Along with my belated birthday wishes to SETI, a belated happy 40th birthday to the Internet. I knew the 'net when it was the Arpanet and have written about those glorious and heady days in Nothing New Under the Sun (Buying Computer Time, part 3).... The Arpanet came into being 40 years ago as of the past 29 Oct.
That long ago autumn day Arpanet went live. Well...not quite. It crashed before anyone could even login. Forget about any Blue Screen of Death. The computers (well, not really computers as most people think of them today. They were more like mammoth automated telephone switching stations) of the day were talking to each other and humming merrily along. It wasn't until one Charley Kline, then a student at UCLA, attempted to log in that things crashed.
Proof again that boys like to break things, I guess.
You know, I would never consider myself a programmer and everybody knows I'm a Luddite. But I remember seeing the first computer with an organic (read "alive") memory at Urbana (I was asked if I wanted to feed it). I remember being seated in Lexington, MA, and playing Adventure with guys seated in Berkeley, CA, and sending emails back and forth with folks at Penn State and Carnegie-Mellon. I remember designing 3D input devices and using an Apple II to create smart homes for quadriplegics. There are people that (to this day) are amazed at how I overcame the storage problems.
But you want to know my real best memory?
Susan (my beloved) was a StarTrek fan when we met. I programmed my HP-100 to play a Federation v Klingon-Romulan Alliance game for her. Ten levels, each level with 10 enemy ships and only the Enterprise to defeat them, they could cloak, she could not, with asteroids, planets, blackholes and limited photon torpedoes.
The things we do for love.
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