[HECnet] Here there be dragons...

[John Yaldwyn]

Hi Paul,

The whole of New Zealand was originally connected to Arpanet at 9600 bps via the University of Waikato in the 80's when our work email was updated twice daily using UUCP.

At that time "high speed" local computing access was a 3274 controller connected via 2400 bps leased line to a local computer centre and we booked access to the four shared terminal in hourly blocks.

You can imagine how we all felt when the luxury of a shiny new 780 arrived with terminals for everyone that wanted one.

John

> On 6/09/2020, at 08:45, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Sep 5, 2020, at 4:13 PM, John Yaldwyn <jy at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Mike,
>> 
>> I live in a rural area here in New Zealand.
>> 
>> The best internet on offer is 5Mbps/500kbps ADSL, slow satellite with horrendous latency, or rural broadband on 700 MHz LTE. 
> 
> That's not so bad.
> 
> I remember when DEC's internal "Engineering Net" first extended to the UK (Reading, near London).  I'm pretty sure it wasn't what was then called a "high speed link" so most likely that was a 2400 baud link.  High speed, for us, meant 9600 baud.
> 
> Yes, a few organizations with big budgets, like ARPAnet, had a super fast backbone -- 56 kbps.  
> 
> I remember how boggled my mind was when Ethernet first appeared, with 10 Mbps wires and network interface cards capable of running at a fair fraction of that speed.  DEUNA couldn't do wire rate, I'm pretty sure, but it came respectably close.  QNA was even faster, when it worked.
> 
>    paul
> 
>