andrea Lena
Timex/Sinclair
Somewhere, I have the original Sinclair Micro-ace -- which is the kit version of the ZX-80. I remember running all over Frankfurt looking for a 78-series chip because they sent me the wrong part. I finally got the thing soldered together and enjoyed programming in integer basic.
Later, I built a ZX-81, which is the same as the Sinclair 1000. I used to save my programs to audio tape every half hour or so because jiggling the 16K ram pack would cause the whole thing to crap out.
Ah... the old memories.
September 1995
That's when I first used the 'net.
It was at university (Aberystwyth, in case you're interested), Netscape 1.1N on a Windows NT4 box. I think the uni had an 8Mbps connection to the outside world then - and on at least one occasion we spent a few days offline because someone digging up the road about 100 miles away accidentally sliced through the cable...
I also discovered IRC (initially the internal #aber on EFnet) and newsgroups (mainly aber.*, although someone once set up alt.aber and - as a parody, because I'd ended up on the wrong side of too many flamewars [I was still young and naive back then!] - alt.fan.ben-norwood [which hopefully doesn't exist any more!]). Later on I discovered Geocities - although I created a site, it was practically content-less, as I couldn't think of anything useful to put on it!
Back then my first computer was a Pentium 75 with 8MB RAM and a 500MB HDD, running Win 3.
Skip forward 14 years, and I still don't have a website - unless you count Facebook - but that's practically designed to be a content-free presence on the web :) I do however have an 8Mbps connection to myself.
And my computer's now an Athlon 64X2 5000+ (whatever that translates as) with 3GB RAM and a 250GB HDD, running Mandriva 2009.1 (hopfully in 4 days time, Mandriva 2010). So a slight improvement, then... :)
Right, that's enough technobabble for now, I'll stop before I send you off to sleep :)
--Ben
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!