groups Was Another OS390 to zOS 1.4 migration

at one point in the early 80s ... there were periodic claims that for some months, i was in some way responsible for 20 to 30 percent of all bits flowing across the worldwide internal network (there were bits other then email ... like i was also blaimed for being the internal network infection vector for the adventure game distribution).

the internal network was larger than the arpanet-internet from just about the start up until around summer of '85.

at the great switch over from host-imp arpanet to internetworking protocol on 1-1-83 ... the arpanet was around 250 nodes. by comparison, not too long afterwards, the internal network pbutted 1000 nodes:

i've claimed that one of the possible reasons was that the major internal networking nodes had a form of gateway functionality built into every node ... which the arpanet-internet didn't get until the 1-1-83 cut-over to internetworking protocol.

during this period in the early 80s ... there was some growing internal anxiety about this emerging internal networking prevalence ... that had largely grown up from the grbuttroots.

there were all kinds of efforts formed to try and study and understand what was happening. once such effort even brought in hiltz and turoff (the network nation) to help study what was going on.

also, there was a researcher buttigned to set in the back of my office. they took notes on how i communicated in face-to-face (also going to meetings with me), on the phone ... and they also had access to contents of all my incoming and outgoing email as well as logs of all my instant messages. this went on for 9 months ... the the report also turned into a stanford phd thesis (joint with language and computer AI) ... as well as material for subsequent papers and books. some references included in collection of postings on computer mediated communication

one of the stats was that supposedly for the 9 month period, that I exchanged email with an avg. of 275-some people per week (well before the days of spam).

later in the 80s ... there was the nsf network backbone RFP. we weren't allowed to bid ... but we got an nsf study that reported that the backbone that we were operating was at least five years ahead of all bid submissions to build the nsfnet backbone.

the nsf network backbone could be considered the progenitor of the modern internet .... actually deploying a backbone for supporting network of networks (aka an operational characteristic that goes along with the internetworking protocol technology).

note that into the early and mid-90s ... much of the newsgroups were still riding the usenet-uucp rails (not yet having moved to internet in any significant way) ... and people having either a direct usenet feed or having access via some BBS that had a usenet feed. Circa 93, I co-authored an article for boardwatch (bbs industry mag) about drivers I had done for a full usenet satellite broadcast feed.

the "ISPs" of this era were typically offering shell accounts and-or UUCP accounts (predating PPP and tcp-ip connectivity).

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