The Gateless Gateway

Searching for the unknown thing

I may have told this story before. It'll bear re-telling, if I can wring a lesson from it.

Before the Internet was ubiquitous, there were networks, but they weren’t necessarily linked together. Big expensive computers with terminals attached in crazy ways; occasional clusters to pool the resources of a few machines in the same building; dial-up and leased lines between sites, with a mish-mash of protocols. One big network in the UK was JANET, the Joint Academic Network, and it ran on the X.25 packet-switching protocol. (The early JANET history is thin: the shenanigans described here were a year or few before 1984).

My high school had a terminal connected to a Prime Computer cluster 15 miles away. I spent most lunchtimes and many evenings glued to this thing, getting into every sort of trouble that I could manage.

One troublesome thing I did was to read the help files. (The Prime had great help files). I found some interesting things. A program called FUTIL that let you do stuff that should have been impossible: looking at file permissions, reading other people's email, that sort of thing. A program called RLOGIN that let you log in to another computer: your connections could become like stacked cups, one inside the other. There was also a tantalizing reference to a mysterious global network. Apparently, JANET had a Gateway to the Internet.

So I set about finding the gateway.

It was an iterative process. Use FUTIL to search people's email and projects for references to the Internet (which were scarce, and always seemed to be lacking in specifics) or references to other computers. Use RLOGIN to try connect to those computers (as "system" or "admin" if I didn't know a password already). Use whatever means were available there, to search for the gateway. Perhaps I would be able to log into it and, standing on the edge, see the Internet splayed across the horizon.

The exploration was quite a learning experience. Some of these remote computers were weird; instead of being Primes, they were VAXes or Unix machines, and the command-line was different and hard to navigate. I did what I could, trying to read the help files. Sometimes this took a while, because my terminal was a Teletype, which prints (on paper) very slowly indeed.

I do remember logging in to one machine that turned out to be a mail-server at CERN; the only command I could find that did anything useful was "shutdown". It seemed to work; the connection dropped and didn't come back, and I ran off in somewhat of a panic. If this affected you: my deep apologies.

During this time I never did find the elusive Gateway, nor the actual Internet.

Eventually, of course, I bought my own Gateway to the Internet and put it in the basement. I realized that the JANET gateway had been there all the time, just below my field of view. I found the limits of help files, and committed to writing good ones. I also heard about the gateless gate, and recognized in the koans a pointer to the nature of the thing I had been searching for.

Is there a lesson to be learned from these teenage hi-jinks (other than: computer security hasn’t got very much better in forty years…)?

Mu!