= Life, the Internet, and Everything =

a look back on my life with the internet.
what is this internet thing?
trying to understand it.. bit by bit.
will i ever be able to understand it all?

= The Beginning =

The internet started in 1968 and i did not know about it until 1984.
In 1984 i went to university and was connected by someone on a
computer to a program which happened to be *the* text adventure.
i had no idea at the time where that computer was. i assumed
it was somewhere near, though. little did i know...

in winter 1985 i graduated from school, and in 1986 - after doing my
driver's license and escaping the army - i enrolled at university.
there, i just missed the computing with punch cards. stacks
of them were still used as door stops in the computer room.

i learned programming in pascal on a mainframe,
requesting a copy of some line for change, and with
another command putting it back onto the 40x20 screen.
if you didnt save the changes before paging away
then you lost your changes. this sure learnt me
to do text editing the hard way.

in 1988 i did a seminar on "image editing"
which means that we were using one of the first scanners
(really expensive) to obtain images in TIFF -
and then we should try to read letters from it.
it's called optical characters recognition (OCR),
and you'll probably see some of it when you are
asked by some website to solve a "captcha".

all this involved many things for the first time:
a *login* on a *unix* machine (minix, actually);
a *shell*, a text editor, a compiler, a tracer,
a new library with algorithms from another university,
this thing called 'X' which gave me an "xterm"
on an 386 PC with windows, and then some.

i discovered that this shell thing is
much more than just command.com on DOS.
its lines were way longer and you could place
many more command in a row if you wanted.
its piping was way better.
it had job control, and
it could run subshells.
it had a history from which you
could recall and reuse commands,
and it was saved for later use.
you could use an editor to store
those command in a text file and
later run it again and again.
you could even tell a clock to run
these text files at a given time.
and much, much more.

there had been no intro to the system for us.
and noone taught us about shells.
we had no idead about the options to a compiler,
and i only knew about "manuals" from my sys admin.
we didnt learn about all those secrets of the
language 'C', and never learnt to read a stack trace.

in the end we learnt that there were just too many
kinds of TIFF to program anything useful for them all,
and that the library was pre-alpha and
we were just guinea pigs to test it.
at least we found some bugs. yay.

but then i learnt that your login name combined with
the machine name - just put an at sign between it
to obtain user@machine - was your email address!

email?

noone told us about email.  but there it was!

email allowed to send texts to people with a login
on the same computer.  or on another computer
in the same room.  or on a computer within the
network in the faculty in the next building...
or to someone on some computer
somewhere on the entire *planet*.

now, *that* was exciting!

= 1988+1989 =

at that time the city of berlin was still surrounded by a wall.
people behind the wall claimed that it protects them
from the imperialistic world with all its bad things -
like coca-cola, jeans, and mickey mouse.
little did they know about the internet...

at that time the western world was hundreds of miles across
the "red sea" away - and both letters and phone calls
cost quite bit to connect you to other people.

at that time i learned about the program "telnet"
which would connect me to another computer -
and into more text adventures,
like multi user dungeons (aka MUDs).

me and a fellow student had a lot of fun with this.
we used a *frontend* program which allowed us to
create shortcuts to shorten command names,
and quickly move about the scenery, as well as create
"actions" to react to the text such as "you are hurt"
to retract automatically to the pub in this virtual
village to get drunk and thereby to heal our characters.

we would become "wizards" in that game - and
then also in other instantiations of the game
with other "scenario", "quests", and "puzzles".
the great thing about being a wizard was that
you could create objects on-the-fly, during the game.
no need to write code which gets compiled and
then runs after the next reboot of the game -
no, it was right there, within the game, instantly.
you could create a new "container" such as a bag,
being able to hold more weight that usual bags.
you were given a room, your "castle", which you
could add to the game's world, connecting it
to more rooms, and things, and stuff,
and whatever you could think of.
you would add to the existing world.
who cares that some people only think
of it as a "virtual world"?
come on - it exists on my screen!
what do you mean "virtual world"?

within the game you could talk to others
when you were in the same "room" with them.
special objects also allowed conversation
when you were not in the same room.
(very helpful to solve some "quests" together!)
but these conversations were still bound
to the same virtual world on one server.
(later, some people even connected the players'
characters through different virtual worlds..)

but at that time we would chat using programs such as "write"
to write text directly onto the terminal of others, and
"talk" which split up the screen to see each other typing,
and finally "ytalk" for the same but with three or more people.
connecting to people however required you to know the location (terminal)
of the people or at least their account and machine name.
you already needed to know them (and their address)
before you could talk to them.

at that a guy in finland invented a chat program
called "international realy chat" (IRC).
at first there were only channel numbers.
and channel number 42 was always busy and humming
with weird kind of talk.

it looked like someone used a german keyboard for
typing but with an overwhelming abundance of umlauts;
obviously the umlaut keys were stuck and
produced at least two umlauts after another.

well, of course the program would spread across
finnish universites and talk was all in finnish.
(it's really a weird language - even to us germans.)

i still use IRC to this day.
somehow ICQ, jabber, and all the others
never really replaced what we already had.

as people are connecting to an IRC server within
a net of servers this may be confusing at first.
but then youl'' get used to it.  and then you
learn that there are many "nets of nets"
which are *not* connected to each other.
and you begin to get a feeling that somehow
somewhere there are things you do not see...

in 1989 we saw what happened at the place of tian'anmen square.
to me it has been a warning... you world may seem free - but, is it?

in the east of germany, people were protesting.
they went away to the czech republic and hungary for holidays..
and would try to flee to an embassy of west germany.
hungary opened up their iron curtain and let them go.
and finally, the wall "fell".
the news were that people could now go to the west.
"when?" "i think.. this is effective immeadiately".
people saw this on tv.  they rushed to the wall.
they demanded to be let through.
soldiers guarding the wall didnt know what to do.
"shall we shoot?"  "we dont have any orders on this."
so they let them go.  thousands streamed across
the border into the west. and noone got hurt.
noone had expected this.  it was unbelievable.

i just *had* to communicate this to a friend who
was then staying in japan on a scholar's grant.
we had been communicating via air-mail,
written on thin, light paper.

it was hard to write on because you could
so easily tear this fragile paper apart.
you would have to carefully place the
paper into a special blue envelope.
the transfer would cost quite a bit of money
so we would write in small letters as to
maximize the bandwidth/content of a "message".

but this time the message just had to come across
in an instant.  waiting for all his to be communicated
in a letter would just take too much time.
this was big news - and it had to be told instantly!

we talked for about two, maybe 2.5, hours.  i tried
not to think about the cost of this conversation.
the phone bill of that month asked
for more than 250 deutsch marks.
my mum was not amused.

at that time i wished that everyone i knew
and communicated with had an "account"
on some machine at his university,
so we could "chat" through this system.

but at that time this wasnt possible.  yet.

still, some peopke were connected to the internet.
and they used IRC for chatting.
so we chatted to people in the US, in korea,
in australia, and in quite a few countries.

we told them about "the fall of the wall"
and we got incredulouly requests on why
anyone would make such a fuss about some wall.
"so a wall collapsed. what's the big deal?"
it sounded like a bag of rice
fell to the ground in china.

at that time we could not simply give them
a link to the wikipedia page about our "wall",
some pictures on flickr, or films on youtube.
all this came later, and it required the
"internet" as most people know it today:
the "world wide web" had to be invented first.

= ftp and all that =

the protocol "ftp" (file transfer protocol) and
its likewise called program "ftp" enabled people
to upload and download files from servers.
they quickly became "archives" for files
with special content, and the need for
knowing about archives and its files
became a necessity.

the admins of archives created recursive
file listings of their servers
using the command "ls -lR"
which were then compressed with "compress"
resulting in files named "ls-lR.Z".

quickly, other servers admins gathered copies
of those files, creating "machine.ls-lR.Z" files.
but you would still have to download all those files,
decompress them, and look through them with "grep"
to find "interesting" file descriptions.
who would know what to find where now?

a new service sprung up - "archee".
you could send requests to those servers
with your favourite search words via email - and
get a resulting server/file list in your mailbox.
when you asked for something simple such as "data"
then your resulting email could easily outgrow
the maximum limit of your mailbox.

at that time Ed Krol assembled info
about the internet and published it as
"The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog".
(which was published in 1992).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Krol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User's_Guide_and_Catalog 

suddenly, more people knew about this internet thing.

= 1990 =

i think it was in 1990 when this guy from the chemistry
department came over to our tutor room and said
"we need this server with us now".
he took away the computer that has been standing
under a table for some time with a note that said
"must be running at all times. do NOT turn off. thankyou."
i asked what this server was all about.
"Usenet", he replied.  "Net News", he added.
"so.. what is this then?" i asked.
he told me to check out this program, "nn".
it was a "newsreader" to read
"newsgroups" on a "news server".
its tag line was "No News is Good News",
the idea being to quickly select the
interesting messages from the lot
and read them efficiently, possibly to
reply to them in private or in public.

i knew about mailing lists as a way to distribute
messages to a list of addresses/people -
but this was different to mailing lists.

the messages were not distributed to the users
in their account, but were stored on the server.
therefore they carried an archive of the messages
to some amount of data or up to some time ago.

you could use your newsreader to access messages
which had been sent before you subscribed to the
newsgroup, and read+reply to them, too.  there
were hundreds, actually thousands of newsgroups.
they might have been archived way longer on other servers.
some servers had even more newsgroups than others.

the word "peering" came on.  now, what was that?

-----------------------------------------------
TODO
-----------------------------------------------

= 1992 =

russia.  tanks.  BBSs.

"spaf" says goodbye to the internet.

IN-Berlin founded.  snafu split off.

protocols, programs, systems...  minix, linux.

more ISPs.  more bandwidth.  modems, ISDN, DSL.

program -> talks+workshops -> events -> event calendar.

time for a look back!

some theory on bits and bytes.
file as long streams of bits, just big numbers.

can we "own" these?
can we control all copies?
how much "right" can we claim on bit streams?
are we allowed to link them?
store, copy, change, delete.

how can we condense all this into some rules?
what is really worth knowing about all that data?
what shall we teach people about it?
what is this "medienkompetenz"?

-----------------------------------------------
computers are machines with CPU and data storages.
sequential computation. limited storage.
speed given by a clock. gigaflops.

data transfer is controlled by protocols.
data is sliced into packets - and reassembled.
thousands of protocols "standardized" by RFCs.

the internet consists of connected machines.
computers, routers+switches.

DNS is one of the central services.
DHCP gives computers an address, mask, and more.

computers route packets in different routes.
data is often rewritten in other forms.

file systems.

encryption. https, ssl.  gpg+pgp.  keys.
symmetrical and asymmetrical algorithms.

who uses encryption?  only terrorists?  or
normal people accessing their bank accounts?

data storage.  save a copy - or just a link to a copy?
how much data storage would you need to store
everything you need for your entire life?

-----------------------------------------------

= END =

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big.
You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is.
I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist,
but that's just peanuts to space.

the same holds for the internet: it's *really* big!
you might think you understand it after a while -
but then learn something new, and you understand
that there'll be *always* something new, and you'll
never see all of it, and you'll never understand it.

here's one more:  the internet is only *part* of our world.
there is a LOT more out there which is not within the net.
do you really think you will ever understand it *all*?
think again!

Latest change: Sun Feb 26 07:23:42 CET 2012
EOF