ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet
cpr: Whew, that would be in 1972, as a frosh at Harvard, back when there were about 20-30 hosts on the ARPANet (the precursor to today's Internet) in the whole world.I remember fondly telnet'ing from machine to machine (back then, most were PDP-10's running TOPS-10 or TENEX, and all had open guest accounts), seeing how many telnet sessions one could chain before something broke.And I remember the first ARPANet mailing list, hosted at BBN (the inventors of email), which was about (recursively enough) email clients and mailing lists.I remember sitting at a TTY (physical teletype--no CRTs yet) next to the IMP (the ARPANet node processor) late at night and getting calls from BBN to reboot the IMP if it hung. We had high-speed 56Kb leased lines to MIT, BBN and a few other local nodes!FTP seemed like a miracle at the time, and we had access to a data store at CCA down the street which had an IBM data cell, which could hold gigabytes (which seemed infinite, given that our PDP-10 had 256K of 36-bit words and maybe a few hundred MB of large disk storage).