On July 12, 2014 at 12:08 randy@psg.com (Randy Bush) wrote:
And, for the record, it's pretty widely acknowledge that "The World" (Barry Shein) was the world's first commercial ISP - offering shell access in 1989, and at some point started offering PPP dial-up services. As I recall, they were a UUnet POP.
yep. and uunet and psi were hallucinations. can we please not rewrite well-known history?
or are you equating shell access with isp? that would be novel. unix shell != internet.
You mean when you sat at a unix shell using a dumb terminal on a machine attached to the internet in, say, 1986 you didn't think you were "on the internet"? The shell machines were connected to the internet. You could FTP, email, telnet, etc etc etc. Back in 1989 that was "on the internet". Heck, in 2014 it means on the internet. Right this minute I'm in a shell on a Linux machine connected to the internet and I'm pretty sure I have access to the internet. Consider the difference if you unplug that shell machine from the internet. Internet Service Provider. You got internet services. What hair are you trying to split? That you were using a shared address? Are people behind a NAT wall not on the internet? -- -Barry Shein The World | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool & Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*