Memories of Mosaic
Memories of Mosaic
I have long-winded comments in (facebook public) "Internet Old Farts"
We were doing HA/CMP ... it had originally started out as HA/6000 for the NYTimes to move their newspaper system (ATEX) off VAX/Cluster to RS/6000. I then rename it HA/CMP when start doing technical cluster scaleup with the national labs and commercial cluster scaleup with the RDBMS vendors (Ingres, Informix, Sybase, and Oracle who have Vaxcluster support in common source base with their other products and I do API with vaxcluster semantics to simplify the port).
Old archive post with reference to Jan92 cluster scaleup meeting with Oracle CEO (16processor by mid92, 128processor by ye92)
Within a few weeks of the Ellison meeting, cluster scaleup is transferred, announced as IBM supercomputer (for technical/scientific *ONLY*) and we were told we couldn't work on anything with more than four processors. We leave IBM a few months later. Later we are brought in as consultants with small client/server startup. Two of the former Oracle people (we had worked with on cluster scaleup) were there responsible for something called "commerce server" and wanted to do payment transactions on the server. The startup had also invented this technology they called SSL they wanted to use, it is now frequently called "electronic commerce". I had absolute authority for everything between the webservers and the financial industry payment networks. I then created "Why Internet Isn't Business Critical Dataprocessing" talk based on the work I had to do for electronic commerce.
Starting in early 80s, had HSDT project, T1 (1.5mbits/sec) and faster computer links; and was suppose to get $20M from NSF director to interconnect the NSF supercomputer sites. Then congress cuts the budget, some other things happen and finally an RFP is released (based in part on what we already had running). Preliminary Announcement (Mary1986)
"The OASC has initiated three programs: The Supercomputer Centers Program to provide Supercomputer cycles; the New Technologies Program to foster new supercomputer software and hardware developments; and the Networking Program to build a National Supercomputer Access Network - NSFnet."
IBM internal politics not allowing us to bid (being blamed for online computer conferencing inside IBM, likely contributed). The NSF director tried to help by writing the company a letter (with support from other gov. agencies) ... but that just made the internal politics worse (as did claims that what we already had operational was at least 5yrs ahead of the winning bid), as regional networks connect in, it becomes the NSFNET backbone, precursor to modern internet
trivia1: the first webserver in the US was Stanford SLAC (CERN sister installation) on their VM370 system
trivia2: OASC (mar1986 preliminary announce) funding for software went to NCSA
developed MOSAIC (browser). Some of the people left NCSA and did MOSAIC startup. Name changed to NETSCAPE when NCSA complained about the use of "MOSAIC". trivia3: what silicon valley company provided them with the name "NETSCAPE"?
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As load on early webservers started to ramp up, there was six months or so where they would hit 90% CPU running the FINWAIT list (before vendors started releasing fixes). NETSCAPE installed large Sequent multiprocessor, which had previously fixed the FINWAIT problem in Dynix.
misc recent other with network/internet history
Misc. NCSA/Mosaic archived stuff from 1994
other trivia:
some of the MIT CTSS/7094 people
had gone to project MAC on 5th flr, for multics
others went to the IBM science center on the 4th flr and did virtual machines (cp40/cms & cp67/cms, precursor to vm370),
online & performance apps, internal corporate network (see zvm-50th-part-3 account), etc. CTSS RUNOFF
was redone as "script" for CMS. Then GML was invented at the science center in 1969 (letters chosen from 1st letters of inventors last name) and GML tag processing added to script.
after another decade, GML morphs into ISO standard SGML ... and then after another decade, SGML morphs into HTML at CERN.
Stanford SLAC was heavy VM370 user (followon to CP67) and hosted the monthly bay area user group meetings "BAYBUNCH". SLAC (CERN sister installation) hosted 1st webserver in the US on its VM370 system (see SLAC URLs above)