History of Computer Networks Up to IPv4

Abstract

A long time ago (in a galaxy not too far away), regular people started connecting computers together. A few brave souls tried to do this with dial-up 1200-baud modems over phone lines. Pioneers brought up Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs; message boards that one person at a time could dial into and exchange short messages, and later small files, with each other). I brought up the eighth BBS in the world, in Atlanta, in about 1977, using code from the original CBBS in Chicago (created by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess). I used a modem donated by my friend Dennis Hayes (of Hayes Microcomputer Products). Later there were thousands of online Bulletin Board Systems, all over the world. Soon there followed commercial “information utilities” like CompuServe and The Source, which were like giant Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) with many more features. Tens of thousands of users could connect to these simultaneously. It was like the first crude approximation to the Internet of today, based on circuit-switched connections over telephone lines. Everything was text oriented (non-graphical) and very slow. 1200 bits/second was typical at first, although later modems with speeds of 2400 bits/second, 9600 bits/second, 14.4 Kbps, 28.8 Kbps, and finally 56 Kbps were developed and came into widespread use. Later these modems were primarily used to dial into an ISP to connect to the Internet, and some people are still using them this way.