Back in the days before the World Wide Web, there was still The Internet, and before The Internet there was ARPANET, which I guess was an internet. And before there were TCP/IP and internets, there was DECnet. And for a time, there was both. In the early 80s, there was ARPANET and there was Digital Equipment Corporation's world-wide corporate network (which at one time was called EasyNet for some reason, there must have been a contest), and there was a gateway between them.
And before the World Wide Web, there was Usenet, a collection of newsgroups, like discussion forums, where you could post your cat videos (no, I don't think so) and recipes and jokes. It was like a bulletin board system on steroids, or more like thousands of BBS's, really.
I worked at DEC back then, starting in 1981 - yes, I actually was 16 when I started. And a funny thing happened when I googled my old email address on DEC's network. My mail node - as in node name, hence the little song I'd sing once U2 gave it a tune and some words - was a VAX system in our computer laaaaab and it was called GLIVET, which was short for Glenlivet, and had been named by a Scotch drinker. And so my email address was GLIVET::DIAMOND. And when you google that, you don't find much, but it does turn up a few Usenet postings that I managed to get through the gateway.
So here now is a link to one of those old posts to the jokes group from 1984 (wow, 29 years ago?). If you're a math nerd, and I hope you are, I'm sure you'll understand.
http://groups.google.com/group/net.jokes/msg/02cabf569d4a876e
No comments:
Post a Comment