How the Net was Won
September 17, 2015 3:39 AM   Subscribe

 
Great post! I was fortunate to be on the sidelines, watching MERIT grow: a couple close friends got their first jobs out of college there and have since had successful careers due to their work ranging from on-call tech support to writing BGP specifications at IETF sessions.

I remember those trailers too. Not exactly NASA control room grade impressive, but at the same time it felt like important work was going on around you.
posted by ardgedee at 4:22 AM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


That was a nice article and video. Also, I enjoyed hearing Van Houweling mixing the current and old pronunciations of "internet".
posted by Kattullus at 4:29 AM on September 17, 2015


Merit was how my family got access to the Internet back in the late 90s, growing up. Those were some exciting times... :)

Great article, thanks for posting!
posted by JoeXIII007 at 4:32 AM on September 17, 2015


Followed shortly by the NSFWnet, and then the Internet really took off.
posted by Muddler at 4:51 AM on September 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


Good old Merit. My first access to the net as well, when I drive by their current building in Ann Arbor I can't help but smile...good memories as the world opened up to us on a scale we could never have imagined. I clearly recall, after my first log in and an evening spent exploring nooks and crannies, turning to my wife and saying, even as it was still 100% text based, "this is going to change the world in ways we can't even imagine".

Back then it all seemed like magic. The fun was in trying to explain to folks just what the "internet" was, the confused look on my father-in-law's face as he looked at my computer and I tried to explain to him how I was able to play chess with some guy in Europe, for free... He honestly couldn't comprehend it.

Thanks for the link, good article...
posted by HuronBob at 5:48 AM on September 17, 2015 [4 favorites]


Go Blue!
posted by leotrotsky at 6:05 AM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


Ah, lovely. I don't know as much about this history as I should, being on the other side of the Atlantic - I remember as a young and scruffy journalist sitting in briefings at a Parisian tech show where people in expensive suits told us why IP wasn't any good and OSI was going to win. It was technically superior, IP had all these nasty indeterminencies and unreliabilities, all the governments and all the industry needed and specified a much higher quality of networking, so it was a done deal.

I particularly like the fact, mentioned in the article, that IBM ate its own dogfood on this and got out of IP routers. Quite a lot of companies around then had to decide whether to continue to push their own thing, switch to IP, or just get out of the game, and not just in infrastructure. Eventually, of course, that decision would be made for them, but it'd be nice to read a history of that time through that perspective.
posted by Devonian at 7:15 AM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's funny how inevitable the Internet seems now,when it was anything but. My college joined BITNET in the late 80s and was very excited by the connectivity. That set us back on joining the Internet (aka NSFNET) a couple of years. I still remember having to manually log in to another university via dialup, to FTP some files to our UUCP queue and then wait for it to be delivered in the batch that night. BITNET wasn't terrible, but it sure wasn't as integrated and convenient as the Internet.
posted by Nelson at 8:25 AM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


I remember the days I used to read Usenet by ftping the entire file for a group over from MIT and tailing it.
posted by tavella at 9:08 AM on September 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


Working in the Merit / ANS NOC (as a fairly lowly NOC operator on the night shift) during the period described in the article, when they were bringing up the first national T3 backbone, was my first full-time job.

It still seems incredible how quickly the net has grown since then -- I live now on a lightly-populated remote island on the edge of the continent and the amount of traffic that can be delivered to my private dwelling is comparable to what the entire national infrastructure could carry when I was first starting out.
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:11 AM on September 17, 2015 [6 favorites]


I ought to add that a lot of fine people worked there at the same time I did and decades later I still run into their names from time to time -- many continued on to do significant work in the field. It was not a huge phase of my life and I was not an important player there, but I remain proud to have played even a minor part in building the internet that connects the world today.
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:15 AM on September 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


Nice find infini. A buddy's father worked on this project and for Xerox.

Dharma indeed.
posted by clavdivs at 3:56 PM on September 17, 2015


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