Category Archives: Internet

One Class In High School That Changed My Life – And I Almost Didn’t Take It

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Old photo of a classroom of girls sitting at desks typing on typewriters. They girls are all wearing school uniforms and the walls are vary sparsely decorated.

It’s funny how decisions you may make in the moment can affect the course of your life.

It was the fall of 1984 and I was signing up for classes for my last semester at my high school in southern Connecticut. I had one open course slot and I had to sign up for some class. I’d completed all my required courses and could sign up for any course I wanted.

So after some deliberation, I signed up for “typing”. This made sense in my brain since I’d been playing with computers since 1977 when the first Apple II came out and one of my best friends got one. Later I got my own Commodore 64, and at the high school I helped out in the computer labs that were full of Apple IIe’s.

It seemed to me that typing might be something to learn. 🤔

BUT… this was 1984/1985 in a US high school. The only people who took “typing classes” were the girls who were expecting to become secretaries. 🤯 Looking back, it’s kind of fascinating now, but there was this clear gender divide. Typing was NOT a class that boys normally took at my school.

So there I was… in a room full of desks with IBM Selectric typewriters on them. The only boy. Me and 20+ girls sitting there typing jjjjjjjjjjjjj and fffffffff a zillion times until we could finally work our way up to such phrases as “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and go on from there. Typing and typing and typing for the five months or so of the semester. Typing so much that we could “touch type” and be able to be looking at something completely different while typing on our typewriters. Doing speed tests and accuracy tests and more.

In the perfect clarity of hindsight, it turned out to be one of the smartest things I ever did!

I would go on to the University of New Hampshire where I got involved in the early Internet, as well as earlier networks like BITNET, EcoNet, etc. I would write millions of email messages, thousands and thousands of blog posts, a number of books, many reports and documents… and many, many lines of programming code in so many different languages.

I would go on to teach electronic publishing using Framemaker… and then develop courseware… and help people create web pages using HTML. Several of my jobs involved writing extensive sets of documentation, or later rapidly developing draft documents for Internet standards.

Because of that typing class, I was well-prepared for the USENET flamewars… for long debates on email lists… for being able to just spew out blog posts, press releases, speeches, or whatever else was needed.

Typing has been a critical component of the success I’ve had over the past 40 years… it turned out to be perhaps the single most useful class I took in high school!

And I almost didn’t… it was just tossed in at the last minute because I needed to fill a slot! 🤣

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons – History Trust of South Australia, circa 1945 – not my actual school.. I’m not THAT old! 😃

A photo showing a lake with mountains in the background. In the foreground are several "dragon boats", which are large, canoe-like boats with 20 people in them paddling. Behind the boats there is a beach with tents and people visible on it.

A Livestream of Dragon Boats – and the magic of the Internet!

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This weekend I was reminded again of just how amazing this Internet we’ve all built together really is! There I was at 6:00am in my house in Vermont … drinking my cup of tea and watching my wife and her team compete in dragon boat races some 3,700 miles (~ 6,000 km) away in France. I could see them paddling hard in their boats. I watched multiple boats capsize! (Thankfully not hers.) I was caught up in the drama and just watching all these many boats full of breast cancer survivors competing against each other.[1]

It’s 2026 and for much of the 75% of the world who has Internet connectivity, we’ve gotten used to live streams. They’re pretty much everywhere! Most social media sites support live streams. YouTube of course does. Twitch is built around livestreaming. There are zillions of shopping services doing live streams of products. Many of the video streaming services support live sessions. And even people who still watch the regular old TV have gotten used to news programs having people streaming in from all over the world.

But when I found myself frustrated with the lack of audio as they had some technical difficulties[2], I could feel my blood pressure rising. And as I joined in on comments on the event’s Facebook page noting that the audio wasn’t working… I found myself pausing.

Wait… I said to myself… isn’t it amazing that this actually works as well as it does??

I mean… the people doing the streaming were taking a live video feed from a DRONE following the boats on a lake in France, doing some kind of local mixing to put on the titles, lower-thirds, etc., and then sending that off to YouTube. The stream probably hit local YouTube servers in France where it was then sent across YouTube’s streaming infrastructure.

In my case that meant the stream went across some subsea cable to presumably some data center in the US where it would then go out across YouTube’s CDN until it eventually crossed Burlington Telecom’s network to land in my house, where it actually had one final step to go across WiFi to my laptop where i was watching. (And yes, I’m simplifying as there were many other pieces and networks involved.)

And all this happened… within fractions of a second 🤯!

Or maybe it was a second or two… I don’t actually know or care. The point is that I was watching these live races from across an ocean. And other family members were watching from other parts of the USA.

And teams participating in the event were from much farther away… for instance from Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. And given that there were 4,500 paddlers total, I’m sure some number of supporters were watching from there. The New Zealanders were very literally on the opposite side of the world!

And… … it worked! [3]

In places like where I live where we have strong, solid Internet access (and also solid electricity), it’s so easy to just take all this for granted. Of course it will work! We just assume that the Internet will be all around us, just like air. And… most of the time… we’re right!

But sometimes we need to just pause and reflect for a moment… and step back in our minds 30 or 40 years .. and think how MAGICAL this would all seem to someone from that era!

We live in an amazing time!

[1] And admittedly being completely caught up in the amazing drone footage! In my loooonng list of things I want to play with is to use drones for livestreaming…

[2] I know a guy in Brooklyn, New York, who does amazing live streaming and would never have let a live stream go live like this without audio! 😃

[3] With the exception of not having audio for a period of time, but they did get the audio back working again.

Image credit: A screenshot I took of the IBCPC live stream.

Slides for my ISC2 Security Congress session on “Demystifying Routing Security”

Isc2-routing-security-webToday at the ISC2 Security Congress 2023 in Nashville, TN, I gave a well-received talk on "Demystifying the World of Routing Security". Unfortunately, the mobile app for the event had (and still has) the wrong set of slides. Instead of mine, the attached deck was for a 2019 talk. So I told participants I would put the slides up on one of my sites. And here they are:

As you will see, a great amount of the slides are about the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative.

Also, for people seeking info about how to be involved with the "MANRS+" effort, the link is: https://www.manrs.org/about/manrs-working-group/

Thanks to all who attended – and especially to the five who helped me with the on-stage demonstration. 😀

Capturing My Own Memories Of The Internet’s History (and Pre-History)

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Last month I boosted a post on Mastodon where an early pioneer of networking relayed an amusing story about shutting down part of the ARPANET during a storm. After I did that, I was asked “@danyork Do you have a similar story from your archive?”

As I said in a reply,I have stories, but none quite so dramatic. Born in the late 1960s, I got involved with the Internet in the mid- to late 1980s at the University of New Hampshire (UNH).  I was not part of the late 1960s / early 1970s group that was involved with the ARPANET.

But I was at UNH before it became part of the Internet. We used BITNET and there was UUCP and USENET around. It was during my years there (1985-1989) that UNH became part of the Internet. I remember it being a Very Big Deal for those of us in the Computer Science program. Suddenly we would be getting “@unh.edu” email addresses and could connect to everyone else on this growing Internet.

And I was involved with BBSs and early “information services” that pre-dated all of that.

Ari’s point struck me, though. There are many of us who were around in those early days of networking who are walking around with many stories in our heads. Stories of the early days. Stories of how things were before we have the ubiquitous connectivity we have today in many parts of the world (but not all!).

There is value in capturing those stories. In part so that others can perhaps understand how things came to be the way they are. Or to learn how things once were. Or to perhaps spark memories in others. Or for the history fans to just read about what people remember.

There is value in writing or recording these stories NOW… before we forget more of them. Before people get too old to communicate – or before people die. Or, as someone I knew once wrote in the prologue of a memoire of his… “before our memories get so good that we start remembering things that never happened!”  😀

So I think I’ll start this for myself. Here. On this site in a new “History” category. I don’t know that any of my memories are particularly dramatic, and may only be of interest to myself and a few others. But I’ll start capturing them, probably in no particular order.

What about you? If you have stories of the early days of networking, can you share them somewhere?

Image: generated by DALL-E 2 with the prompt “memories of Internet history”