Wednesday September 06, 2006

First connection to the internet...

For an engineer's recent escalation we had to find a modem and have it connected to a phone line to help resolve a customer issue. The modem we were to use was a Hayes modem and as soon as I saw it memories came flooding back. When I worked at HR Wallingford we were asked to set up an email service so people could send/receive emails to/from the internet. I basically used a Sun 3/160 deskside workstation that was called reynolds to do the job. The first stage was to find someone to dial up. Initially we piggy backed off an existing company on the internet I think the company was called Pyramid Computers. At this time we did not have a registered domain name so our emails looked like this (I think) paulhu%hydres@pyrmid.co.uk. So armed with a modem very similar but slower (1200baud) I got cracking. We used uucp to make the connection and after the configuration was tested fun and games set in to persuade sendmail to send internet email to reynolds who then sent it out via uucp. The sendmail was the hardest bit. I remember getting and email from someone who said my convoluted address looked like a bang path from mars. It was not long before I found what where called info servers where you could send an email and a contents list of free software usually in source form could be obtained. Eventually we upgraded the modem and got a direct link to the UK internet hub on a 9600 baud modem. Like a lot of things in computing now it is so easy to get on the internet and the pain of setting up these software packages appears easier than before.