An early social un-network

I was at university just as residential networking was installed, so all of the students doing computer work would hang out in the room full of terminals and workstations. There was a single serial terminal on each residential floor for quick email sessions, but if you needed to get work done, you went over to the computer center. Some rooms had X Terminals, others more powerful workstations, and there were some large central hosts that had the licensed applications needed for some coursework. There would be a hundred people logged in at once. It was common for people to set up .plan files, use Unix "talk" to message each other, we had a local Usenet hierarchy in addition to the global one. People shared what they learned, experimented with early Gopher and Web, a natural community was formed.

Once the residences were wired, a lot of that culture went away.

I'm really glad those of us who were around on these systems in the late 80s/early-90s are recording some of their experiences. It really was a wonderful period, when the Internet was small, and to some extent we felt like we were already living in the future. I find it hard to explain... but the character of the connected world was different in those days. The technical barriers were a great filter.

VMS did, in fact have finger back in those days, although it might have not been a stock utility. In Claremont, we had the advantage of having Ned Freed (inventor of MIME) on the computing staff at HMC, so we might have had a lot of innovative stuff that wasn’t yet universal. JANET did have a gateway to the rest of the world. On interesting thing is that JANET addresses were the inverse of contemporary domain naming, with the highest level part of the domain name appearing first (kind of appropriate for an island where they drive on the “wrong” side of the road). There was also a tendency to use really short names, so a friend/colleague at Imperial College was something like mc @ uk.ac.ic (which was always fun to say out loud).

Most of Europe was on a network (EARN) based on the IBM protocols that undergirded BITNET. Switzerland, Austria and Germany followed a stereotypically teutonic and highly rational system of assigning domain names where the first letter indicated the country (D=Germany, A=Austria, C=Switzerland), the next two letters were the region, then two letters for the institution and the last three characters identified the individual machine which was making the best of the situation where there were only eight characters available to identify each machine on the whole network with a flat namespace.

BITNET names were a bit more freewheeling, but often were going to be something like institute+machine type, so UICVM for the IBM mainframe at UIC, HMCVAX for the VAX at Harvey Mudd College, etc. There was a Bitnet protocol for real-time chat.

Most Unix machines eschewed the Bitnet protocols for UUCP which, at least initially, often required explicit hops from one machine to the next, so you might have to address an email to something like drofnats!caltech!jarthur!dhosek to get an email from Stanford to Harvey Mudd, although by the late 80s, only the most obscure corners of the Unix world required a path with an explicit path.

The first generation of the internet did a lot to hide the disparate networking protocols underlying ARPA vs BITNET vs JANET vs UUCP, etc. (EARN and BITNET, using the same protocol effectively acted as a single network at that time), which meant that it was no longer necessary to do things like include gateways in email addresses (WISCVM was one machine that I recall being on both ARPA and BITNET and was a common path to route email between the networks). If you look at old issues of TUGBoat from the 80s, you’ll often see lists of email paths authors would provide to make it easier to reach them including some communication protocols which are long gone like Telex.

> No really, we had this. On the Vax it was DEC$PHONE and allowed up to four (or was it five?) simultaneous participants in a real-time text chat channel. If you “phoned” someone using their account name on the system then a “ringing” text alert would appear in the middle of whatever else they were doing on their terminal. Awfully like getting @here alerts in Slack in the modern era.

Seems like an oversight not mentioning IRC in this section.

> Like DEC$PHONE you had talk I believe? Instant messenger but far more network friendly and so closer to what we think of today.

We also had (still have...) Zephyr:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)

That's what we used primarily in the CS dept at my university in the early 90s and the tech staff were still using it at my first job in the late 90s.

This old terminal hardware is just beautiful. Terribly unergonomic probably, but certainly nice to look at.

After some short FIDO BBS tries I eventually settled on MAUSnet with posh Zyxel (19200baud, you 14k4 losers :)) and later Bitnet Relay and UUCP. IRC was "The New kid on the block" and crowded with beginners...

A really good read. I was a bit later to the party but, my God, it was better then.

But the reality of shareholder value and developers salaries had to come from somewhere, and here we are, the enshittification of the internet is upon us and you can’t even load a HTML document without being tracked, spammed and generally frustrated.