Worked through that but towards the end of it

I got very interested in computing and fact, I ended up doing physics with computing

that's where I met Dave and the other people who were setting up the early computer science group and

Then he said after I'd finished that I've got a bit of spare money. Would you like to work on some typesetting stuff?

There's all sorts of interesting things happening

So I did. I worked on that for a year, I think, with Dave doing various things

including this

connection for the exams machine and all that interesting stuff

Never mind said Julian quite rightly. So, we'll keep the lower level

And then I got really interested in networking us as that was just starting to come about and I worked with another

lecturer called Hugh Smith

and he had contacts with UCL and so we got into this sort of Internet and ARPANET and

Early connections to that and I started working on

email software to try and make sense of all this stuff that was going on get rid of all these

exclamation marks in your routes and things like that and

Just try and make it simpler

It was quite early on so it was about

1984 or three I think I got involved in it. At that time

The the internet was well, it was all just ARPANET. So it was the

American connection and we had a very very tenuous connection

we had some friends at University College London, and they had a satellite link to the ARPANET they'd had for a while and

we were in the maths building which is where we are today and

We didn't actually have a connection to the outside world

But (the) Psychology (department) did. So you could connect across to Psychology's computer and dial up London

Log into one of London's nodes and then you could use the internet

Very very slow. And of course it was going across satellite

So you connect to... I don't know, there weren't very many sites, but there were a few places you can pick up software

So you'd log into those?

but because it was going over a satellite you typed a letter a

and it would take about three seconds for the a to come back and so

You'd start typing and then you get very confused halfway through and have to delete it all and this was all painfully slow

But we thought it was wonderful at the time

So it was about you know, 20 minutes or something to get onto the Internet from here

But but we did manage it. Alongside that at the same time

There's sort of a more anarchic network called Usenet, which was just - that was machines

That you were friendly with. You talk to other machines and and a whole grouping came out of that

so we also have that so you could use that alongside it so you could

Send email to somebody and say do you know a good site

I can go to to pick up software for?

this, that, or the other and they'd send something back over that but it was all very very

disconnected

so, I remember we connected to Lancaster and then Lancaster connected to Kent and Kent connected to

Amsterdam and Amsterdam was the European gateway. They could then connect - and er, at a very early stage you actually have to work out your route

so if you wanted to email somebody you'd say right so go from Nottingham to Lancaster to Kent to Amsterdam to

Seismo to Rutgers to something other and you could eventually work out where to go and how it would get there

So it was

So much fun

We had email in the department for a long time and then as psychology and other places got connected. We sent it around campus.

I can't think who I would've send the first one to probably somebody at

University College London because we did a lot of work with them early on and eventually had some

Connection which is how we got connected to the Internet

I do remember

desperately trying to get in contact with Brian Kernighan and

Sending email after email along these different paths - via Amsterdam and Seismo to... It was called "Research" - Research

Everybody's

Name was just their computer name

So "Research" was the AT&T computer node, so and eventually I remember it was late on a Friday night

I was watching the logs and suddenly saw an email come in. It was from Brian

Rushed down to Dave Brailsford, and said look, look, we've got a connection

here's the route that you need to use and he scribbled it down and

From then on we had contact there very soon after that. We started sort of collaborating. So I was working with somebody in the

California and we were working on software that got switched around

so I'd be working on it during UK time and then he'd be working on at Californian time and then he'd send me changes and

Yeah, that was mostly done over email we didn't need

Very much

Because in the UK we were still we weren't using tcp/ip. We were

Told we had to use x.25 at the time

But we cheated and we ran some

tcp over x.25 and we ran strange protocols that allowed us to

Connect to the Internet and we did actually even managed to have a sort of talk

System where you could type a message and it would appear in California and vice versa

That was a great day when that first happened

I guess that was about nineteen eighty six or seven when that we managed to cobble together enough protocol to get that all to work

SEAN> And you mention email the instant thing you think of these days?

It's probably webmail or a client email with attachments just being dealt with for you. Can you talk me though that?

You couldn't do attachments at all though, you could sometimes because it was all just text

so sometimes you could wrap them up in interesting ways and

There was particularly one self-extracting

It was called a shar archive self-extracting

it was actually a small shell script program for UNIX and so

Your message arrived and you just ran the contents of the message as a program and it extracted itself and you could send files that way

but

That was fairly late on because we had very little bandwidth at the time. So it was more very quick short emails and

This is a place to pick up a file from we would try and get the file somewhere near nearer to the person

So that they could pick it up with a reasonable speed. So this is a message I've saved from

1987 and this is the path you can see here

So it starts off over here. This is the person and then this is all the places

It's been through, Seismo was a popular place in I think it's in Virginia or somewhere like that

But it had great connectivity to lots of other places and then down here

We have MC VAX, which is the European node

And then it trickles across the UK to get to us from here

So, you know

That was kind of one of the early messages and you had to remember these paths and write them down so that you you could

Get back to them and this is kind of the route

it took it jumped around in Europe a little and then left over across the

Atlantic and then rattled around there until it ended up where it went to and this is just a,

This is the Sat net that was

So this bit here is all of the US and there's a connection here coming over the satellite to Goonhilly Down in

Cornwall and a landline up to UCL

I remember when they finally got to upgrading that they went to a transatlantic cable or something TAT 8 or TAT 6

Transatlantic telephone cable 6 when that was laid down. Suddenly. We had more bandwidth than we ever knew what to do with

Until about two months later when we fully utilized it all

That's the way it goes

That was what a lot of the internet was for and that's still what the Internet's for

actually, serving very little purpose but you know back then they took it to a to a different level and

we'd have to go to this really dark room and

The computers were green little I had an Amiga computer, right? This is like an Amiga 500