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

[Bret Busby]

On 11/06/2019, Bret Busby <bret.busby at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

That last part should have been

"
in Australia, when wired access is actually available to the Internet,
achieving a speed over 50MB/s, is regarded like the first landing on
the moon was, at the time that it happened.
"

-- 
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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