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CaptainMoustache t1_j5q0f03 wrote

Thats a neat little piece of Internet history you have there, any more information about it? I can't seem to find much from a cursory Google search.

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hopopo t1_j5q0n7d wrote

Your dad is Al Gore?

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Professional-Error58 t1_j5q35ku wrote

who would have known Nj played a key role in the establishment of the worlds internet

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imMakingA-UnityGame t1_j5q42s3 wrote

That is AWESOME! Please take good care of this, you’ve got a real piece of history here.

Should consider loaning it to a museum temporarily or something but I do understand the personal value to you so can’t blame you for not wanting to.

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imMakingA-UnityGame t1_j5q460m wrote

Replying to Professional-Error58 (#1,472,704)

NJ played a HUGE part in computing in general, Bell Labs is responsible for creating a LOT of the stuff still used today.

To name a few:

The transistor

The Laser

The solar cell

The fields of radio astronomy and information theory

The GUI

UNIX operating system (still at the core of most machines running today, even new ones)

The C programming g language (still at the core of most machines running today, even new ones, countless programming languages abstracted ontop of/out of this)

There are many im forgetting I’m sure. It has had like 9 Nobel prizes come out of it i think. Today it is a shell of its former self but Bell Labs is more or less to thank for the modern world of computing. Without C and Unix, computers being so accessible to the masses wouldn’t have happened.

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sect0r_9 t1_j5q4u83 wrote

Igor Klener is a narcissist.

1

mcgeggy t1_j5q7gmb wrote

What does it mean “sold out of a basement”? Who was selling it to who?

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Paul_S_R_Chisholm t1_j5qgjw9 wrote

Replying to imMakingA-UnityGame (#1,472,812)

Yep!

A few nits:

>The Laser

The laser was "invented" by many people at many organizations.

>The GUI

The early ground breaking work was done at SRI and Xerox PARC. Bell Labs did invent the Blit.

>The C programming language (still at the core of most machines running today, even new ones, countless programming languages abstracted on top of/out of this)

And C++ (nobody's favorite language but hugely influential).

Also:

  • communications satellites (Telstar series)
  • touch-tone phones (back when you really would "dial" a telephone number)
  • Digital Signal Processors (DSPs)
  • transatlantic telephone cables
  • charge-coupled devices (CCDs), the heart of every digital camera

And so much more.

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SemiEmployedTree t1_j5qht2x wrote

Can you post a picture showing the names better? I’m wondering if anybody I knew back then is there.

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Draano t1_j5qhwgg wrote

Replying to [deleted] (#1,473,951)

Not OP, but my guess is it's similar to the company that "started in a garage". Built/assembled in the basement, and shipped by the person in the company who happened to have the job of running to the post office, UPS or FedEx. Probably picking up lunch from McDonalds on their way back to the basement/office.

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small_e_900 t1_j5qidp1 wrote

In 1989, I lived on St. Georges Ave, a few doors down from Bachman's tavern. Hi neighbor.

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njstein t1_j5qkmkf wrote

OP really went to go get this after people called his comments fake in the backyard thread lol.

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onemm t1_j5qmzn5 wrote

Replying to TriggerTough (#1,473,274)

Ok so was the first internet connection sent from NJ to Tokyo? Or NYC to Tokyo?

Cause as a Jersey boy I know New Yorkers love taking credit for a lot of our shit

Edit: just realized what sub I’m on and don’t need to clarify I’m a Jersey boy

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Starbucks__Lovers t1_j5qny06 wrote

That explains the pool, hot tub and giant backyard in Monmouth county

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BigStinkyMeat t1_j5qpzyt wrote

This is so lame.

No one actually gives a shit except introverted dorks on Reddit.

−25

Sudovoodoo80 t1_j5qzyha wrote

You fool! You've doomed us all!!!!

lol Just kiddding, that's really cool.

11

beachmedic23 t1_j5r1wg7 wrote

Replying to SchAmToo (#1,473,774)

I remember my grandfather taking me to Bell Labs as a kid. He was on the fiber optic team. That place was so cool even back then, I'm glad Bellworks was able to repurpose the building instead of knocking it down

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TriggerTough OP t1_j5r2157 wrote

Replying to Sudovoodoo80 (#1,475,927)

Thank you.

On a side note, for the first 3 years no one wanted to buy it. They thought it was a joke. My dad was so frustrated every day at dinner time.

Then the World Wide Web came out about 1993 and it was more "user friendly" so companies started buying it up.

Look where we are at now! Crazy IMO.

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philosteen t1_j5r3elb wrote

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to present to you... the internet!

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SursumCorda-NJ t1_j5r46rs wrote

Replying to imMakingA-UnityGame (#1,472,812)

> UNIX operating system (still at the core of most machines running today, even new ones)

What runs on Unix in modern machines? If you have a Windows computer I thought Windows is what the computer used.

I'm very computer engineering ignorant.

1

vabello t1_j5r5ir4 wrote

Replying to imMakingA-UnityGame (#1,472,812)

My dad worked at Bell Labs in Whippany. I remember going there in the 80’s and seeing a lot of Apple II computers with all sorts of crazy custom boards and ribbon cables running everywhere. I recall a co-worker of his gave us a custom Apple II floppy controller with a toggle switch to change which ROMs were active, changing from something being 3.2 to 3.3 versions. More interestingly, I remember that my dad said Bell Labs frequently had employees who built technology that had no current application. He said they kept a lot of it locked away until the rest of the world caught up and had a use for it.

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dethskwirl t1_j5r6t4s wrote

it always comes back to New Jersey.

I've been to a lot of places and seen a lot things in this world so far, and there's always someone or something that links it back to New Jersey.

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ministryofmayhem t1_j5r85yz wrote

Was wondering about that lowercase 'c' in cisco, so I looked it up. From Wikipedia:

>The name "Cisco" was derived from the city name San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on using the lower case "cisco" in its early years. The logo is intended to depict the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.

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nadeemon t1_j5rag82 wrote

Replying to imMakingA-UnityGame (#1,472,812)

You're also forgetting neural networks, which power alot of AI today. They were invented by yann lecun at bell labs, his manager was Rich Howard, who was involved with WINLAB at Rutgers.

Then there's also Thomas Edison and all the advancements his company made.

6

AidanAmerica t1_j5rmorr wrote

Replying to SursumCorda-NJ (#1,476,358)

Windows is the 800 lb gorilla exception, but the vast majority of operating systems are derived from Unix. Here’s the short explanation:

AT&T’s Bell Labs invented Unix in the late 60s. They funded research related to all kinds of communication projects. Because of an antitrust decree, AT&T wasn’t allowed to sell computers or computer software until after 1982, when the Supreme Court broke them up.

So, during the 70s, AT&T had this great OS, but they couldn’t sell it. They could, however, license it as a trade secret. So universities and companies bought a license, and they’d get the UNIX source code — think an Ikea chair that’s sold disassembled, but which comes with instructions on how to turn those parts into a working chair.

During that time when AT&T was licensing out those instructions, people studied them and learned how the system works. Returning to the chair analogy: after you assemble it, you could study it and figure out how it distributes the force through the chair to support a person. Then, after you learn how that chair works, you could use that knowledge to go build your own chair from scratch.

After AT&T was split up in 1982, they could start selling the OS as a finished product, but it didn’t matter as much anymore: the secret was out. People could build their own chairs. BSD and Linux* are two examples of UNIX-like operating systems that came about that way.

Modern day UNIX derivatives contain none of that original AT&T- authored code, but they are based off of a clone of AT&T UNIX.

So, because AT&T did all the hard work 40 years ago, and now you can reap the benefits for free, most people and organizations that need an operating system just use one of those free UNIX-derived clones. Apple’s operating systems, Android, FreeBSD (Netflix’s OS of choice for their server infrastructure) all come from that gene pool.

The one major exception is Windows, because Microsoft built their own OS from scratch back when it made a little more sense to do so, and now if they tear it up and start from scratch, they’ll break 37 years of third party software. It’s possible to put together a fix, but then they’d end up in an even more precarious situation of trying to support decades of software plus this new variable. Microsoft has always been hesitant to do that type of thing. Apple, by contrast, is willing to just break old things in the interest of progress and tell their users to suck it up.

Hey, that didn’t end up being short at all.

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slapstick15 t1_j5ro8r5 wrote

What a neat piece of technological memorabilia! Thanks for sharing.

1

22marks t1_j5rpx1j wrote

Replying to gotMUSE (#1,478,318)

Here's the whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Go to the last page and the references are listed, but these three of the eight are from Bell Labs and were conceived at the Friendly's Restaurant in Morristown:

S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "How to time-stamp a digital document," In Journal of Cryptology, vol 3, no2, pages 99-111, 1991.

D. Bayer, S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Improving the efficiency and reliability of digital time-stamping,"In Sequences II: Methods in Communication, Security and Computer Science, pages 329-334, 1993.

S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Secure names for bit-strings," In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conferenceon Computer and Communications Security, pages 28-35, April 1997.

One of the actual patents can be found here:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5136647A/en

4

Pcakes844 t1_j5rqdy2 wrote

Replying to dethskwirl (#1,476,618)

Fr. YooHoo, the electric guitar, the light bulb, the motion picture camera and the whole modern movie industry as we know it today, Campbell's soup. Just a tiny bit of all the things that were created here in New Jersey.

Like the bridge says "Trenton makes, the world takes"

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pnerges t1_j5rtj5u wrote

It is famous! They even made an episode of South Park about that router.

2

playdohplaydate t1_j5s3xhz wrote

It’s so amazing how much of the modern world was developed in NJ

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ssSerendipityss t1_j5s43kz wrote

I’m from Rahway! In PA now. Now I have something to mention besides the prison!

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mattemer t1_j5s6ebg wrote

You're dad is Al Gore?

Of course kidding.

This is really awesome. What a cool piece of history to have and to be a part of.

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TodayTimeDeux t1_j5sapof wrote

mmuseumm in nyc would love this for an seasonal exhibit

1

TriggerTough OP t1_j5snzfm wrote

Replying to KillerKPa (#1,477,834)

The basement of the home I grew up in was Ciscos first sales office on the east coast.

In 1989 they weren’t public yet. Just a small startup.

My dad was working for Wang Computers in sales in the 1980s. A venture capitalist met with him to see if he wanted to take a risk with a company who had a new technology no one had used yet.

My dad decided to do it. We had the basement of the home we lived in as the sales office since it was such a small startup.

It’s crazy thinking back to see where it’s at now.

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greensocks77 t1_j5t00e5 wrote

AT&T had an opportunity to buy Cisco products early on and sell them as their own. A “Brouter”. Worked with engineers on the evaluation team. They gave the thumbs up but the opportunity never came to fruition. Go figure. This was before they bought NCR. Bet they would love to change those choices.

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RafeDangerous t1_j5t9cal wrote

Replying to hopopo (#1,472,429)

Fun fact...what Al Gore said about his role in the internet is largely correct. The actual quote that people turned into "I invented the internet" was:

> "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system".

This is true. He was the first major politician to publicly recognize the potential of a large interlinked network, and he pushed hard for the expansion of ARPANET and public access to it. Would we have the internet today without him? Probably, but arguably it would be a number of years behind where it is and might not look like it does now since the drivers very well might have been the large "walled-garden" systems like CompuServe and America Online rather than public infrastructure. Without the expansion of ARPANET into the Internet, there would have been no common infrastructure for the World Wide Web.

Vint Cerf, co-creator of TCP/IP which makes him one of the actual original "inventors" of the internet, wrote a piece defending Gore on this topic. This part gets pretty much to the point:

> "Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.

>No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time."

Basically, right-wing radio took a significant accomplishment that Gore made and turned it into an insult. It kind of reminds me of the McDonald's "too hot coffee" lawsuit in that way.

13

Spectrum2700 t1_j5t9nxg wrote

Replying to Fryceratops (#1,472,788)

Yup, NJN did a whole documentary after the 1984 Bell System breakup, explaining that they'd chose to move from NYC to NJ simply because there was plenty of space for use in all sorts of areas --- they had some field in Chester for testing phone poles and lines outdoors, a Western Electric facility in Springfield near Union (now the HQ of Bed, Bath and Beyond for however long they last)...

5

RafeDangerous t1_j5tbiwj wrote

Replying to nadeemon (#1,476,864)

> Essentially all servers run in unix, mac os is unix, and Android phones are unix.

Not quite. MacOS is a certified UNIX system, but Android is Linux which is a UNIX derivative clone. At this point, in sheer numbers there are more Linux servers than there are UNIX ones.

Linux was built to be a UNIX clone by Linus Torvolds and a host of open-source developers, and has no direct links to UNIX, which was developed originally by AT&T. Linux is a fully open-source OS, while UNIX is a mix (BSD is partially open-source, but as far as I know none of the others are).

Edit: Okay, this isn't a debatable point. Only systems certified by The Open Group are UNIX. Others can be similar to UNIX, or clones of UNIX, but they are not UNIX. Linux has never been certified as UNIX, and even if they requested certification they would not pass the requirements because while Linux is very similar to UNIX, it doesn't meet the benchmark requirements. Downvoting me doesn't change reality.

1

namean_jellybean t1_j5td7ld wrote

Omg my dad worked for bell / nortel during that time period and told me about the cisco systems team! I remember being the only kid in school with internet at home (what was before 56k, 14kbps?) in like 1991 but it was just ‘message boards’ and was not interesting to any regular people.

3

TriggerTough OP t1_j5tdthp wrote

Replying to namean_jellybean (#1,483,343)

Correct!

I had the internet from 1989 as well. All green screen stuff with commands. No real "websites" either. No one wanted to use it. It wasn't "user friendly." It was a "joke" at the time.

Then about 1993 when the WWW hit everyone wanted it. It was not for just "computer nerds" anymore. It sold like hotcakes!

3

imMakingA-UnityGame t1_j5tgq1m wrote

Replying to SursumCorda-NJ (#1,476,358)

Yeah, so it’s either MS-DOS based systems or UNIX based. If it’s not a windows machine its 99% likely its UNIX based. This would lead you to think the vast majority of computing things are windows as it’s the most popular OS, however you need to consider ALL computers. Not just Laptops/PCs.

Think phones, tablets, smart watches, cars, “smart” anything’s, TVs, rockets, servers, anything running Linux, basically anything running a computer chip which is….a lot of shit now.

That being said, even windows has been in the last few year implementing more and more of the UNIX/POSIX type shit for developers.

2

imMakingA-UnityGame t1_j5tgyqv wrote

Replying to RafeDangerous (#1,483,157)

Linux is UNIX based and uses POSIX, it’s essentially a. GUI extension ontop of UNIX. We wouldn’t have it without UNIX. *NIX machines perhaps is more accurate than UNIX, but that’s just semantics. At its core LINUX is UNIX on crack. Obviously it’s come leaps and bounds away from UNIX in this age but it’s built ontop of it.

0

RafeDangerous t1_j5tiei1 wrote

Replying to imMakingA-UnityGame (#1,483,816)

It's really not though. It shares no actual code from proprietary UNIX, and UNIX is an actual certification which Linux doesn't have. If anything, calling Linux UNIX takes away from all the work that Linus and the others did; they didn't simply repackage UNIX code, they wrote it from scratch and did an amazing job.

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murphydcat t1_j5tm8i3 wrote

Alexander Shipley, who is the Rahway historian, may be interested in that router.

He doesn't use email much but he is the director of the Merchants & Drovers Tavern Museum on St. Georges Ave. Give him a ring at (732) 381-0441.

Did you know that Rahway was also home to the first lab of inventor Nikolai Tesla? There is a statue of him in front of the Rahway Train Station.

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marymonstera t1_j5tnova wrote

Damn I’d love to see this featured on antiques roadshow when they have cool stuff from the local places they hold the show

2

suarezd1 t1_j5tvzut wrote

To think, the idiots went West.

"We're gonna head west. There's a rumor goin' around there might be some Internet out there. So we're headed out Californee Way."

1

roytay t1_j5twf4m wrote

Replying to nadeemon (#1,476,973)

I worked with Yann in Bell Labs, back in the day. He may have invented convolutional neural networks -- he's cited as a 'founding father' of them. Neural networks in general pre-date him a bit.

Edit: Don't get me wrong. Yann's work in that field was huge and he's a big deal at Meta now.

4

raichiha t1_j5txnft wrote

Replying to TwinsTwice (#1,482,630)

“Taylor” is the BRAND. “Pork roll” is the actual product.

Its pork roll.

You don’t say your having a bowl of General Mills for breakfast, you say your having Frosted Flakes, because thats the product and GM is the brand.

Also note, you don’t see the words “Taylor Ham” next to eachother, anywhere on the Taylor brand packaging.

Also Also note, the store brands will call it, for example, “Shoprite Pork Roll” because Taylor is a competing brand, not the actual product, which is pork roll.

Are we clear? This really can’t be that difficult to grasp.

1

NachoFries2020 t1_j5ukjfq wrote

Very cool, good old Rahway NJ !! 07065 !!!! Get some Munce's hot dogs by the park on St.George Ave back in the day !

2

SemiEmployedTree t1_j5uogw2 wrote

Replying to AidanAmerica (#1,478,094)

The one part of the OS saga you left out is the role played by Dave Cutler. Cutler was a key guy at DEC responsible for RSX-11M and then VMS. He left DEC and joined Microsoft where he led the NT team. The whole NT architecture has his fingerprints all over it and in some ways was a VMS clone.

Never met the guy but I hear he had a real low opinion of UNIX.

1

craywolf t1_j5uqr4p wrote

Replying to RafeDangerous (#1,483,157)

To further drive your point home, Linux is technically just the kernel which is pretty useless by itself, because there's no built-in way to interact with it.

The standard set of tools for interacting with the Linux kernel are the GNU utilities.

GNU stands for "GNU is Not Unix."

2

SemiEmployedTree t1_j5urnuz wrote

Replying to onemm (#1,474,678)

Depends on what you mean by "internet". Since you used a lower case "i" the correct answer is that the first successful host-to-host connection on the ARPANET was made between Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park CA. and UCLA at 10:30 pm PST on 29 October 1969 (6:30 UTC on 30 October 1969).

The term "internet", which refers not to a network but to the technology, wasn't used I believe until ~1974. The capitalized form "Internet" is usually used to refer to the actual network (i.e physical implementation) but whether that is correct usage and, if so, when the Internet came into existence, is a topic best left to drunk engineers to argue over.

2

namean_jellybean t1_j5v8qsq wrote

Replying to TriggerTough (#1,483,419)

Yes!!! I remember having ‘internet’ at home for a couple years before our school got it. A teacher told me I was lying when I said I had already been had that at home for a while. Didn’t matter to me, it was only him using it anyway (for work? For dorky telecom things? 16 bit naked ladies?) so it’s not like I knew what it was.

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SursumCorda-NJ t1_j5vj1wu wrote

Replying to AidanAmerica (#1,478,094)

> Hey, that didn’t end up being short at all.

Haha Nope but it was a fascinating read and really broke it down to make it easy to understand. Even though I don't know shit about computer engineering I still find this sorta stuff fascinating, the history of early computing that is. Is there a universal language that works for Unix derived systems or does each derivative system use their own special language?

2

UnableAdagio4166 t1_j5x5qq9 wrote

Calling bs on this one. EVERYONE KNOWS it was AL Gore who started the internet. Geesh, the nerve of some people.

1

AidanAmerica t1_j5x6ex7 wrote

Replying to SursumCorda-NJ (#1,492,463)

I’ve always been interested in this type of thing as a type of modern day history. It’s fascinating to see how people solved all kinds of little problems to put together the modern world. The history of Unix has as much engineering effort for multiple moon landings, along with b-plots of intense business pressures, a weirdly large amount of government influence, and intense interpersonal political intrigue.

The closest thing to a universal language for Unix would be the Single Unix Specification. I’m not familiar enough to say if there’s some programming language that can be turned into a compatible app for any Unix-derived system, but the practical answer is more political than technical. That specification came about because there were multiple similar, but different and incompatible versions of Unix on the market. The US government adopted a regulation that they would only buy software that met this new standard, so anyone who wanted to go for a lucrative DoD contract needed to meet that standard. (In a surprise twist, though, Microsoft talked the government into buying their software that was a totally different breed from anything that would meet the standard). That standard still exists, though, and it’s regularly updated. A consortium that acquired the legal rights to Unix from AT&T is responsible for maintaining that standard, and they certify operating systems as compliant. If an OS is derived from the Unix lineage, but not compliant with the SUS[^sus], then they can’t use the Unix name since it’s copyrighted. Those are usually described as Unix-Like, because for some reason that’s legally distinct enough. A few years ago, Apple made a few changes macOS so it could get Unix certification. I assume they also had to pay for that.

Working developers likely know a few popular programming languages. If they want to write software for an OS, they need to find a “compiler,” an application which takes the code, written in the language of the programmer’s choice, and outputs a finished, functional application.[^I don’t code, so if there’s any place I’m getting a small detail wrong, it’s here. ] If you want that application to run on an iPhone, for example, you need to follow Apple’s rules and go through their approval and certification process. Apple made the iPhone’s operating system by building it on top of a Unix-derived free operating system, but they’re allowed and able to put their non-free licenses and terms on top of that free foundation.

A totally free operating system — for example, Debian Linux — isn’t made by a group that uses their legal rights to keep their software locked down in that way. What’s interesting about projects like those is that they’re equally, if not more, innovative in their legal and social philosophy as they are in their technical design. These are projects run by volunteers online who vote democratically to decide how the project should be run. It’s guided by a constitution and social contract that outline, among other things, the process to propose and approve changes to the OS, a stipulation that the OS will always be free, that they’ll always make both the source code (the kit with parts and instructions) and the final product openly and freely available, and that it won’t come with any software that doesn’t abide by those same open and free terms. These Unix-derivative projects compete more on licensing terms, philosophy, and what to prioritize as their focus than on technical differences. People debate these things online in their free time like software rabbis. There wouldn’t be room to debate those types of questions if the most important technical questions hadn’t largely been answered by AT&T (and all the other contributors) over the last few decades. If someone doesn’t like the way the Debian project is answering the philosophical questions, they can go look at some other group’s Unix-like OS, or even take the source code and make their own.

So, to answer your question: there are many standard and well-known languages that can be used to write software that is technically capable of being run on any Unix-derived operating system, but whether or not it does run is more a question of whether or not the people who make the operating system decide they want to let it run.

And, again, Windows is its own lineage. A developer who knows one of those common programming languages can find a compiler to make a working app for Windows just as they could for any other OS, but that’s because Microsoft puts its significant resources behind making it easy to make software for Windows, and easy for users to get a computer that runs Windows. Apple does the same for their operating systems. Microsoft (like Apple or any company in a similarly market-dominant position) has a sales staff that convinces companies to buy their software because those companies know it’ll be warrantied by Microsoft, a big name they trust. If you’re the one tasked with buying new software for the whole company, are you going to have the company spend a few thousand dollars to buy Microsoft’s offering, or are you going to gamble your career on the free option? If that turns out to be a dud, even if only because the new software looks scary and different, you’re to blame. That’s essentially why Windows still exists as a distinct breed: Microsoft is the only company uniquely positioned so that it’s cheaper and less risky for them to stick with their own thing than to build off of what’s long been freely available.

Oops, I wrote a blog post again.

2

TriggerTough OP t1_j5yepro wrote

Replying to greensocks77 (#1,504,230)

I bet.

My dad was with Cisco before they went public.

Honestly, the 1st office on the east coast for Cisco was in the basement of the home I grew up in, Rahway NJ. No joke. I was there to witness it. lol

1

NJSkibum t1_j6a3jao wrote

Replying to raichiha (#1,485,758)

It was originally Taylor's Ham until government regulators made him change it. Not a fan of cowering to the government so it'll always be Taylor Ham for me. ✊🏼

0