On 9/10/26 22:26, CGS wrote:
On 2026-10-08, Bret Busby <[email protected]> wrote:
Out of interest, as a person who has used alpine since it superseded
pine, and, before that, pine, since before the Internet, and, having
How did you use pine before the Internet?
pine was used as a mail application on a multi-user mainframe at a
university, and, between users on another system. Both pine and elm were
available. From memory, elm used a horizontally split screen for message
index and message content. elm was the more commonly used mail
application at the university (at the time, the institution as not a
university - more detail about this, is below), but, elm was more
difficult to use, and, over the decades, I have found pine/alpine to be
the most powerful user email application, making all the other email
applications look like toys, for use as user email applications.
While at the university, I saw on a noticeboard, and advertisement for a
localised (Perth, Western Australia) network provider, who provided WAN
access for people interested in learning and using UNIX. The provider
was named dialix. the facility provided dialup communications, using a
modem, to the UNIX server. So, I subscribed to that.
dialix used the SLIP/PPP protocol, from memory, for users to dialup and
connect to dialix.
I believe that it was when I was a dialix user, that I had sent an email
message to a USA major book publisher, enquiring about a particular
book that I was seeking, and, I got a response back within half an hour,
from the marketing manager of the publisher (it might have been the
MacMillan publishing company, it is too long ago for me to be sure),
advising me that the book had been out of print for a few years, and,
was no longer available as a new book.
The level of service of the publisher was exemplary, and, much better
than the quality of service of most businesses nowadays, and, the
communication speed, was good, given the applicable technology, and, in
comparison with quality standards that currently exist, including a
scenario, some years ago, where an email message from a relative, took
two weeks to reach me, from New Zealand (postal mail would have been
much faster, and, transporting it by canoe, paddling between there and
here, about 5000km, may have been faster), with email taking over a
week, to travel from one mailserver to another, within the server room
of a major Perth ISP, that is, I believe, now one of the five or so
major Internet Access Providers in Australia. That was via the World
Wide Web, not the text only internets such as DARPAnet or AARPAnet or
"The Internet".
Both the facilities - the university WAN and the dialix facility, were
nodes of AARnet, the Australian Academic Research network, which was a
node of DARPAnet, the predecessor of "The Internet".
This was before operating systems with GUI's, such as MS Windows, and
Mozaic, were available to the public.
"The Internet" is an internet.
An internet, from my education, is a network that provides for
communications between computers using different companies' operating
systems.
For example, DECnet, which was used by the Western Australian TAFE
education system, at the time of my initially learning about networks,
allowed the DEC PDP11 minicomputers, which ran RSX and/or RSTS/e, to
communicate with the central VAX-11/785 (I think, from memory, it was a
785 - this is going back about 45 years, and, I had been a user on
different academic VAX systems, the first one running BSD 4.2, which was
in 1979, I believe - my use of that one, was as a user on a multiuser
computer, and I do not remember it being connected to a LAN or WAN - it
may have been, but I do not remember that, and, connection from the
terminals to that VAX, were through a telephone switchboard, as used in
manual exchanges, and, by armies at that time, for telephone
communications). We could use the particular college's (the particular
college that I attended, in the multi-campus TAFE system) PDP 11/44, for
running BASIC and Pascal, for learning those languages, and, we had to
log in, across the TAFE network, to the VAX, to run FORTRAN (we were
using FORTRAN-77) on the VAX, for learning to program FORTRAN. The
FORTRAN that we were using, in that system, was VAX FORTRAN, which was
an enhanced, and, not the ISO standard, FORTRAN.
Now, that was DECnet, which was a proprietary network operating system,
which provided for communication between only DEC proprietary operating
systems.
Internet operating systems existed, and, I believe, from memory (I could
be wrong about the particular name), that the IBM one was named SNA.
That allowed nodes on the network, to be using different companies'
operating systems, such as the DEC mini computer operating systems, and,
IBM minicomputer operating systems.
So, that is my understanding of what is an internet.
"The Internet" is simply an instantiation of an internet, for which, in
the development of "the Internet", whether it was done when the DARPAnet
was being used, the Internet Protocol, was developed, which also
provided for such functionality such as redundancy, which allowed for a
node on a pathway of data transmission, to be bypassed, when using the
particular node, was not feasible.
And, the facility to which most people now, refer as "The Internet", is
not "The Internet", but, is the GUI World Wide Web, that runs on "The
Internet" (and, I use "runs on", in its correct sense, and, not, as many
people mistakenly indicate an operating system running on top of the
applications that run on the operating system, such as "I am using
alpine running under Debian 24" - the application runs on the operating
system, NOT under the operating system. What runs under the operating
system, is the BIOS.
At the university, with the university (this was before the institution
became a university - it was, before being a university, the Western
Australian College of Advanced Education, previously being the Western
Australian Teachers' College (for teaching prospective teachers) being a
node on AARnet, which was a node on the DARPAnet, I remember a notice
being posted on the noticeboards, by the academic (as opposed to
support) IT Department Head of Department, that students were required
to stop playing MUDD across the WAN, as complaints had been received
from NASA, of staff resources and time being misused by playing MUDD
across the network, with IT students from the WACAE.
So, after all of that, that, I believe, is a (kind of - it could have
been longer) brief ( :) ) explanation of how I was using pine, before
"The Internet".
"The Internet" is widely misunderstood, including its age, and, how it
fits into ICT, and, what it really is, and, the use of the term, is
mostly, a malapropism.
And, when "The Internet" came to be used, to supersede the use of the
AARPAnet DARPAnet, and, in Australia, the node network (the network that
is/was a node of the AARPAnet/DARPAnet), that was a step in the
evolution of ICT, after which step, came the development and
establishment of the widespread use of, the World Wide Web, which is
now, mostly misnamed as "The Internet", which the World Wide Web is not.
..
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
(UTC+0800)
..............
