Early Internet Protocols

People were their own ISP back then?

You're forgetting about AOL and Compuserve. The Internet itself was federated. Networking really wasn't.

A joke I get knowing that it is totally whoosh! to everyone I know in real life...Jokes aside I think there is more to the story than the article, in the early 90's 'ATM' was going to be the future:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_ModeIn a nutshell that is 51 byte packets with layers of TCP/IP on top - 7 layers stuff (or how

Which modern protocols even existed back then? IP? TCP? FTP?

The 80s? Were you involved in ARPANet or something?

Wait until they get to the networking layer; you're going to hate what Vint Cerf did in the 70s :)

the internet predates MAC addresses - it was originally running over serial modem connections.

you were using what network protocol stack in 1991 ? Banyan "vines" or token-ring ?

Ethernet was XNS/ITP when it first started. That protocol splintered into DECnet, AppleTalk, Novell and TCP/IP. The advent of async-TCP/IP on commodity hardware (aka Microsoft RAS) caused it to takeover the game and created the dystopia we have now (with nightly national news warning our parents and grandparents that Russia is readying a “cyberattack” that will shutdown the power running their oxygen machines and hearing aide chargers). TCP/IP could transcend LANs and WANs wi

I don't buy the early part either, but "3 years into the internet we had emails and tcp" is the wrong way to critique it IMO. The "Internet" meaning IP was already the 3rd or 4th (or more) attempt at trying to create a computer networking standard. Predecessors to the internet include: ARPANET, Usenet, FidoNet, BBSes, and CYCLADES, if not more. By the way, Email existed on _all_ of these platforms before TCP or even IP. Usenet used UUCP to transfer Internet Messages (the