Line wrapping for smart phones - Was: 18.04 LTS installation failure

[Bret Busby]

On 11/06/2019, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jun 2019 at 18:10, Bret Busby <bret.busby at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Interesting, because "the 1980s and early 1990s" is before "The
>> Internet" - at that time, internets operated generally through
>> ARPAnet, from memory, unless they were standalone internets.
>
> Not even slightly, no.
>
> The email address in my sig -- lproven at cix.co.uk -- is hosted by CIX:
> https://www.cix.uk/
>
> Part of the reason I've kept it is that to the cognoscenti, a
> cix.co.uk email address means you were old-school and were online
> before the trendy public WWW came along. Few recognise it now but if
> they do, the reaction is "whoah, this person has been online for
> 30-something years!"
>
> Which I have.
>
> I joined in November 1991. I have friends on there who joined when it
> opened up for public subs in 1987.
>
> On its boards, Cliff Stanford --
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Stanford -- was discussing his
> idea for a public ISP in a conference called cix:tenner_a_month. I was
> in there. It became Demon Internet:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Internet
>
> CIX didn't give you a routed connection over dial-up in the '80s but
> you could send and receive Internet mail, ftp files, access Usenet and
> so on. You could also do ftp by email which was handy. You told a
> batch server what files you wanted from where; it FTPed them to your
> private space; then it emailed you when they were done; you logged in
> and downloaded them direct from CIX's servers.
>
> Before that, I did have PPP via CIS, AKA Compu$erve; I was 100277,414
> or 100277.414 at compuserve.com
>
> But before Demon you could buy dial-up from PIPEX in the UK:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipex
>
> Before that, I was on JANET via Royal Holloway University. I was
> sending and receiving Internet email from 1985 on their cluster of 2
> DEC VAX-11/780 machines.
>
> The *Web* is a 1990s thing, but the Internet was around for public use
> for a decade before that.
>
> In the 1970s it was confined to universities and the military. Not by the
> 1980s.
>
> I wasn't on it myself (because local phone calls cost money in Europe)
> but many FidoNet BBSs were on the Internet in the late 1980s and you
> could send and receive Internet emails through them.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
>
> CIX was inspired by, and ran the same host software, as BIX in the States:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Information_Exchange
>
> I had friends on that. Others used, and still use,  the Well, the
> Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link:
>
> https://www.well.com/
>

I suppose that it comes to the question of locality.

In Western Australia, in the early 1990's, at one of the universities,
access to other networks was via AARnet, the Australian Academic and
Research network, which was a node of ARPAnet. In the state capital, a
man ran a service, with flyers at one or more of the universities,
where he somehow acted as a node on the AARnet, and provided a UNIX
email account on his server, and, free access to his UNIX system, so
that students could learn UNIX as users, which is probably how he was
able to have a node on the AARnet. That was a thing of wonder, and,
his offering was the only internetworking (as in what internetworking
means - communication between computers of different operating systems
platforms), that was available to "the public" of which I was aware at
the time.

In the early 1990's, the Internet was neither accessible in Western
Australia, nor, mentioned or taught, in one or more universities and
technical colleges in Western Australia.

But, then, in the 1990's, the FORTRAN that was being taught in Western
Australian academic institutions and technical colleges, was FORTRAN
77.

It is probably not surprising, in a country that is determined to go
backward, with wired Internet access having been forcibly changed to
the reliability of overhead, uninsulated, copper telephone wires -
sometimes it works, and, sometimes it doesn't, with about a 50%
success rate.

So, while the Internet may have been active elsewhere in the world,
the sailing ships carrying the bytes, had yet to reach Australia.

I suppose it is a bit like the countries that have Internet data
transmission speeds at and above the 1GB/s mark - in Australia, when
access is available to the Internet, achieving a speed over 50MB/s, is
regarded like the first landing on the moon.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
.............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992

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