There is a revolution on the internet and it isn't marketing or MLM or MMF, though many have exploited the net for personal gain, but nearly all those who are sucked into joining one of these schemes or scams, have failed miserably, because it was predetermined that they would. No, the revolution is clearly not MMF or MLM, it is "OPEN SOURCE" (or more appropriately called the Free Software Movement (FSM) which has pioneered many of the real innovations in internet technology and the operating system isn't from Microsoft (tm), it is an off-shoot of UNIX; it is: Linux.
And, this Revolution is being led from FSM but it also has been exploited and coopted by for personal and corporate gain.
Libertarian Socialists who want to break with the monopolization and commercialization of software and computers were building their own computers on breadboxes back in the 60s and 70s and were the first to use Linux.
My first computer was a simple switching device built on a breadbox, but my interest didn't start with an article in Science magazine nor was I aware how revolutionary the net would become. My interest in computers actually started at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, where my uncle worked as a physicist and invented the fastest camera in the world using the first computer system delivered to the government as a military project for the development of a more deadly way to deliver death and destruction. My uncle invited me to see his laboratory.
FSM (and Open Source) was the natural extension of the spirit of community engendered by the users of the first time-sharing systems and it became a new economic model on the internet and that is why I speak of it as a revolution.
The networking of computers was conceived as the interconnection of interactive, on-line communities of people. But, it was also a means of communication hardened against nuclear attack, which would take out all the radio and satellite communications, whereas interconnected networks of cable and wire would survive. The Internet was the government's answer to this problem.
In 1982, connectivity protocol was standardized for TCP/IP. The TCP means "Transmission Control Protocol" which provides the data transmission verification between the client and the server, and IP is the abbreviation for Internet Protocol, which decodes and routes data.
In 1983, ARPAnet became sub-divided into ARPAnet and MILNET. MILNET was soon integrated into the Defense Data Network (created in 1982). In 1986, NSFNET (the National Science Foundation NETwork) was created, with the aid of NASA and the Department of Energy, for the purpose of providing an improved backbone speed, which was all of 56Kbps at that time.
In 1989, NSFNET was upgraded to a faster T1 line and ARPAnet was retired in 1990. The ARPAnet became the INTERNET which refered to a network of research, military, and university computers.
Open Source is software source code which is FREE so everyone can modify and improve upon it and collaborate in development and the application. Open Source is a project of collectivisation, which could only have been possible because of the internet. It belongs to all of the People.
The term "Hacker" originated at MIT. And ARPAnet which began as a project to thwart the results of (EMP) Electro Magnetic Pulse grew into what we now know as the internet to to which I refer so endearingly as the interNUT.
I first went online with the Internet through the Research Triangle University system, when I was studying programming, which then was mostly cobol, basic, pascal, lisp, fortran, and assembly languages.
My first computer in the 70s, was a breadbox (a Heath kit), and then I acquired one of the first PCs, a Commodore, the one with the small keyboard and 4K of RAM and I wrote programs in basic for it and also used machine language. Machine Language is the basic coding of ones and zeros that is very unique and specific to each machine architecture and is not transportable. In the 70s, different computers spoke different languages and used different connectivity protocols.
I was a loyal supporter of Commodore and there were many of us who were, and we thought it was the greatest "personal" computer system (which actually was quite a step up from the very expensive min-computers) to be developed, designed, and made available to the very few of us who were computer hobbyists at that time.
But Commodore was pursuing profits and the support for new software was almost nonexistent or it came from other Commodore owners and not from the company. Everyone shared their software, which was easy to do. We just sent each other floppy disks. And, we formed Commodore computer clubs.
While commercial software was considered proprietory and commercial property by the companies that hired programmers to write the code, it wasn't open source nor free. There wasn't even any shareware then and nobody heard of freeware. Everyone of us, who were hobbyists then, were "hackers" and it was easy to hack commercial software so we all had plenty of software; more than we needed.
The prestigious association to belong to then was the (ACM)"Association of Computing Machinery". I also was accepted into ACM, when I was a student at Durham Tech.
At the school I used big IBM mainframes and punch cards, which required laborious effort to punch and then turn in to the mainframe administrator who would run our programs through the computer.
When Prodigy and FidoNet were first to offer computer bulletin board systems, you called one in your city and connected. FidoNet would then send the mail through interconnected branches to a HUB and then on to the backbone and the mail would then be routed to all the subscribers. There were discussion groups, similar to newsgroups on the internet. And, when "PC-Pursuit" offered national access I got my PCP account.
On the ham bands I was one of the first ones to use my computer, by then better Commodore 2000, which had a little more memory than the old one and I used it as a quasi-radioteletype machine (early 80s). I used it to handle message traffic for the military as a member of the Military Affiliate Radio System. A new development was the hard disk storage unit and mine for the Commodore cost me $1,700.
All computer hobbyists were into sharing, which is how the hacker community and culture developed. On the internet, which was the domain for research and development and connected all the universities, we used mostly DEC machines and the PDP-10 was a popular machine. I finally got an IBM-XT(PC) personal computer, when I realized that Commodore would never provide decent support for their equipment. I used my XT in DOS and programmed in "business basic" or used assembly language, which tells a computer how to use it's own machine code, the basic language of every computer.
Students and scientists at MIT were using mostly lisp, a more scientific and math based language and it was a popular language for many years by the Hacker community.
UNIX had a command line shell language which made it easy to use. The favorite editor on Unix, long before Pico was Emacs (thanks to Richard Stallman who wrote the program), which was then and is still being used and very powerful, but not as easy to use as Pico, which I found adequate.
There was also a culture built around the Xerox PARC which evolved at the Palo Alto Research Center and into the 80s where many new developments were made in hardware and software. They invented the mouse, windows and an interface using icons.
The next biggest development was the electronic mailing list. Listserver was almost all there was and evolved into the most powerful and feature filled system, still in use today and what we use for the four mailing lists I use.
There was also CompuServe and GEnie, which provided their own little computer network communities. I tried Prodigy, but never like it because it wasn't the internet. But, I did like Fidonet, which was similar and an noncommercial independant national network of volunteers. I was active with Fidonet since their inception and had my own BBS bulletin board system, which I installed on the XT. Those of us who provided these bulletin boards were called sysops. I forgot what software I was using, but I do remember it was a bitch to get it all configured and not nearly as easy as setting up a GNU/Linux system.
I was very devoted to UNIX, which is the system I used on the internet with a shell account. To be connected to the internet, you needed a shell account in those days, usually one that was provided by a university. And, that waslong before anybody ever dreamed of a World Wide Web. In my shell account I used Elm as a mailer and PNEWS wasn't just my forum for "Progressive News & and Views, it was a software routine used to post to newsgroups on the internet.
UNIX was written by a hacker at Bell Labs. GNU/Linux is an acronym for "GNU is NOT Unix." But, it is compatable with Unix. All the commands are the same and whatever I could do with UNIX, I can also do in GNU/Linux.
The C language was written and implemented in UNIX by Dennis Ritchie in the 70s. Bell Labs was a center for Unix development just as they were instrumental in developing the first wide band multiplexing system at the White House a few years earlier when I was there. I was assigned to assist their engineers. My job wasn't all that important. It was mostly listening to the lines, counting clicks and watching an oscilloscope for blips.
Back in the old days, nobody called themselves "hackers". That description didn't orgininate as part of the computer lexicon until the 80s. These were just enthusiastic hams and software writers who came from engineering and physics backgrounds or were just hobbyists. The engineers and physicists were the guys with ties. And, this was the time when Murphy's Law ruled. If it could go wrong, it generally did.
MIT had the first PDP-1. My son studied computer programming on a PDP at Broward Community College, before he went on to the University of Florida, the University of Miami and later graduate school at the University of North Carolina. But, then he turned to theater design and only recently acquired a computer for the internet.
MIT had their PDP in the 60s and we had a room full of computers (or was it one), at the Pentagon, when I worked there in the War Room, in the 60s. It used vacumn tubes; tens of thousands of them. Remember tubes? AND, at MIT they coined the name: "hacker."
These highly skilled hackers worked in MIT's (AI) Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and they influenced the development of the ARPanet, which was to become the prcursor to the Internet, just as the Internet is now just a step in the development of internet2.
Before the C language was developed at Bell Labs, operating systems were written in assembly language, but after the development of C, entire operating systems were written and successfuly ported to machines using C. This had never been done before.
The beauty of C was that you didn't have to write new software for each and every NEW computer. One language could do it all. It was PORTABLE. and Unix became an OS that combined various programs or configurations of code which could then be then customized in any configuration desired.
Out of all this developed the UNIX culture (using mostly PDP-11s and the VAX), which was portable and used throughout the ARPAnet. The protocol for networking then was UUCP -- though slow in speed (my first modem was only 300 Baud), and relatively cheap. The point was unix machines could by point to point mail exchange data, using land lines. Out of this, Usenet was also born.
The language which was used to interface to the "personal computer" was primarily "basic". There was always the problem of forgetting to close files, or if you lost power, it sometimes took all night to reconstruct and repair a database. It was very risky to use a computer with anything worth preserving if one did not have a backup power source (UPS).
Richard Stallman invented the EMACS editor/mail program for UNIX and was the idealistic radical who opposed commercialization of software and the net, then the private domain of the university crowd and the government. Many of us, especially the hobbyists thought the computer would be just lik ham radio and would never become privatized and commercial the same way the FCC kept the ham bands from becoming commercial.
Of course we were wrong and just as ham radio was losing radio spectrum to commercialization, so too with the internet. And, today the internet is mostly a commercial toilet.
Richard Stallman formed Free Software Foundation and dedicated himself to writing free high quality software. Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom. Stallman has been called "the last true hacker" but he wasn't the last, just a pivatol point in hackerdom and he has many supporters. He has my gratitude and admiration.
And if cynics ridicule freedom, ridicule community...if ``hard nosed realists'' say that profit is the only ideal...just ignore them, and use copyleft all the same. [Richard Stallman]It has actually taken the WEB to make the internet a world-wide medium and household name.
The internet has also become a commercial toilet. It is a medium for all types of perversion and commercial exploitation. There will always be those who will exploit a good thing, and there will always be those who will believe the hype about making money on the net, because they want to, in spite of rational arguments and facts to the contrary. There are NO free rides or easy way to make money. And personally I disliked any commercialization of the internet. It can be a national resource to be used for the common good, instead of for profits. But, that is an unrealistic ideal. This indiscriminate and expoitive use of the net has dispoiled the pristine research environment that once existed here. I do miss the good old days before the internet became a household word. With the advent of Internet2 we may be able to preserve some of those qualities.
The internet is also an opportunity for free speech and to spread the truth about governments and war, and corporate misuse of power, and scams, like no other opportunity we have ever had.
Muse - Mt Weather - White House - DSA - Humanity - POTUS
Re-up - Coevolution - France - War Room - Ike - Hackers - ENIAC
Teddy - Patriot - Ana-Mae - Ancestors - Hotel - Military School
Army - Special - FBI - Jane - South - Luca - Link - Reason - Shop
Up-Hill - Capitalism - Family - Down-Hill - Struggle - Vagabonds - Left
Children - TN - Liberal - Angst - Faith - Extinction - Curse - Blast #1
Blast #2 - DARPA - WormHole #1 - WormHole #2 - Crypt #1 - Crypt #2
Hack Attack - High Crimes - (BHG) Jewelry - Golem - Pyramid
Epilogue - Epilogue to the Epilogue - No Coherence - Nature of Nature
G 0 l e m D e s i g n s
On the Internet since 1982
(I have been doing it longer - and I do it better)Worm Hole (Home) - The Crypt (Repository) - Hank Roth (Biography) - Hack Attack (naWiki)