I was in the basement of UCL computer science (in the Pearson
building) in 1988. Our lab had a very special yellow (Don't ever touch
that!!) cable that ran across the ceiling between joists, then off
under UCH toward Telecom tower. Of course we hung bits of origami on
it with cotton. Apparently that was JANET. I never heard anyone say
"The Internet" back then, but we did have a coms lecture where
"inter-networking" was a thing. Nice to read some old names in that
piece.
Until relatively recently I worked with JANET (or Janet - lower case - as it is now) as part of Jisc, the UK's NREN. I also worked with the wider European org, GEANT, that runs the academic networks across Europe. We were (and still are ) very proud of Janet.
Thanks for your service. I did not know JANET was formed in April
1984. Then I was still at school, and we had a teletype that you
could send emails. Of course those days no one had email so we had a
class of kids sending emails to each other to print out on tty
paper. I think the broader implications may have been lost in that
lesson. It wes probably a BBS rather than JANET.
I was also in one of those basement labs in the Pearson building in 1988. Not exactly the nicest place to work, but some great equipment. I particularly remember that year coding a graphical application in NeWS (Sun's original network window system, long before it became X/NeWS) on a Sun Workstation there, which was an amazing piece of kit for its time. Also remember the DecStation 3100s we had down there that would periodically catch fire.
Nice to meet you. Yeah the smell of overcooked circuits down there was
something eh? I forget my room number now but there was something
called the Pyramid next door that was mysterious and hush-hush.
Phil Treleaven was my prof (saw him outside Waterstones last time I
was around ULU so he must still be there).
Haha, yes, the Pyramid was alien technology, but the cover story was that it was a multiprocessor RISC minicomputer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Technology When I arrived at UCL, there were three PDP 11/44s of which one (?) was shared by all the undergrads. The pyramid replaced those circa 1987 and was a huge improvement.
If I recall correctly, the main workstation lab was B10A, where I spent a lot of time. Then there was a narrow room, B09 I think, that had mission control on the right hand side with a machine room behind it, and a second machine room on the left side. Can't remember which machine room the Pyramid was in.
Memories. I had an unfiltered 100Mbit ethernet port, with public static IP, in my dorm room at Manchester Uni in 2000 thanks to JANET. It was amazing compared to the ISDN line at home (...which until then I had thought was the bees knees). It took almost another 15 years before I could get something faster at home than what I'd had at uni (!)
