Hacker Remix

How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)

169 points by samizdis 1 week ago | 93 comments

cpr 1 week ago

That March 1977 map always brings back a flood of memories to this old-timer.

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.

Suzuran 1 week ago

On the subject of that last item, it is to my amusement that modern internet scanners are completely confused by a 1970s operating system. They record a "hit" when they find an open telnet port, but then get stuck because there is no recognizable prompt after the system banner message prints. They find a running FTP server but get confused that it does not use recognizable filesystem semantics. They get even more confused when it ignores passwords because the system has none. By all rules and tenets of security doctrine this system should be the internet equivalent to a smoking crater, instantly and utterly destroyed by advanced security threats beyond the imaginations of its creators.

PS: It is also amusing that an unmodified 1970s SMTP server can still deliver messages to gmail and receive responses back, given only the provision of a SPF record. Sadly, the coming mandatory requirement for DKIM will finally make this no longer a possibility.

PPS: It is much less amusing to attempt to read the gmail user's responses on a terminal.

lxgr 1 week ago

Surprisingly, as I discovered earlier today, Gmail (still? newly?) supports sending plaintext-only messages!

Suzuran 1 week ago

Really? How?

lxgr 1 week ago

"Plain text mode", hiding in the "kebab menu" (i.e. the three vertically stacked dots) on the bottom of the message composition window. It even seems to stay on as a default once activated!

Very useful for the few times I actually need to send email to mailing lists with strong opinions about newfangled MIME multipart messages :)

Suzuran 1 week ago

Yes, that's very useful, thanks for pointing that out.

ManuelKiessling 1 week ago

Dear Sir, could you just, you know, continue writing? I just love these stories, would love to hear more!

cpr 1 week ago

Nah, it'd come out too much as "almost famous".

I did manage to avoid being Microsoft employee #12 or so (my buddy Bob Greenberg was #8, I think?, and encouraged me to come join them), and Adobe employee #8 (I knew Chuck Geschke from some earlier work done as an undergrad extending his PhD thesis to Harvard's extensible language ECL), due to various life circumstances. I guess God didn't want be to be a spoiled rotten billionaire.

Another near miss was co-consulting with Len Bosack at HP setting up Lisp Machine networking, and wondering how the heck the then-nascent Cisco was ever going to sell more than a few hundred routers (based on the same Sun-1 boards developed by Andy Bechtolstein at Standford that we used at Imagen, the first typeset-quality laser printers, a spinoff from Don Knuth's research at Stanford) to universities and government labs.

As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.

ManuelKiessling 4 days ago

> As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.

Well, I wasn't even close to the technology nexus that you describe, neither in time nor in place, but this really resonates with me.

I RELIABLY manage to "not get" stuff in my own bubble, not because I'm too far away from it or because I don't understand it, but the exact opposite.

For example, I clearly remember how in the early 2000s I thought/felt "well, of course Amazon/eBay/Google is a great business, but everyone is already using them anyway, so what's the upside" and similiar other Thoughts Of Great Wisdom And Foresight.

Suzuran 1 week ago

You worked at Imagen? I had to write a partial Impress emulator a little while ago so I could make waste paper from my lispm. It only supported the image format since that was the only thing the lispm sent when printing the screen, but it beat the heck out of taking photos of a CRT.

cpr 1 week ago

Yes, helped start it (first or second employee back in 1980(?)).

Wild! I had forgotten the LispMs had Impress support; I think that came out of the time when we worked with Janet Walker, head of documentation at Symbolics.

mromanuk 1 week ago

Yes, please! I love these comments on HN, this is blog material.

coffeecantcode 1 week ago

If this man wrote a book I’d read it.

mhandley 1 week ago

I worked for Peter Kirstein for many years - he always had wonderful stories to tell.

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.

nxobject 1 week ago

If only it could have disappeared into a vault until now... the bill could have been inflated away!

nxobject 1 week ago

The most hilari-depressing part of the story was the funding politics and grantwriting headaches that have never changed:

– 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.)

mhandley 1 week ago

Peter once told me that in 1973, the only two organizations permitted to do telecommunications were the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense. So to legally connect UCL to the ARPAnet, he needed an exception clause. Somehow he got both the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense to sign off that they were not interested in computer-to-computer communications, in perpetuity, so that UCL could do so instead. He said he never tried to hold them to it later.

Full_Clark 1 week ago

Spot on. Would be interesting to see what sort of hoops you'd have to jump through in an academic lab today to secure similar money.

That 5k GPB in 1973 is 77k in today's pound, or about 95k USD at current exchange rates.

indymike 1 week ago

Every time I have a meeting with government, especially regulatory agencies about getting something done, it isn't easy because these words have very different meanings, which can lead you into bad places quickly:

support - engineer means "compatible, works with" govt means "aiding a cause"

business rules - engineer means logic, govt means literal rules that have force of law

If you want to get results, you have to be really careful - if you say you are supporting something, the govt people may think you are aiding a cause they or whoever appointed them oppose. If you talk about rules, govt people assume a 2 year fight, expensive process, and lots of hearings - so it gets weird.

gnufx 1 week ago

The trouble was that it was quite unclear to a researcher, even in one of the research council networking hubs, how to get access to the gateway, and it may have cost. I gave up trying before going to work in Oak Ridge for the summer (where I was taken aback by the primitive computing, at least "outside the fence"). For some time (mid-80s to early 90s? I don't remember) we were generally dependent on the infamous BITNET email gateway to communicate with the rest of the world from the well-developed UK network. It was "interesting" to deal with code in a Swedish 6-bit character set sent through the EBCDIC gateway to ISO 646-GB. (The Fortran Hollerith formats were added interest...)