---------- From: Matt Elliott[SMTP:melliott@ncsa.uiuc.edu] Reply To: Matt Elliott Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2000 3:38 PM To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: Re: I created the "Al Gore created the Internet" story

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I'm not suggesting some sort of vast conspiracy to keep the Internet small. But I think it could be found that 3-4 years were effectively wasted. I really want to know what the impediments to the Internet were in the 1986-1993 time frame.

NSFnet acceptable use policy.

To expand on this, in the early years, access was only for people doing DoD funded work - either defense contractors, or universities with DoD funding. It was even argued that non work-related email was forbidden (and the SF-Lovers Digest - the first large mailing list - existed only sub-rosa for it's early years). Usenet was a bit later - early to mid-80's I think. But there were a lot of earlier problems... In those days, there were no ISPs. You got access through a university or a contractor, or not at all. Around 1990, email portals were permitted to some of the large commercial BBS systems - BIX, Delphi, Compuserve, etc - later Usenet was also gatewayed (I date the 'death of the net' to this period). At this time, the typical user used a terminal emulation program (vt100) to dial into a Unix box, and then used Unix CLI tools to access net services from that point. If you wanted to get something from the Unix box to your PC, you used sneakernet or Kermit. Finally, NSF and DARPA got out of the net, and commercial backbone providers took over. ISPs started to appear. However, the net was still hard to use, and very much a geek's toy. If you doubt this, consider that until the early 90's, all access was still via command line interfaces - rn for news, ftp for file transfer, telnet for remote access, a variety of packages for mail (all flat text). Even if you owned a PC, you still had to buy and set up a modem, buy and install a TCP stack (not included in DOS or Windows), and obtain some initial tools (ftp clients most critically - with ftp you could bootstrap yourself). It was not until the WWW that 'the lights came on' and suddenly the net was something that non-geeks could expect to use and navigate effectively. Peter Trei