[IP] Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Michael Slavitch" <slavitch@gmail.com>
Date: August 19, 2008 12:58:17 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:        NSF and the Birth of the Internet
Reply-To: slavitch@gmail.com

I still have my 3 ring binder copy of the USENET Cookbook sitting next  
to my copy of How To Cook Everything* and The Graduate Students Guide  
To Indian Cooking.  Like all armies early Internet users travelled on  
their stomachs.

*It is a name full of hubris given that the USENET Cookbook has  
recipes for both milobinder and muskrat (once considered to be fish on  
fridays in the upper peninsula). The pavlova recipe is lovely.


Michael Slavitch
Ottawa Ontario Canada

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber <dave@farber.net>

Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:14:26
To: ip<ip@v2.listbox.com>
Subject: [IP] Re:        NSF and the Birth of the Internet




Begin forwarded message:

From: "Wendy M. Grossman" <wendyg@pelicancrossing.net>
Date: August 19, 2008 12:13:15 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Cc: ip <ip@v2.listbox.com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:       NSF and the Birth of the Internet
Reply-To: wendyg@pelicancrossing.net

Yes. I used gopher back then but it was a painful experience, and it
was very little of what I or anyone I knew did online. It might be
reasonable to say that for a time Usenet was the INternet - even
though Usenet didn't really require the Internet to exist. Go back to
1985-1995, and it's really notable how much was going on - consider,
for example, how seriously Scientology took Usenet in 1993-1995 (as I
documented at the time) when critics got going in
alt.religion.scientology and how much resources they threw at trying
to control that.

wg

David Farber wrote:
> Begin forwarded message:
> From: Jim Thompson <jim@netgate.com>
> Date: August 19, 2008 7:22:25 AM EDT
> To: dave@farber.net
> Cc: alberti@sanction.net, Steve Goldstein <steve.goldstein@cox.net>,
> DeWayne Townsend <d-town@tc.umn.edu>
> Subject: Re: [IP] Re:      NSF and the Birth of the Internet
> On Aug 19, 2008, at 1:02 AM, David Farber wrote:
> > Also the word "gopher" appears nowhere in the timeline, although
> > for a
> > couple of years it WAS the Internet...
> No, it wasn't.
> I can get behind the idea that email was the Internet for a number
> of years.
> But while gopher and WAIS were popular for a brief period of time
> before NCSA shipped Mosaic and supported the IMG tag in HTML over
> HTTP, they were
> never responsible for anywhere near as much communication as email,
> to say nothing of things like USENET / NNTP.
> Jim
> -------------------------------------------




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