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| Authored by: Magpie on Tuesday, July 24 2012 @ 02:52 PM EDT |
I left university and started at what was then a small software house based in
London in the summer of 1972. I remember one of the first projects I knew about
was a subcontract from BBN to help define the protocols. At that stage it was
all about specifying the different layers.
A few years later (around the 1976/77 sort of time but I can't be sure) our
company invented something called "Polynet". This was a token ring
that provided one of the first local area networks. But it didn't last long and
it was replaced by the Ethernet.
During the early 1980s I was responsible for our internal office network and
then it was all DECnet with a central Vax, and although TCP/IP was talked about
it wasn't until Microsoft Introduced a usable stack into Windows that we
switched to using that. At the time, we were building private networks (in a
wan sense) using X25 for our customers (We were setting up water utility
telemetry networks). But I think it was during the mid to late 1980's that TCP
started to replace that.
It was late 1980's when I experienced the first web browsing and I remember
quite strange from a privacy point of view that we were "entering"
someone else computer and reading their information. At that initial stage
there was only very simple static pages, but that rapidly changed as people
learnt to dynamically create the pages on the fly and we started seeing
e-commerce as a possibility.
Quite when in all of that you define the internet starting I don't know, but I
would probably hone in to the few years from 1985 to 1989 - were we went from
various random wide area protocols to TCP/IP as ubiquitous and where the use of
HTTP/HTML as the protocol for the ordinary man in the street to interact
commercially with organisations digitally became possible.
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