How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)
95 comments
·January 9, 2025cpr
Suzuran
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.
ManuelKiessling
Dear Sir, could you just, you know, continue writing? I just love these stories, would love to hear more!
cpr
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
> 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
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.
mromanuk
Yes, please! I love these comments on HN, this is blog material.
coffeecantcode
If this man wrote a book I’d read it.
mhandley
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
If only it could have disappeared into a vault until now... the bill could have been inflated away!
nxobject
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
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
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
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
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...)
ChildOfChaos
Peter Kirstein died in January 2020, likely around the time when the internet finally reached Wales.
lysace
So I was just reading through a 1988 Swedish popular book on "data communications". Not a single word on Arpanet/etc. Many other network technologies and attempts at global networks described.
My point: "Internet" wasn't very well-known "even" in 1988 outside of well-connected places.
Book: Scandinavian PC Systems, Valentino Berti: "Introduktion till datakommunikation"
kjellsbells
The inter-networking part of Internet was specialist knowledge restricted to those researchers actively working in the space. But countries had rich national networks back then, e.g. UK universities had a thing called JANET (joint academic network) that allowed, say, someone at the University of Kent to send files to someone at the University of Durham. The hosts were heterogeneous but the protocols were kinda sorta in place (there was a lot of X.25 leased lines and UUCP dialup, if I recall). Kent sticks in my memory because they could do commercial email in the old path!to!destination style if you knew the right guy to call. And Durham because they had this incredibly wacky mainframe OS, Michigan Terminal System, which I have never seen anywhere except there and at Newcastle (a town 40km up the road from Durham).
qingcharles
Any idea when JAnet connected to the Internet? When I first used it ~1994 I remember they had a single 2Mbps connection to the USA for the whole of JAnet.
What connection did the housing in the dorms at Kent have? I seem to remember serial ports in the rooms, but could have been ether?
mhandley
UCL was on both the JAnet X.25 network and the Internet when I joined in 1985, and provided a relay service between the two for email and for telnet. Maybe others - not sure. Relaying email required translating the address order as the UK used big-endian "foo@uk.ac.ucl.cs" and the rest of the world used little-endian "foo@cs.ucl.ac.uk". There were a whole set of heuristics to figure out which order the destination should be, which worked fine up until Czechoslovakia joined with their .cs domain. I think it was probably in the early 90s when JAnet fully deployed IP-over-X.25, and all UK universities became IP-reachable, but some would have been reachable before then.
Peter was also responsible for the UK using .uk instead of the ISO country code "gb" which it should have been according to "the rules". But Peter insisted on .uk, as the official name of the country was "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", and he thought GB was not properly inclusive of Northern Ireland. It took until 2021 for UK to replace GB on car number plates (and stickers for travelling abroad).
vidarh
I have fond memories of the Nordic university network (NORDUnet) when the US<-->Sweden link was upgraded to 34Mbps in '95 (NORDUnet kept 24Mbps of the cable initially). At the time the fastest connection between the US and elsewhere in Europe was 6Mbps, according to the NORDunet 25 year report....
At one point there was an outage of the Sprint connection to Sweden that the Nordic connection to the US went over, and the Nordic countries for several hours saturated connections throughout parts of Europe that were in no way at a scale suitable to be a functional backup for the traffic from the Nordic countries...
It was first later I realised how spoiled we'd been... Tens of Mbps FTP speeds to other Nordic countries was routine in 94/95, for example.
UncleSlacky
When I was at Kent (88-91) the few rooms which did have connections (only available in the new-build Darwin Houses at the time, IIRC) had basic serial ports. The colleges (not dorms, if you please!) had dedicated computer rooms (using mostly old TA Alphatronics as terminals) with a PAD connecting them to the Cambridge Ring campus network. We had full email/FTP privileges for the Internet (the term 'JANET' was still used, but it was becoming less prominent) but mostly only read-only Usenet privileges, unless you asked the right person very nicely.
TheOtherHobbes
JANET went live in 1984. Before then, UK universities were connected by X.25 links with ARPAnet gateways to Rest of World. (Such as it was then - basically the US and Scandinavia.)
You could, with a tiny amount of password hacking, joyride around the system quite easily, at least as far as getting to a login message on a remote host, possibly logging on with a guest account and having a text chat with surprised people in other countries.
dannyobrien
I don't remember all the details, but allegedly some undergraduates at a college very close to me in the late 80s were able to get limited Internet access by snagging the passwords of CS postgrads who had remote accounts at UCL via Janet, and logging in when they weren't around.
Boy, those scalliwags would have got into a lot of trouble if they had got caught.
fanf2
JANET started running IP-over-X25 in 1991 and within a year the volume of IP traffic was greater than the volume of native JANET traffic.
matt-p
It was certainly in place at the launch of SuperJanet in 1993, where 55 Universities each got a 34Mbps connection. I could believe only 2Mb to the USA, but it had a number of connections to europe and UK ISPs that were faster.
gnufx
The "fat pipe" didn't look so fat at that stage! (I don't remember when you could first easily interact with the Internet.)
null
Kye
It looks like Archive.org has it.
https://archive.org/details/michigan-terminal-system-distrib...
nonrandomstring
I was in the basement of UCL computer science (in the Pearson building) in 1988. Our lab had a very special yellow (Don't ever touch that!!) cable that ran across the ceiling between joists, then off under UCH toward Telecom tower. Of course we hung bits of origami on it with cotton. Apparently that was JANET. I never heard anyone say "The Internet" back then, but we did have a coms lecture where "inter-networking" was a thing. Nice to read some old names in that piece.
grumblepeet
Until relatively recently I worked with JANET (or Janet - lower case - as it is now) as part of Jisc, the UK's NREN. I also worked with the wider European org, GEANT, that runs the academic networks across Europe. We were (and still are ) very proud of Janet.
nonrandomstring
Thanks for your service. I did not know JANET was formed in April 1984. Then I was still at school, and we had a teletype that you could send emails. Of course those days no one had email so we had a class of kids sending emails to each other to print out on tty paper. I think the broader implications may have been lost in that lesson. It wes probably a BBS rather than JANET.
mhandley
I was also in one of those basement labs in the Pearson building in 1988. Not exactly the nicest place to work, but some great equipment. I particularly remember that year coding a graphical application in NeWS (Sun's original network window system, long before it became X/NeWS) on a Sun Workstation there, which was an amazing piece of kit for its time. Also remember the DecStation 3100s we had down there that would periodically catch fire.
nonrandomstring
Nice to meet you. Yeah the smell of overcooked circuits down there was something eh? I forget my room number now but there was something called the Pyramid next door that was mysterious and hush-hush. Phil Treleaven was my prof (saw him outside Waterstones last time I was around ULU so he must still be there).
corford
Memories. I had an unfiltered 100Mbit ethernet port, with public static IP, in my dorm room at Manchester Uni in 2000 thanks to JANET. It was amazing compared to the ISDN line at home (...which until then I had thought was the bees knees). It took almost another 15 years before I could get something faster at home than what I'd had at uni (!)
peterstjohn
I even hosted a mirror of the original Mozilla source code dump from St. Anselm Hall, and nobody ever complained ;P
qw
I think knowledge was more localised to certain universities or researchers.
Norway was the first country outside of USA to be connected to Arpanet in 1973 to share seismic data, but the universities did not gain general access until 1983.
I posted submitted a link to a story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655568
euroderf
IIRC Finland was connected by then.
vidarh
By '73? My understanding is the only other country outside the US to have a connection at that point was Norway, and only NORSAR and maybe one other location. NORSAR only because it was a critically important seismic array used by NATO to monitor Soviet missile tests.
As far as I can tell, Finland first got ARPANET connection via NORDunet in 1988 [1][2][3], though possibly indirectly a few years before as there was a connection to Sweden a few years earlier.
[1] https://siy.fi/history-of-the-finnish-internet/
[2] https://csc.fi/en/news/funets-anniversary-40-years-of-action...
[3] From [2]: "On Thursday December 1st, 1988, the first routing test was carried out, allowing IP packets to pass from Finland via Nordunet to the USA, in effect the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET and Arpanet networks. This connected Finland to the international Internet via the Funet network. The following message can be seen as the beginning of the Finnish Internet."
lproven
> My understanding is the only other country outside the US to have a connection at that point was Norway
I speak enough Norwegian to have gone around a few museums that tourists and other foreigners don't usually visit, and this is my understanding too.
euroderf
That sounds about right. I was working at the NSF in the late 80s, around when they were uniting all the scattered mini nets into Teh Interwebz, and I was trading emails with Finns. And BTW I was not trying to compete.
lysace
I do understand your urge to turn this into a competition - but let's not.
dang
Far be it from me to step between Sweden and Finland but this might be a moment to mention from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
(which of course applies to your comments as well)
timthorn
> The little black book of the internet
The article doesn't mention the Coloured Book protocols, but I'm pretty sure this phrasing isn't accidental: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols
vidarh
While it could be, "little black book" commonly refers to an address book, and has since long before the internet. While it's hard to established when it became a commonly understood term for that, -as it was used in a more general sense before that, and often simply referred to small notebooks -, it has seen use to refer to address books since at least the 19th century[1]. (EDIT: It's also mentioned in Aretha Franklin's "Runnin' Out of Fools[2] from 1964)
Also, now I feel very old. "Little black book" was an ubiquitous term when I grew up, and so using the term would just be a synonym to "address book" that nobody would think twice about.
[1] E.g. The House and Home: A Practical Book - Volume 1 (1896): "And there is a little black book with red lettering seen on every writing-table and carriage-cushion wherein puzzled mater-familias finds her bearings annually among her cherished acquaintances, many of whom the little black book alone keeps in her recollection!"
[2] Guess you got back (Guess you got) To my name (To my name) In your little black book
timthorn
> "Little black book" was an ubiquitous term when I grew up, and so using the term would just be a synonym to "address book" that nobody would think twice about.
Indeed, I'm aware of that meaning and its ubiquity. But amongst UK university computing staff at that time, knowledge of the Coloured Books was as embedded. Remember that JANET network addresses were the other way round, so rather than cam.ac.uk it used to be uk.ac.cam - the author of this piece will have been well aware of the double meaning.
It's that double meaning that gives the headline it's precise relevance and a dash of humour.
vidarh
I don't see why the order makes any difference with respect to the use of the term, nor do I get from description what you think is humorous about it.
It still reads to me like just a synonym for "address book" to refer to a mapping.
gnufx
Red book was particularly interesting (modulo lack of security) long before "the Grid"; it worked between various computer centres.
Its_Padar
> (2018)
I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that... After some searching I found the Conversation's RSS feed for technology[1] which says it was 2025 after searching the page for "internet" and looking through the results
<id>tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45404</id>
<published>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</published>
<updated>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</updated>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://theconversation.com/how-britain-got-its-first-internet-connection-by-the-late-pioneer-who-created-the-first-password-on-the-internet-45404"/>
<title>How Britain got its first internet connection – by the late pioneer who created the first password on the internet</title>
pxeger1
The preface says it was originally written "a few years before [the author] died", but never published (until now - having been (re)edited), so the (2018) makes sense.
lproven
> I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that
You seem to be confusing the date it was written with the date it was published.
I believe there are multiple works where that interval is over 50 years. I would not be surprised if a gap of a century has been surpassed.
gnufx
Not relevant to the article, but for the history of UK academic networking mentioned in various comments, Wikipedia's account looks about right, though I'm not sure it's up-to-date concerning the regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET
I was using SRCnet in 1981, when Liverpool Physics had a dedicated link to Daresbury (national lab) whose speed I don't remember at that stage. Unfortunately the infamous PDP11 "terminal concentrators" for interactive use then were horribly unreliable. RJE to the cloud, where analyses ran, worked well.
nickdothutton
The story has it all. Government stupidity and shortsightedness. Nonsensical self-harming bureaucracy. A plucky, persistent, woefully underfunded Brit who eventually succeeded in spite of the state.
msla
Here's a debunking and a history of the myth the ARPANET/Internet was designed to survive nuclear war:
http://9ol.es/nuclear-myth.html
A bit more:
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15035/did-the-co...
DrBazza
> he was prevented from extending his project outside the lab by pressure from the British Post Office, which then held a monopoly on telecommunications.
The UK and telecoms don't make a happy pairing - we always seem to do the wrong thing:
https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
Dr Cochrane knew that Britain's tired copper network was insufficient: "In 1974 it was patently obvious that copper wire was unsuitable for digital communication in any form, and it could not afford the capacity we needed for the future."
He was asked to do a report on the UK's future of digital communication and what was needed to move forward.
"In 1979 I presented my results," he tells us, "and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort - that spanned in six years - involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation.
"In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop".
Ylpertnodi
BT let me off a £2,000 bill 'cus my dialer.exe got hijacked and I was calling a Seychelles premium line. I'd turned off the sound on my 56k? modem and didn't spot the extremely long beeps and boops. That's what got me started on basic security...zone alarm (pre-shitty-ness), proxomitron, hosts files (and other blocking lists/ banner blockers), autoexec.bat to delete histories, being caught out by dark patterns etc. Fun times....'cus the internet was fun at the time, too. Nowadays, despite a trove of bookmarks, I visit very, very, very few new-to-me sites.
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.