Wanna feel old?
-
The Thriller video is 40 yrs old.
Feels about right. I would have guessed 37…
-
Back to the Future is 39 yrs old.
We are already past the “future” Marty travelled to.
-
The Internet is 50 years old.
(More accurately, the paper that lays out what became the TCP/IP foundational technology for the Internet was published 50 years ago. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf ) -
The Internet is 50 years old.
(More accurately, the paper that lays out what became the TCP/IP foundational technology for the Internet was published 50 years ago. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf )@Axtremus said in Wanna feel old?:
The Internet is 50 years old.
I got on the internet in 1993. I remember telling my mother-in-law, who passed away in 1994, that my computer could connect, via gopher and ftp, to a computer in Europe.
She was astounded.
-
Cellular communication is 77 years or 45 years old, depends on how you look at it.
An internal Bell Labs technical memo lays out a fairly complete technical concept for cellular communication in 1947 (77 years ago), but the first commercial cellular communication service was not available until 1979 (45 years ago; in Tokyo, Japan).
-
And just for @LuFins-Dad …
“Sex reassignment surgery” is 93 years old.
The first documented surgery of this nature happened in 1931, in Germany. -
My Dad was on the committees that defined the standards for the US cellular network. He’s on some of the relevant patents. His first name is ‘Kenneth’ if you want to google ‘firstname lastname cellular patents’ you can find them.
"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."
-Cormac McCarthy -
My Dad was on the committees that defined the standards for the US cellular network. He’s on some of the relevant patents. His first name is ‘Kenneth’ if you want to google ‘firstname lastname cellular patents’ you can find them.
-
My Dad was on the committees that defined the standards for the US cellular network. He’s on some of the relevant patents. His first name is ‘Kenneth’ if you want to google ‘firstname lastname cellular patents’ you can find them.
@jon-nyc said in Wanna feel old?:
My Dad was on the committees that defined the standards for the US cellular network. He’s on some of the relevant patents. His first name is ‘Kenneth’ if you want to google ‘firstname lastname cellular patents’ you can find them.
He worked for Harris?
I've worked with a bunch of folk from their place in Rochester, NY.
I was only joking
-
@jon-nyc said in Wanna feel old?:
My Dad was on the committees that defined the standards for the US cellular network. He’s on some of the relevant patents. His first name is ‘Kenneth’ if you want to google ‘firstname lastname cellular patents’ you can find them.
He worked for Harris?
I've worked with a bunch of folk from their place in Rochester, NY.
@Doctor-Phibes said in Wanna feel old?:
@jon-nyc said in Wanna feel old?:
My Dad was on the committees that defined the standards for the US cellular network. He’s on some of the relevant patents. His first name is ‘Kenneth’ if you want to google ‘firstname lastname cellular patents’ you can find them.
He worked for Harris?
I've worked with a bunch of folk from their place in Rochester, NY.
He did. I went to high school there.
-
@jon-nyc said in Wanna feel old?:
My Dad was on the committees that defined the standards for the US cellular network. He’s on some of the relevant patents. His first name is ‘Kenneth’ if you want to google ‘firstname lastname cellular patents’ you can find them.
He worked for Harris?
I've worked with a bunch of folk from their place in Rochester, NY.
@Doctor-Phibes said in Wanna feel old?:
He worked for Harris?
So Harris hired my dad because he had experience in designing central office switching systems for the telephone network. Harris wanted to sell the behind-the-scenes hardware to the carriers.
They invested all this money helping define the standards so they could get a leg up on the designs. They hired my father in 1982.
Fast forward a few years, the FCC decided to do a lottery to give away cellular licenses (as opposed to an auction, the other way they’ve distributed spectrum for new services). These lotteries were for licenses at local city level.
The result was chaos. Mom and pop applicants won many of the lotteries. No big company was going to invest in building a network unless they had decent geographical coverage. The mom and pops weren’t going to build anything at all. It took several years for the majors to sort out buying all these licenses and consolidate coverage.
In the mean time Harris lost patience and exited the business.
They offered my dad roles in other divisions, but he was a network guy at the end of the day. So he took a job at the defense contracting arm of Magnavox, which made frequency-hopping radios for the Air Force (division later sold to Raytheon). My dad retired from that job in 1996.
-
I was born a little less than 10 years after we last walked on the moon. To me, that is clear "past history" stuff, but my youngest kid was born 22 years after 9/11, and to me that event happened "recently". I've also been out of high school for 24 years.
I know I'm not as
oldwise as some of you but time speeds up faster each year. I still "feel" (mind, not body) like I'm in my late 20s (I'm 42). Do any of you feel the same, mentally at least? I look at my father in law who is 76 and I'd have to imagine he thinks "there is no way I'm 76" often. -
The Internet is 50 years old.
(More accurately, the paper that lays out what became the TCP/IP foundational technology for the Internet was published 50 years ago. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf )@Axtremus said in Wanna feel old?:
The Internet is 50 years old.
(More accurately, the paper that lays out what became the TCP/IP foundational technology for the Internet was published 50 years ago. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf )Interesting. The paper only seems to describe the IP part of TCP/IP, though. But is TCP/IP the most important piece of tech that made the internet the internet? I'd argue that the HTTP protocol, which didn't arrive until the early 1990s, was at least as important. Specifically, its stateless-ness is what makes the internet scale to the dimensions we see today. TCP/IP was developed with stateful connections in mind.
-
Sounds fair. There's also HTML, which enables browsers and then later, JavaScript, which enables real web applications.
It's interesting that the original HTTP specification is just 700 words long, but still found it necessary to point out that "A well-behaved server will not require the carriage return character." and "The client should not assume that the carriage return will be present.".
The most important sentence is the last one: "Requests are idempotent . The server need not store any information about the request after disconnection."
-
And this:
Future HTTP protocols will be back-compatible with this protocol.
Assurance of future compatibility right from the start, leaving all future implementations with a known starting point to discover/negotiate new capabilities.
These slides (PDF) give a pretty good technical outline/summary of how HTTP has evolved from 1991 to late 2022.
