My first introduction to the Internet was in 1974 while attending a Datacomms symposium at the Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg. Of course, the term "Internet" had not been invented at that point but the concept was mind-blowing.
A big feature of the conference was packet-switched network. I remember only two presentations from that conference. The first was by a French gentleman who espoused on the packet network, which had just been introduced in France.
The second presentation, which is the one I most vividly remember and the one that ultimately blew me away, was by a speaker named Vint Cerf from the University of California (UCLA). Cerf, together with Bob Kahn, was at that time working on the design of the first version of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
In the main conference hall of the Carlton Hotel, rows of television monitors were arranged down each side of the hall so that delegates could watch what was happening on the teletype terminal used by the speaker.
Vint had arranged an international telephone call (it had to be pre-booked via the international telephone exchange in Cape Town) so that he could set up a modem call (probably 300bps) between the Carlton Hotel and UCLA. He linked up to his computer at the university and proceeded to show us the operation of ARPANET, which linked approximately 25 research computers across the US.
As he jumped from UCLA to Harvard to Stanford running programs on one machine with output transferred to another, the audience was in awe. We were accustomed to centralised mainframes running terminal networks. This democratic alliance among peers was a new and exciting concept. The years went by and many exciting developments occurred: microcomputers, Apple computers, CP/M, IBM PC, MSDOS, Novell.
During the 1980s I worked at the Kruger National Park as part of the Conservation Research Group. We collaborated with researchers from all over the world and this gave rise to my first use of e-mail via Compuserve and MCI. This was done through a connection via Saponet.
The manual telephone exchange in Skukuza was trained to avoid interrupting me so that my data calls at 1200bps to Nelspruit were not broken. Using Saponet X.28 and X.25, I would connect to the US.
By 1989, the researchers on my e-mail list in the US were migrating to the Internet. I arranged for a user account at the University of York in the UK, which I could reach via Saponet. At last I was an Internet user!
However, this is not as simple as it sounds. To connect, you had to know the path between your host and the destination host, for instance, utzoo!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhtsa!ihnss!ihuxp!grg.
I was also an early adopter (1983) of Unix, on the DEC PDP11 at the Kruger National Park. We tried to set up a network of interlinked Unix computers, using dialup connections. Although early experiments with Mark Elkins of Ukom Systems (later Olivetti, later POSIX) were successful, the manual telephone exchange at Skukuza prevented me from participating regularly in this early South African branch of the Internet.
In 1994 I set up my first Web server, called SAFARI, which was an attempt to provide tourism information on SA. We had a 64K leased line to CIS (part of the CSIR, later MWEB, later WorldOnline). However, it did not become a great success mainly due to lack of attention from my side.
If I think back on the growth of the Internet, the thing that strikes me the most is that the really big developments around the World Wide Web went unnoticed when they happened. These were overshadowed by the smaller IT developments that seemed really important at the time.
Having had this experience, I would surmise that the smaller developments happening around us now are the ones destined to be really big in 10 years time.
If I were to take a wild guess at what the Internet will look like 10 years from now, I would say that the extension of the Internet from our cars to refrigerators to the packet of corn flakes in our kitchen cupboards will be the dominant theme. How this extension will benefit or restrict us is anyone`s guess, but the trend will always be towards more convenience, more efficiency.
Kind regards
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