{"id":4782,"date":"2025-07-21T15:57:45","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T22:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/?p=4782"},"modified":"2025-07-21T15:57:45","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T22:57:45","slug":"did-i-help-influence-the-commercial-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/uncategorized\/did-i-help-influence-the-commercial-internet","title":{"rendered":"Did I help influence the commercial internet?"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, I was going through my dad’s office and I found a front panel from a early ARPAnet router. \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This led me eventaully to a memory of “Take your kid to work day” in 1988 or 1989. My dad took me to the Pentagon and set me down in front of a early Sun Sparcstation – I’m fairly sure a Sparc 1, in fact, from looking at photos and from the timeline. I also remember I was super fascinated by the NEXTcube that had just come out and it’s ability to emulate a modem in software, and DARPA had a few of those somewhere.<\/p>\n

Anyway, my dad wandered off for a meeting, and I discovered the video teleconferencing software on the sparc and tried to open several video conferencing links. I am pretty sure I temporarily broke the ARPAnet, which it turns out was still made of 256kbit links.<\/p>\n

Shortly thereafter, my dad decided to decomission the ARPAnet. I had never considered there as being any possible connection between those events until today, when I realised that it must have to him looked as a demonstration of how outdated the ARPAnet was. NSFnet was already held together with T1 lines, which were becoming the industry standard, and would not have broken quite so easily. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, I was going through my dad’s office and I found a front panel from a early ARPAnet router. This led me eventaully to a memory of “Take your kid to work day” in 1988 or 1989. My dad took me to the Pentagon and set me down in front of a early Sun Sparcstation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4782"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4782"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4784,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4782\/revisions\/4784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}