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Happy Anniversary, 1st Internet crash (27 Oct 1980)

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http://motherboard.vice.com/read/happy-anniversary-to-the-early-internets-first-network-wide-crash

By 1980, ARPANET, the US Defense Department’s pre-internet internet, had
spread across the United States and on into Europe. Over the course of
about a decade, it had grown from a four-node network to a system
supporting thousands of users, floods of email messages, and even
something of proto-reddit collection of special interest message-groups.

America’s not-quite-internet was growing up quickly and, thus, it was
high time for something to go really, really wrong. And so it did, on
October 27, 1980, with the first proper network crash in the history of
the proto-internet.

The failure didn’t leave any warships adrift, but the event, which left
ARPANET disconnected for nearly four hours, was a milestone nonetheless.
It was the result of a pair of subtle screwups having to do with the
network’s interface message processors (IMPs), which were basically what
we now call routers: intermediate switching devices that process network
traffic.

ARPANET’s IMPs were in charge of taking communications from local
computers and networks and translating them into the ARPANET standard.
Different sites were based on different platforms involving different
protocols and standards, and the IMPs generalized these differences so
everything moving around the network was generic to ARPANET.  ....

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Happy Anniversary, 1st Internet crash (27 Oct 1980) RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-10-29 20:38 +0000

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