The internet before the web
There was an internet before there were web pages, and this is the software people used to reach it: a telnet client, a TCP/IP stack, a sockets library, the store-and-forward mail that crossed between machines which were never online at the same time.
It comes off the Simtel MSDOS shareware collection. Every
description below was written by Simtel’s curators and
shipped on the disc in a file called 00_INDEX.TXT.
Nothing here is paraphrased.
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A message from Phil Karn
In the KA9Q directory, between the archives, there is a
607-byte file called ASMOBJ.MSG. It is a piece of
electronic mail from November 1990, kept because it explained
what the archive beside it was for:
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 90 18:36:45 UTC From: karn@ka9q.bellcore.com (Phil Karn) To: tcp-group@ucsd.edu Re: asmobj.zip on thumper In response to several requests, I have created a ZIP archive of the .OBJ files assembled from the .asm source files in NOS. Since the only use I make of the Turbo C Professional package vs the regular version is the assembler, this should allow those with only the regular Turbo C compiler to rebuild NOS. These files don't change very often, but if they do I'll try to remember to update this archive. The file name is /pub/ka9q/nos/asmobj.zip on thumper.bellcore.com. Phil
That is the whole of it, and it is the period in miniature: a mailing list at a university, a file path on a machine called thumper, and one man answering “several requests” by hand so that people with the cheaper compiler could still build his TCP/IP stack.
Why this sits beside a radio station
Phil Karn is KA9Q — that is a callsign, not a product name. He wrote NOS so that radio amateurs could run the internet’s protocols over the air, on packet links measured in hundreds of bits per second. It then escaped into the wider world and put whole campuses online.
This museum is one half of a pair. The other half, hp84.com, is a working amateur packet station in Riyadh — 7Z1FP. The software catalogued below is the point where those two things stop being separate subjects.
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