[GreenKeys] [External] Re: ASR32 or ASR33 ?

[Jones, Douglas W]

From:  Steve Garrison [steve.n4tty at gmail.com] -- Friday, October 29, 2021 6:29 PM
> Looks like a 32 to me!  Probably the guy writing the story just found a picture of any old teletype.

> From:  Michael Katzmann --  Friday, October 29, 2021 7:11 PM
>>  ooops .. this article https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/internet-got-started-simple-hello

The machine would have been a Model 33, not a Model 32.  I say this as someone who spent many hours programming an SDS Sigma 7 computer back in the day.  The Sigma 7 was a 32 bit machine, very much in the spirit of (but not compatible with) the IBM System 360 Model 67 -- it used EBCDIC as its internal code, but had excellent support for ASCII remote terminals and at Com Share Inc in Ann Arbor, we had a fleet of Teletype Model 33s, KSR and ASR, plus a small number of very new Tektronix graphics terminals (the kind with the storage scope).

A Sigma 7 in California was indeed the first ARPAnet host, and ARPAnet is where the Internet protocol suite origniated.

And, in response to the snide remark about Al Gore, he never said he invented the Internet, but he sure played an important role in the Senate making it possible for the Internet to come into being.  Government policies could well have prevented it, and Gore took a lead in the 1980s to make sure the Internet could happen.  I don't think anyone else in the Senate had a clue about the potential of networking back then.

As to who invented the Internet, many of us working on computers in the 1970s and 1980s knew that it was only a matter of time so long as government didn't stand in the way.  The form it would take was up in the air, but we knew from the little networks of the 1970s that it would happen in some form.  No one person can claim to have invented the Internet.  Similarly, many of us knew that something like the World Wide Web would happen.  I was using Gopher on the Internet before Tim Brenners Lee invented HTML.  Had he not invented HTML, Gopher (invented in Minnesota, not CERN) was poised to evolve into a hyperetext markup language.  Not the HTML we know, but it would have done the same things.  I strongly suspect there were other contenders in the wings.

           Doug Jones
           jones at cs.uioa.edu