[Boatanchors] Re: Internet was : eBay item 6506630347 (Ends Jan-26-05115704PST)-JAPANESE MILITARY RADIOS PAR

[mikea]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 09:44:46AM -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Mike Sanders K0AZ" <k0az at corpranet.net>
> Subject: RE: [Boatanchors] eBay item 6506630347 (Ends 
> Jan-26-05115704PST)-JAPANESE MILITARY RADIOS PAR


> > Once again. On the original internet we had nothing but communications
> > keyboards in
> > use (All Caps). Mostly in use were various models of teletype machines.

> This comment has been bugging me.  In finally did a little digging and this 
> is what I found ...

It sort of got my attention, too. I've been fighting computers for a living
since 1965, and have seen a lot -- too much, sometimes. 

> Much of the early interest in the Internet was among DEC/Unix types.  Their 
> most popular terminal back in the days was the Decwriter LA-36, which was 
> introduced in 1974 and supported upper and lower case.  To tell the truth, I 
> think the mainframe types had lower case in communications much earlier, but 
> lower case was not used among mainframe types until very late, probably a 
> cultural thing between mainframers and Deccies.

Way Back When, IBM had lots of different terminal types, and just about
every one seemed to have its own control characters. Most of 'em used BCD.
A little later, IBM standardized on EBCDIC, which has upper and lower
case and a full set of control characters, with the introduction of the
System/360. That was just about the time I started doing this stuff for a
living. Not terribly long after that, ANSI declared that USASCII, later
shortened to ASCII, was The Standard Character Set; it also has upper and
lower case and a full set of control characters.

USASCII and EBCDIC have existed side-by-side since then, IBM being
unwilling to bend the knee to any other organization and the rest of the
world unwilling to bend the knee to IBM. There has been an uneasy truce
between the two character sets until recently, when IBM big iron has
actually included instructions[1] to translate between the EBCDIC character
set and the ASCII and double-byte character sets.

I'm omitting a lot of stuff about different IBM terminals, their character
sets, and the control characters they used as part of their respective
communications protocols. It's all ancient history, and I have finally
managed to recycle most of those neurons. Still, I wake in the night with
my voice echoing "Circle-C, Circle-D" in my ears. It's horrible.

> The date Al Gore started the Internet is a little vague, but it certainly 
> wasn't before 1974.  The first concept was floated in 1973, TCP/IP wasn't 
> proposed until 1978, and wasn't actually used until 1983.  The IETF, the 
> body responsible for the Internet standards, was formed in 1986.

Before TCP/IP there were TIPs and IMPs, and Things Worked Differently.
There _was_ spam, though. The first spam was sent by a DEC salesman, 
to all the folks with E-mail addresses on Arpanet. It was a harbinger of 
things to come. 

> Some would probably argue that the ARPANET was really the Internet, and it 
> started back in 1969.  But the ARPANET wasn't at all like the Internet, 
> whose real "essence" is the idea of interconnecting networks, rather than 
> computers, and having a standards body that ensured all those networks could 
> actually communicate.  Besides, BITNET, TIMENET, Telenet and several others 
> all added ideas to what eventually became the Internet.

> I would suggest that it was really the formation of IETF that "created" the 
> Internet, although I could accept that the introduction to the wild of IP in 
> 1983 marked the beginning.  But four computers wired together at great 
> expense certainly doesn't represent the Internet, and that's what ARPANET 
> was.

I think that 1983 probably is as good a starting point as any, and better  
than most.                                                                 

> In any case, the upper/lower case terminal was widespread at least 9
> years before the "Internet", although hobbyists, like myself, certainly
> used teletypes long after that. But our upper-case ramblings were
> certainly viewed as boorish by the "real" users in the universities and
> government.

And the IBM mainframers, using 2260 (and, later, 3270) terminals, had only
upper case until the introduction of some fairly-late models of 3270, about
1982 or 1983 IIRC. WE HAD NO LOWERCASE AND COULD NOT STOP SHOUTING until
then. I remember having to convince my boss that it would be useful to have
lower case on a terminal; he'd never even thought of the concept before
then.

Now, of course, 3270 terminals pretty much don't exist, and people run
3270 emulators that talk over Ethernet -- or, for really stubborn cases,
token-ring, using ... TCP/IP.

[1]	_NOT_ the Translate instruction; that has been part of the S/360 and 
	later instruction sets from the beginning.

-- 
Mike Andrews, W5EGO
mikea at mikea.ath.cx
Tired old sysadmin 
Systems programmer (CDC, IBM) since 1965