« ΤΟ Δ’ΑΙΕΙ ΠΑΡΑΜΕΡΟΝ ΕΣΛΟΝ »
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of this site. Welcome!
| status of this site |
When I'm still alive and kicking, walking and talking, at least to some
extent, you're visiting a more or less (more less than more, actually)
actively maintained site. But once I'm "on the wrong side of the grass",
(being) recycled by tiny bottom-dwelling organisms, reduced to an orderly
or loose collection of 206 bones, blown to shreds by the ever more
popular pastime of shooting, shelling, bombing or blasting, cremated to
ashes blowing in the wind or neatly stored, resomated and washed away,
vaporized by a nuclear blast or by the impact of some extraterrestrial
object, sucked into a black hole, or in any other way
have ceased to exist, you're visiting an archived copy of the last
maintained version of this site, "cast in digital concrete" yet fully
functional, with a most likely gradually but ever increasing number of
links that either failing or leading to sites that are more or less or
even completely unrelated to [the purpose of] the sites they originally
referred to.
A striking example of the latter was a link to a Dutch theatre group's
site: after the group stopped performing, its domain name was deregistered,
but shortly thereafter it was registered again, of all things by a Chinese
mining company! I never understood this odd new registration. A non-educated
guess was that it was because the company had no clue about the meaning
of the Dutch name, but found .NL-domains to be high-ranking in search
engines and .NL therefore reliable and attractive for PR.
| internet is not internet |
In common speak 'internet' has become synonymous to 'www'. That's however
as wrong as calling a road-system a 'car', for no other reason than that
cars are the main 'apps' using it. In reality however, and so in my story
below, 'internet' stands for the network interconnecting a wild variety of
computers worldwide, speaking the same "language" to communicate: the
Internet Protocol, or in short IP.
And '
www', CERN's first
and in fact sort of 'prehistoric' website is no more than the first computer
using the key applications and services that use this Internet as carrier
of specifically formatted data, and also an application (World Wide Web
of www) that I've never been deeply involved with. And even nowadays
e-mail still rivals it (and the euphemistically called "social" media),
albeit that e-mail has "evolved" (I'd rather call it degraded) into a whole
bunch of both addictive and non-interoperable programs, using "protected"
and encrypted data to exchange even the simplest and "nothing to hide"
information (yet at the sa,e time stealing a lot of your personal and
thus private information. At the same time e-mail headers have literally
exploded, from once comprising at most a few hundred bytes with
machine-readable information about the mail, to 8000+ (!) bytes
for the same purpose nowadays.
Anyway, if you talk to me about 'internet', be sure to refer to the Right
Thing, or you'll find yourself in Deep Digital Trouble (!) in Electronic
Limbo. :-)
| web browser |
Contrary to popular habit - in particular on lots of commercial
sites - this website has not been, eh... "optimized" for a specific
browser (read: made barely accessible and working - if at all -
with other browsers), nor does it
use non-html stuff like js, php, py, ai, ads, rtfm, etc. Therefore it
can be viewed with just any browser, old or new - except when they've
been configured without even the slightest knowledge of 'backward
compatibility - and including text-only ones.
And in particular this site doesn't bother you with those dreaded and
extremely annoying "informational" (read: commercial) pop-ups. But
although it doesn't pertain to this site, I'd in general discourage
the use of the mainstream (read: most pushed - if not enforced -
by Big Tech) browsers Chrome, Edge and Safari, but also Opera,
because
they don't block - and you can't configure them to block - the
privacy-violating tracking euphemistically called "hyperlink auditing".
And elaborating on the previous paragraph: you visit this
website
with a
web browser,
not with what is popularly - even
by those who really should know better - what is called an "internet
browser". A wide variety of devices (real computers, "smart"phones (but in
fact incredibly dumb), routers, home appliances, surveillance cameras,
door bell camera's, audio systems, even baby phones, "smart" watches, etc.)
nowadays is connected to the Internet, but only a fraction of them all
really can be browsed, and even less of the latter category is well-protected
(strong password, adequate data encryption, etc.).
| privacy |
This site doesn't use cookies, trackers, web beacons or other privacy
threats, nor does it collect personal information
*).
However, it does contain links to content on
external sites that may
behave otherwise or even cheat you and lure you into paying money to criminals.
That falls outside the responsibility of this site's author though.
I never publish any of my e-mail addresses. I only give them to others for
direct communication with me, and only if I consider them trustworthy.
Therefore it is
strictly forbidden to give them to others, in any
way and by any means, without my explicit permission. That includes in
particular using them, or any other of my private data, on any of the, eh...
'social' media, media that I avoid like the bubonic plague, if only because
I
do care about privacy. For the same reason I also don't use WhatsApp,
even though zillions of privacy-ignorant people are addicted to "apping".
The only exception was Signal, but sadly since about early 2025 a real tsunami
of "updates", probably meant to make it more palatable for WhatsApp addicts,
has terribly deteriorated it.
But there are more factors that threaten your privacy, even to the point
where "smart"phones as such become a most serious threat to your privacy
in two ways:
| 1. |
In 2024 the EU came up with an as ludicrous as immense threat to privacy.
An idea that, even though its goal was sympathetic, was completely absurd
and lacked any sense of reality. That idea, raised by a bunch of brainless
politicians and their adorers, was to force "smart"phone makers to make and
distribute an "update" for each and every smartphone, an update that
would scan all your entire phone for signs of child porn and
report those back. Normal, decent people would simply call that by its real
name: hacking. And once such a blatant intrusion would become reality, it's
for sure that more will follow suit.
|
| 2. |
Also in 2024 the European Court of Justice (!) ruled that "under circumstances"
selling personal data, e.g. by sports clubs, to commercial parties, without
the person's consent or even knowledge, would be "legal". It's the dreaded
euphemism already known for quite some time and euphemistically denoted as
"legitimate interest". That's nonsense: your personal data are yours and yours
alone, even if some entity like a sports club needs to have them for their
own (local, protected) administration (membership, ranking, financial,
playing court, etc.)
|
*) When I've ceased to exist, this site will live on in an archived form.
However, the server or cloud service serving it then may have its own policy
regarding cookies - in particular bitter almond cookies - etc., or
change it at any time, leading to violating my no cookies etc. statement.
But by definition that's beyond my bodily remains' control then and thus
beyond my disapproval or consent.
| whoami |
To start with: D-Day (Delivery Day, that is): I was born! It was in Amsterdam,
on 22 October 1943, in the middle of WW II, that in the dead of night,
at 04:05, my mother pushed me out of her vagina, followed by me taking my
first breaths and becoming a brandnew living human being. But also, as I
became aware of all too well much later, yet another addition to the species
that has become by far the biggest threat and disaster for Planet Earth and
literally all non-human species that live on it.
BUT! There is hope. For Planet Earth, that is. We're almost in - and in
several respects already are experiencing - the Sixth Mass Extinction of
global biodiversity, except that this one isn't the first one caused by a most
extreme and unimaginably violent natural phenomenon, but entirely by the most
lunatic living species that ever existed on earth: mankind itself.
As a tart aside: on the same day that I was born, the Allied Forces bombed
the German city of Kassel with incendiary bombs, creating a massive fire
storm and killing some 10.000 civilians, including pregnant women, babies
and children.
But let's get back to where I was with "whoami":
My father and mother both were teachers - as were my grandfather and my
father's brothers and other more distant (literally relationally) famliy
members) - which may explain some of my character traits. ;-)
After elementary school (Pieter Oosterleeschool) and finishing Gymnasium-β
(Hervormd Lyceum Zuid) - I'm mentioning the school names here for Dutch
visitors of this site and/or their offspring who may be in search of former
class/school mates or their siblings
(see
mijn schooltijd (in Dutch)) -
After finishing elementary school I spent a short and utterly boring period
studying electrical engineering at the Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven (later:
renamed to Eindhoven University of Technology), only to find that merely studying
wasn't my way of "getting something done in life" and heavily collided with my
leaning towards experimenting and my practial do-it-yourself attitude. Which is why
I broke off my study and started looking for a job, which by sheer coincidence
I found shortly thereafter. At that time I obviously didn't have the
faintest idea what this eventually would lead to...
In 1965 I took my first job at the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory,
where I first learned about and worked with with the thing called "computer".
By modern standards that machine
(an
Elliott 803-B)
was a truly exceptional contraption: 39-bits, 8 Kw memory (8 K
39-bit words, that is, so roughly 40 KBytes), a separate floating-point
processor (!), 500 chars/sec (!) paper tape readers, tape units using
sprocketed 35 mm magnetic "film" (right, exactly the same format as used
in 'analog' 35 mm photo cameras; click on the picture to see a presentation
video, and note the magnetic "film" reel on top of the tape unit), but a speed
that was, well... low: e.g. CPU's of the (a
o 2022)
AMD Ryzen
series are more than 10 million times faster... (Comparing the speed of such
old processors to modern multi-core, multi-GHz ones is pretty tricky though,
in particular because modern processors have multiple cores). An annoying
consequence of the speed resembling that of a digital snail (a simple integer
addition took 576 μs) was that, to read numbers from the standard
input medium paper tape at full speed, we had to use a trick: use a then
undocumented (!) floating-point instruction ("65 3", denoting left
shift 3 places and taking 576 μs, plus 2 fixed-poin additions)),
to make the machine keep up with the speed of the tape reader... Despite being
so slow, that Elliott was successfully used in the design of airplanes (Fokker
F-27 'Friendship', turboprop engines), and Fokker F-28 'Fellowship', jet engines).
After one year at the Aerospace Lab, on 1 September 1966, I was fed up
with the militarist athmosphere and took a job at the Mathematical Centre,
later - when informatics had become a science of its own next to and
with strong connections to mathematics - renamed to
CWI
(for Dutch people: CWI is the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, which has
nothing to do with the former Arbeidsbureau that later grabbed the same
abbreviation). The first computer I worked with there was about
20 times faster than the Elliott. And what was especially interesting
about that computer, the Electrologica X1 or EL-X1, was that it was
developed and and initially built in-house at the Mathematical Centre, which
since 1950 had been developing and building experimental computers (see also
the article
"
Computers ontwerpen, toen" (in Dutch) by Carel Scholten), starting with the
ARRA (comprising 1200 electro-mechanical
relays), ARRA II (also relays), and ARMAC (using 1200 (!)vacuum
tubes and consuming 10 kW of mains power!), and ending with the X1.
Electrologica was the Mathematical Center's spin-off company that took over
the building and marketing of the X1 (as van Wijngaarden put it: "we're a
scientific institute, not a computers builder and seller"). Together they
developed a range of computers, culminating in the Electrologica X8
mainframe computer, a machine designed specifically to run Algol 60.
It was roughly 12 times faster than the X1 (X1 32µs,
X8 2.5µs cycle time) and featured a micro-programmed I/O processor,
named CHARON after the
mythological ferryman,
and in Dutch an acronym standing for "Centraal Hulporgaan Autonome Overdracht
Nevenapparatuur" (I won't even try to translate that). CHARON served a variety
of "slow" (1000 chars/s 8-channel punched paper tape readers, 150 chars/s
8-channel paper tape punches, a line printer, etc.) peripheral devices.
In addition it handed over control of "fast" devices (magnetic drum, magnetic-tape
units, harddisks) to a separate controller "SWITCH" (interestingly, whereas all
devices were consistently designated in Dutch - e.g. bandlezer (punched
tape reader), regeldrukker (line printer), trommel (magnetic drum), etc.
As far as I can remember "SWITCH" was neither an abbreviation nor did it
have a designation in Dutch, although very occasionally I've heard it being
called "Snelle Schakelaar" (Fast Switch).
A peculiar repair
One day it was discovered that the X8's floating-point unit was producing
erratic results. One of Electrologica's highly skilled technicians found
the cause: a signal between two modules randomly arriving either just in
time or a tiny fraction too soon on the receiving module. To delay the
signal a little bit he replaced the about 1 meter long wire carrying
the signal by one of a couple of meters long and made a wad of the excess
lenght (coiling it up would cause unwanted side-effects). This makeshift
repair worked like a charm and the problem never showed up again.
Later a DEC PDP-8/I minicomputer was acquired and equipped by Electrologica,
with a custom-made interface designed and built by hem linking it to the X8.
It served for Remote Job Entry from the VU (Free University) over a slow
110 baud (!) telephone line (interestingly, the PTT didn't know
about its existence, because although it had its own phone number, it didn't
show up in their administration...). After the X8 was decommissioned in 1974,
I got permission from the management - and great enthusiasm from the
director
Aad van Wijngaarden,
founder of the Mathematical Center, because "it was the first time since
1956 that someone at MC/CWI was working on computer hardware" - to keep
the X8's line printer and rewire the PDP8-X8 interface for driving the printer.
It sure yielded a peculiar sight: a minicomputer with a max-sized line printer,
but it worked like a charm. And I was happy with the success.
In the 1960's "computer" was in fact synonymous to "mainframe", and they
were massive and hellishly expensive. The time of
personal computers,
GIGAbytes of memory and TERAbytes of disk space (the latter now fitting into
a micro USB stick - compare that to the hard disk drive shown here:
a 80 MEGAbyte unit (± 1980)). 'Unix', 'Windows', 'Mac',
they all were still lightyears away. An attempt to combine the disk drive
in the same picture with a current 1 TERAbyte usb-stick in the same
picture proved utterly futile, because the usb-stick was so small that you
simply couldn't find it in the picture...
Until my retirement in 2004 I've been working at CWI, as programmer, system
programmer, systems manager, network manager, and several other disguises,
with strong emphasis on networking, as will become clear from the following:
In the networking area I've been deeply involved in the setup of European
networking, as the central technical manager of what later became EUnet
(European Unix network), and networking in the Netherlands, through my
early involvement in the Dutch EUnet branch, which later was split off
when Ted Lindgreen (then at the Dutch National Institute of Nuclear Physics)
founded NLnet as the official Dutch branch of EUnet (in April 1998 renamed
to UUnet Nederland).
EUnet was founded in 1982, at the Paris conference of the EUUG (European
Unix User Group). Participants on behalf of CWI were Teus Hagen, Jim McKie
and Jaap Akkerhuis. In a working group at the conference it was decided that
a (dial-up) network would be set up between as many as possible EUUG member
countries. The topology of the network would be a star, with a backbone site
in each country. Backbone sites would have connections between them where
it would be deemed necessary or just practical, and one site would be the
hub of the star, connecting to the USA and handling all the data traffic
between EUnet and the USA.
However, none of the organizations represented at that meeting expected their
management to be willing to take up the hub role. It was my colleague Teus
Hagen who broke the stalemate by announcing that he expected to be able to
convince the CWI (Amsterdam) management of the importance and necessity to
take up that crucial role. And sure enough, he turned out to be right, and
that's how CWI became the central European backbone site, and in later years
a focal point in many network developments.
The first countries to participate in the setup of EUnet were the Netherlands
(CWI), Denmark (DIKU), France (INRIA), England (UKC) and Scotland
(Univ. Edinburgh), soon followed by Germany (Univ. Dortmund) and
Sweden (ENEA Data).
Life far from easy in those days of pioneering, witness an article that I
posted in the net.general Usenet newsgroup (Usenet in those days was what
you'd now call a social network, but far more serious, factual and
subject-driven), and in one case "disguised" in those days gays and lesbians
"didn't exist", so to accomodate them a special newsgroup was created with
the cryptic name (soc.motss), where "motss" stood for "members of the same
sex". In 1982 (mcvax-decvax was our first (dialup) US connection but it sure
didn't work - if at all without mysterious hassles, witness this
article I posted in those days:
| US-Europe link |
| mcvax!piet |
31 jul. 1982 04:50:06 |
|
Link mcvax-decvax is still very cumbersome, at least when activated
automatically. So now we switched over to operator's control, once
or twice a week. Certainly not the ultimate in automation, but it's
working better now. We'll keep it going this way until we've found
a solution to the problem(s).
|
Nowadays in most English/American publications it is said that the UUCP network
was a network of loosely cooperating sites. But that was the case in the USA,
and even very much so. Connection information (with which sites and which
dial-up frequency each site was collected) in the so-called "uucp maps" newsgroups
which were posted on a infrequent (mostly monthly) basis in the comp.mail.maps
Usenet newsgroup. And every single US UUCP site had to pick up those files and
construct its own complete network-wide routing table using the 'pathalias'
software written by Peter Honeyman.
On EUnet I set up an entirely different system. I soon developed and deployed a
system, making use of the star configuration of EUnet, where all backbone sites
maintained the uucp map for their own country, and a fully automated
nightly
exchange of only hose national maps that had been changed, between each national
backbone site and mcvax. Fast, relatively cheap and up-to-date on a daily
basis. On the same basis mcvax automatically exchanged all maps with those that
were changed with the USA, where they would reach the distribution point feeding
them he into comp.mail.maps newsgroup (actually "news" is a misnomer here because
the "articles" contained only purely echnical information. And, as opposed to the
USA, on EUnet no leaf site had to construct the full routing tables itself: all
a site had to do was to exchange mail with its national backbone site, which in
turn exchanged mail with mcvax, which exchanged it all with the USA (and with
Australia, Japan, etc.) This system has functioned like a charm for many, many
years. So from a user's perspective I daresay Europe was far ahead of the US
in this respect.
A note on the relation between the EUUG and EUnet:
The EUUG claimed ownership of EUnet. In reality however EUnet was completely
self-supporting. It had no employees and thus no salary costs, because the
people operating the backbone sites were employed by their (scientific)
institutes, and did their EUnet work in both their institutes' interest and
very often [at home] in their own time. This was feasible because the
scientists working at the institutes had a vested interest in - mainly
e-mail - digital connectivity with fellow scientists worldwide, in
particular on long distances (think e.g. of the time difference between
Europe and Australia). The only "special case" was the Dutch branch of
EUnet, because that was served by mcvax too, in a dual role as both
Europe's central/international and Dutch national backbone site. This odd
situation, in fact giving Dutch sites a financial edge, was corrected later
when NLnet, founded by Ted Lindgreen, became the official Dutch branch of
EUnet, with its own backbone machine ("hp4nl"). Also, the inequality in
costs - unlike all other backbone sites, NLnet had no expensive
long-distance phone call costs, whereas those for Iceland were soaring
high - was eventually settled in an overall multilateral cost-sharing
agreement.
This all doesn't mean though that the EUUG played no role at all for EUnet:
it generated publicity, leading to a lot more sites - many of them
research departments of companies - hooking up to EUnet, it mediated
in a number of tough political issues (e.g. with Yugoslavia), it organized
and sponsored the semi-annual EUUG conferences, with each of them facilitating
a technical and strategic meeting of the EUnetbackbone site managers, including
funding their travel costs, without chaarging them anything for that.
The central machine in this European network initially was a DEC VAX 11/780
(serial number 38!), named 'mcvax' (Mathematical Centre VAX). For establishing
the first (inter)national links we used autodialers (see picture; remarkable
aside: to prevent replication of the devices, the manufacutrer had literally
scratched off the type stamps of all IC's!), which in those days were illegal
and therefore had to be smuggled to other countries (it would take very long
before most countries eventually legalized them, with Switzerland being the
most stubborn and thus the last one), an activity we used to call "acting
ahead of the law"... ;-)
The autodialers then had a price tag of [the equivalent of] about 1200 euro,
but many years later their functionality was incorporated in every 10-euro modem).
Initially we started with 300 bit/s (!) modems for the transatlantic
link, but the traffic picked up so fast, making the costs run so high that in
just a few months we replaced them with 1200 bit/s ones. That however
turned out to be easier said than done and has caused us serious headaches.
At the start of EUnet, when connecting up Scotland, we were in for a nasty
and, in hindsight, ridiculous surprise. The intended backbone site was the
University of Edinburgh. But each and every of their attempts to dial in on
mcvax with the autodialer consistently failed. It took the person responsible
for the backbone site-to-be there quite some time - and some hair loss -
to find the problem's peculiar cause. To his astonishment the university's
telephone exchange appeared to be a "prehistoric" one: an original but still
fully functioning exchange dating from end 1890's (!) and (therefore)
using electro-mechanical
rotary stepping switches,
with the dialtone generated by an electromotor, at a frequency that was way
below the autodialer's dialtone detection range. Once the cause was found,
it didn't take a lot of time to solve the problem with the help of the
autodialer's maker (instructions given by phone). I can assure you we were
very happy when at last the connectivity with Scotland was finally working.
In those days, making computers communicate over long distances already was
a far from trivial exercise, but with the 1200 bit/s modems it unexpectedly
became a real nightmare, vividly illustrated by this
Usenet article
that I posted on July 31, 1982. After much investigation the cause was
found to be as simple as rightout destructive. The cause of the problem
described in that posting turned out to be an as simple as destrictove quirk
intentionally (!) built into the autodialers: we found them to put a
"notification tone" on the phone line that happened to be located within
one of the modem's two data carrier bands, and thus spoiling the data.
The autodialer's maker appeared not to have cooked up that "notification
tone" though": it turned out to be a stupid
legal requirement (!),
with the tone meant to prevent panic in case a dialing error occurred and
the proverbial 'widow in the countryside' got a completely unexpected and
therefore apparently alarming (family member suddenly died?) phone call in
the dead of the night, but having woken up and taken up the phone heard
only silence and panicked. The fix was really trivial: cutting out just one
resistor in the circuit generating that tone, disabled the tone, whereafter
establishing connections worked like a charm. And we never got or heard of
complaints from panicking widows... ;-)
It was also in those early days that we ran into an "expensive zero-cost
problem". When checking the system one morning, the outgoing phone line
appeared to be hanging in occupied state, with a call to the USA in progress
since late the previous afternoon, a duration of 18 hours or more.
With the telco prices of those days that call could cost 5000 guilders
(2300 euro)! I immediately ran off to the campus' PBX to check its
logfile. And sure enough: it had registered that call, with 9999 on the
(4 digits) ticks counter. So we were left with the unpleasant task
of informing CWI's director of a "financial issue". But the real - and
pleasant - surprise came the next month, when the telco's bill showed
nothing exceptional in that period of time. So we could only conclude or
guess that either the modem at the US side had properly terminated the call,
with our modem or software simply having failed to notice it, or the PTT's
readout or billing software having discarded the readout as "impossible"
and thus an error. Phew...
As the transatlantic data traffic with the USA grew rapidly, the need
arose for a faster type of connection. A leased line was not an option,
being prohibitively expensive. An X.25 packet-switched connection using a
PAD (Packet Assembler / Disassembler) looked very promising, making
speeds of upto 9600 bit/s feasible. But it required a site in the USA
to connect to that also had an X.25 connection, which was quite uncommon
there. So I posted a message to the net.general newsgroup on Usenet (in
those days Usenet was what we now call a "social medium"), looking for an
X.25 US counterpart willing to carry at least part, but preferably all of
the Europe-USA data traffic. The response was, as expected, minimal. but
fortunately not zero. I got only two of them: one from Hughes Aircraft
Company and one from the Center for Seismic Studies ("seismo"). Only the
latter was willing to carry
all the traffic. And that's how I got
in touch with what I call my "golden contact": Rick Adams of "seismo".
Initially the X.25/PAD connection turned out to be a deception, and finding
and fixing the causes took quite a lot of time. One cause was Tymnet, that by
default set all PAD interface speeds to 1200 bit/s (commonplace within
the USA) instead of the 9600 bit/s that we required and had ordered.
Fortunately Tymnet was quite fast in responding to my complaint and to set
the port that our line was connected to to 9600 bit/s.
Another cause was "hidden" in the UUCP software: it had an internal protocol
("g-proto") for handling the actual data exchange, but this protocol, in
combination with how X.25 worked and the way it was charged (per packet,
irrespective of how many of a packet's bytes were used (the g-proto's ACK
packets contained only a few bytes, but were charged as full packets),
made it far too expensive for regular use. So I wrote a new protocol
("f-proto") specifically for the PAD's 7-bit wide data path and allowing
(XON/XOFF) flow control of the data stream (the PAD was designed for a
flow-controlled 7-bit data stream). After these fixes/changes the connection
worked like a charm and at minimal cost, even more so after I added a trick
in the protocol to trigger transmission of incomplte packets right away
instead of waiting for a timeout. And additionally it could be used on
any other type of 7-bit wide, flow-controlled, connection paths too, e.g.
those through the then familiar RS232 terminals and port selectors).
On July 31, 1984 I
published
the f-proto source code for free, general use. Not much later Robert Elz
(Australia) wrote uu7encode/uu7decode, 7-bit versions of the well-known
uuencode/uudecode software, using the mapping scheme of my f-proto. Robert
described that in his typical humorous way: "If you think it's a fluke that
040 .. 0171 just happen to be the chars that Piet Beertema's uucp
'f' protocol transmits as single bytes, you're insane."
The second cause was in fact rather trivial, but beyond our control, so we
couldn't fix it ourselves. The culprit turned out to in the intermediate
X.25 network of Tymnet, where the packet transport software was incorrectly
configured, accepting and transfering only small packets. Once the cause
was found, Tymnet quickly corrected the problem - which turned out
to be no more than just one wrong setting in their software - and data
transfers finally ran at full speed.
As a remarkable but destructive aside: when the connection to South Korea
was switched to X.25, it made their computer crash in the blink of an eye
on each and every attempted data transfer. The cause turned out to be in
hardware, or rather: the firmware therein. Their system was equipped with
a hardware X.25 interface, which was a pretty smart idea. However, the
firmware only knew and could handle (stack) single 512-bytes packets.
The PADs however allowed, fully in accordance with the X.25 specification,
a packet's "M-bit" to be set, which indicated that the next packet was to
be treated as a prolongation of and (thus) part of the current packet.
And exactly that was what the f-proto was making use of, stretching packets
on and on: by setting the M-bit in every packet in a stream of packets, it
crammed an entire file of, say, 2 Mbyte into one X.25 packet plus all
following packets, until the terminating packet that had the M-bit off.
I don't recall how the Koreans managed to fix or circumvent the problem,
nor if they did it themselves. My guess is that the interface manufacturer
changed the firmware such that upon seeing an M-bit, the stored packet
was considered "satisfactorily complete" and pushed to the next higher
level, where the computer's storage could store the entire stream of
packets until completion of the whole "super"packet (packet with M-bit
off received).
As the network expanded and the traffic grew, the name 'mcvax' (which
after all was CWI's main computer, meant for scientific work) was
transferred to subsequent other computers taking over the network role
"as an aside", until eventually a SUN Microsystems workstation (!)
got that role and the name was changed into 'mcsun', although in its
function as gateway, except that in its role as interconnect between
EUnet and EARN/BITNET it kept the by then already famous name 'MCVAX'.
Initially (inter)national networking was based on the UUCP communication
protocol built into every flavor of Unix (which is why my first e-mail
address was mcvax!piet). Later, when we moved to the TCP/IP (Internet)
protocols, networking started to cover a wild variety of systems.
The first national, international and intercontinental UUCP connections
were established around 1982. The first open transatlantic Internet
connectivity ("open" as opposed to "private" links, the latter mainly
there for military and military-related purposes, like SATNET) for
Europe started at CWI, on 17 November 1988. The confirmation was
pretty cute: it came in a (forwarded) ultra-short and ultra-cryptic
e-mail message
from the NSFnet boss
Steve Wolff
to me. After a couple of successful tests together with some colleagues,
my reaction was almost as short as theirs: "Let's see if it works. Yes,
it does, so let's get back to work." The US counterpart was 'seismo',
which in turn connected to NSFnet (which in those days stood for the
science-related part of "the Internet").
At 'seismo' the in effect crucial and historical change didn't comprise
much more than moving one cable from one computer to another. At the
CWI side the line erminated literally just a few meters from my office.
Later the US end was moved to UUnet, proposed and established by
-who else?- Rick Adams. It was only a few days later that
this CWI/EUnet-US Internet connection was followed by a NORDUnet-US
connection. Actually theirs could have been a couple of days earlier
than ours, but their transatlantic line suffered from technical
problems, which took several days to solve. Of course both networks
were
very happy that their connections weren't established a
few weeks earlier, because it was then, on November 2, 1988,
that the dreaded
Morris worm,
the first of its kind, hit the Internet and hit it really hard, with
links all over the USA going down. So by sheer "luck" our networks
narrowly escaped this worm and the damage caused by it... A few months
later, in early 1989, an Internet connection was established between
NORDUnet and CWI/EUnet, one purpose of it being that our respective
US connections would act as backup for each other.
In a short period of time these developments soon sparked a lot of
activity among parties actively involved in the IP "scene". One of
the first joint actions undertaken was the initiative in May 1989
to form a common European organization for the coordination of IP
activities in Europe, named "RIPE" (Réseaux IP Européens,
i.e. French for European IP networks): 11 organizations were
represented at the first meeting. Needless to say that all of them
were vehemently anti-OSI and that their common goal was to spread
Internet connectivity - the faster and wider, the better -
throughout Europe.
In the many years that I've been involved in all this, transatlantic
speed went up from 300 bit/s (!) to 256 kbit/s. And
it's still ever increasing beyond imagination (the sky is the limit).
In that time, even for academic/research sites like CWI, getting
access to the "Internet" (in fact we're talking here about ARPAnet,
and later NSFnet) was far from trivial, requiring a
lot of
lobbying, tenacity, "patrons" and signatures (real ones, on paper ;-)).
In particular Rick Adams of the Center for Seismic Studies (later of
UUnet and founder of UUnet),
Steve Wolff,
and Steve Goldstein of NSF - the US National Science Foundation -
have been of invaluable help in this. None of us could even remotely
foresee though how dramatically the situation with the Internet would
change later, in only a few years time, and how commercially spoiled
(ads, ads, ads) and desinformation-spreading it would become...
On the positive side, also some companies should be mentioned here,
companies that contributed hardware to the early European and Dutch
parts of the UUCP network and Internet, and in doing so to its success:
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Sun Microsystems (SUN), Hewlett
Packard (HP) and Cisco Systems (Cisco). The router Cisco contributed
(after some begging and pleading from our side) was one of the first,
if not
the first, in Europe; and for Cisco this contribution
became a key, if not
the key, to their success in Europe.
Apart from these contributions, EUnet has been self-supporting right
from the start. For a 'look behind the curtains' you may want to
read the
Stockholm paper,
a document that was written for a conference in Stockholm in 1987.
It sure was a crazy, yet exciting time, those early days of getting EUnet
off the ground and Europe-wide functioning. Remarkable things happened
in the process. Can you imagine being invited to fly from CWI in Amsterdam
to Olivetti Headquarters in Ivrea, Italy, and being picked up by a limousine
at the airport, and all that for installing UUCP on their machines?!? But
that really
is what happened to me, because I was that technical
invitee. Many years later such software installed in some 15 seconds
or in some cases even less...
There were less funny things too, though, and we had to fight many a
battle for our case. Some of them were lost (e.g. the founder and owner
of ARPAnet, DARPA, refused to grant us access to their, for that time
phenomenally fast, 56 kbit/s (military) SATNET link), some won (like
the utterly ridiculous one with AT&T, that stubbornly refused to send
us their bills for our half of the transatlantic link by air mail, each
and every month sending them by ship, with the result that we got every
bill as late as 6 weeks (!) after they were sent, but already
within 4 weeks AT&T claimed that we hadn't paid the bills (surprise,
surprise...) and threatened to discontinue our transatlantic line. Needless
to say that every time that caused panic on our side. Then the solution
- once again - came from Rick Adams: he agreed with AT&T
that it would send those bills to seismo, seismo would pay them and
right away e-mail a copy to CWI, and without delay CWI would pay them
to seismo. Pretty clumsy, but faced with AT&T's really incredible
and shortsighted (we had made the consequences
very clear to
them) bureaucrazy, sometimes a simple and well-functioning workaround
can be easy and quickly implemented, if you can revert to and rely on
sane, cooperative people.
It was in a later stage that the European Commission refused to have
anything to do with "non-standard" (read: not cooked-up by "official"
telecom standards bodies" like the ITU) protocols like TCP/IP and instead
literally wasted millions of European taxpayers' money in "promoting"
(read: enforcing) "OSI networking" (X.25 and X.400), a battle eventually
won by the end users who insisted on
real connectivity and thus
on TCP/IP. For your amusement here are 2 links to OSI-related fun:
a
poem on OSI and
alternatives to OSI.
The sad side of this story was that this "
protocol war",
waged vehemently by the European Commission and 'RARE' (the EU being
physically located in Brussels seems enough reason to use French
abbreviations and the low-level employees being unable (or pretending
so)), an "umbrella organization" of a couple of national R&D
networks in Europe, effectively set those networks arrear, because
they were
forced to take the slow, expensive and futureless
OSI track and were actively
blocked from Internet access, even
when that was already widely available through EUnet and CWI. (As Rob
Blokzijl (†) of Nikhef/HEPnet (and later RIPE chairman) put it:
"Rare isn't well-done"). It took more than a year before the Dutch
universities could use Internet, and that was only after the SURFnet
management had decided to take a practical approach and use
both
OSI (because they had to)
and TCP/IP (because they saw it as
the only viable option and by some already used internally).
In other countries it took longer,
much longer. In particular
in Germany the stubborn resistance of DFN (their R&D network), led
by the OSI-fanatic Peter Kaufmann, caused it to take years before DFN
finally came to realize that they were on a dead track with their OSI
addiction and fighting an already lost battle. And eventually even the
EC gave up on it... Yes, miracles do happen.
Of course we also had active partners in "practical TCP/IP insubordination",
like NORDUnet, the R&D network in the Nordic countries, and HEPnet/CERN,
through the excellent cooperation with the technical and practical folks of
our neighbour institute Nikhef (high-energy physics).
This all happened long before the word "Internet" became a buzzword and
"internet" became a commodity, a supermarket item - an initially
expensive supermarket item though. And later we reached the in fact crazy
situation where phone companies started providing phone services over the
Internet, eh... over internet: 'VoIP' (Voice over IP). For the technically
oriented it should be obvious that not VoIP, but TCP should have been used
for this - after all VOIP is an acronym for Telephone Conversation
Protocol. :-)
Long before this all, on April 25, 1986, or 25-4-1986
¹),
still in the "UUCP period" (in that time UUCP was the standard protocol
for communication between Unix systems), CWI, in the person of undersigned,
registered the NL top level domain (later: ccTLD, acronym for country code
Top Level Domain, as opposed to gTLD for generic Top Level Domain), in the
framework of its international and national networking activities.
The reason for switching to domain addressing, and thus for registering .NL,
was a purely technical and practical one: UUCP host names could have at most
7 letters and digits and
had to be unique worldwide (!),
with a European (me) and a worldwide arbitrator (Gene Spafford ("spaf") of
Purdue University) arbitrating in cases of name clashes. Arbitration that
sometimes could take quite some time and required several iterations of
back-and-forth mailing. When the number of UUCP hosts worldwide approached
about 25.000, this system became unworkable. Fortunately however there
was a just-in-time solution: the hierarchical domain name system, with
delegation of naming and arbitration on sequentially lower levels to
hierarchically (in terms of subdomain levels) administrators was the
perfect solution. And contrary to urban legend, ".NL" wasn't something
we invented ourselves: the Internet standard RFC 920 (1984) already
included - albeit after sometimes hot debates - the notion of
2-letter country code Top Level Domains, with the 2-letter codes taken
from the official ISO standard ISO-3166 (and thus in many cases different
from the country codes on cars).
For obvious reasons the first domain I registered under .NL was cwi.nl,
on May 1, 1986.
²)
I managed .NL all on my own until 31 January 1996, when
Boudewijn Nederkoorn of SURFnet, Ted Lindgreen of NLnet, and myself
on behalf of CWI, set up a separate foundation,
(
Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland
or SIDN), to take over the management of .NL.
This layered transfer of authority and management had become a sheer
necessity, due to the explosive growth of the number of domains
(see graph) - and thus my already extremely high workload -
and due to the rapid commercialisation of the Internet. But it would
still last until January 1997 before SIDN took over the actual
registration work, which I'd been doing all on my own ever since the
registration of the NL domain. Not surprisingly, right from SIDN's
start I was one of its board members, but in May 2002
I handed over this function to younger folks. But ever since,
I have a special and pleasant relationship with SIDN, bearing
the - purely honorary - title of "Bijzonder Raadgever"
(Special Counsellor), but also an equally pleasant personal contact
with several SIDN employees.
Since its foundation, SIDN has become an overwhelming success. As of
2021, SIDN had grown to 100 employees and an annual turnover of
20 million euros. For a large part this success can be credited
to its managing director Roelof Meijer, who joined SIDN in 2005. On
the negative side though, it remains to be seen if this success will
be continued - no growth can go on forever and unlimited. One of
the steps SIDN could take, based on its reputation, was to start
administering in particular a number of the new TLD's created by
IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). As of 2023 the growth of
the number of .NL-domains levelled off, and early 2024 SIDN announced
plans/agreements, to be implemented in the years thereafter, to move
the actual domain registration process -
but not the crucial
and time-critical DNS-service - to "the cloud"
³),
more specifically to Amazon Web Services (AWS). So maybe SIDN will become
AWSIDN... And although this would have some technical advantages - in
particular switching from SIDN's somewhat out-of-date registration system
to a brand-new system developed together with its Canadian counterpart
CIRA - and would alleviate the ever more serious problem of shortage
of qualified and trustworthy personnel. But even though the servers would
be guaranteed to be located in Europe, it raised deep and widespread
concern, if not an uproar, in broad circles - including well-known
Dutch top experts - about privacy, because after all Amazon, the
company that owns, provides and controls Amazon and its AWS service, is
an American company - and thus subject to legislation and the most
lousy, unreliable and dictatorial president it has ever had - and
therefore subject to American laws and political quirks (it was also
Jeff Bezos of AWS who donated a lot to his election campaign). So no
matter what they "promise" or "agree upon", you can't trust them. And
even "servers in Europe" doesn't mean all that much. After all, Hungary
seems to have completely and intentionally forgotten the Soviet invasion
in 1965, Austria is hosting some 8000 Russian spies, and France, Germany
and Italy are "special cases" on their own.
On January 17, 2025 the Dutch government intervened, ordering that only
"under conditions" and "to a limited extent" SIDN was allowed to move
the registration work.
BTW, the "clouded" privacy issue not only does, or is going to, apply
to SIDN, but also to European governments and all sorts of crucial
organizations and companies in Europe. Really no part, and I repeat:
no part, is 100% immune for and adequately protected against
all sorts of sophisticated hacking or stupidity. That was most clearly
demonstrated in October 2024, when the Dutch police (!) was hacked
and personal data of 60.000 (!) police men and women were stolen...
And in 2025 inadequately protected personal and other sensitive data of
almost a million females were stolen by hackers. Data obtained and
stored in many years of preventive regular (voluntary, not obligatory)
population and individual screening. It is unknown which and how much
of those data were (re)distributed by the hackers.
As a brief, but important aside:
In 2022 SIDN was split into two entities: the original one and an underlying
risk-bearing one "SIDN B.V." owned by the Foundation. An interesting and cute
aside is that the logo on the building, which is still the original one, in
a peculiar way now also reflects the new situation, due to the S having
a separate placing and color.
In another sense this became all too clear in 2024. In decent countries,
where there is freedom of press, writers and editors of newspapers operate
independent of the newspaper's owner. However, in October 2024, the month
before what Americans euphemistically call "elections", the editors of
several until that time serious and reliable US newspapers, including
highly esteemed ones, were literally
forbidden by the newspapers'
multi-zillion dollar owners to publish positive articles about the
Democrats' candidate, Kamala Harris. Obviously that had nothing to do
with freedom of press, but with criminal, zillion-dollars-financed, and
thus dictatorship, oppression and in this case misogyny and the dreaded
anti-blacks attitude.
But then, it's the USA, where freedom of speech,
fair and
democratic
elections simply don't exist and never did: "the (regional/district/state)
winner takes it all" has absolutely
nothing to do with true democracy
("one (wo)man, one vote"). That sort of "elections" actually is quite usual
though for English-speaking countries in general, like the US, UK, NZ, AU.
Here we hit upon another problem for SIDN: Amazon/AWS is owned by Jeff Bezos,
one of those zillion-dollar-driven dictators. And
that AWS is supposed
to be (and stay) neutral and protect your privacy?!? Good grief, come on,
I'd rather trust a black mamba or Tyrannosaurus Rex...
SIDN also has another problem. The 'whois' service on its website gives
you suggestions for alternative names if a domain name you choose already
exists. However, the alternative names that the site suggests can very
closely resemble the existing registered name, differing sometimes just
one letter from the existing name. What this in fact boils down to is
that this "service" is helping cyber/domain squatters by at least
suggesting that such alternative names are perfectly acceptable.
| ¹) |
The registration date 25-4-1986 made .NL's 35th birthday in 2021 a really
special and for the math-minded remarkable one: adding up the digits of
the date, 2+5+4+1+9+8+6, yields 35!
|
| ²) |
SIDN's whois gives April 30, 1986 as registration date of cwi.nl. In
those days however April 30 was Queen's Day, not factually, but
officially appointed as the Queen's birthday, and therefore one of
the Dutch public holidays. And even for this workaholic that was a
day off, on which I could be legally be lazy. ;-) Therefore
that wrong date looks stupid, but it has a serious technical cause:
My registration database had date-only fields, because there was no
need for anything more specific. At some point however, for several
valid reasons (e.g. speed of registration request processing, huge
numbers of registration, legal proof of "who came first", etc. SIDN
changed them to date+time fields, with the time of the
"old domains" set to 00:00:00 (unfortunately - in hindsight
00:00:01 would have been better). But when in 2012 SIDN switched to
using UTC, that switch shifted the date/time of all "old domains"
to the previous day. Manual correction however would be a massive
operation and was deemed too risky.
|
| ³) |
"The cloud" and AI in a sense can, albeit on a terrestrial scale and
confined to Planet Earth, be compared to what Fredric Brown wrote
in his 1954 (!) science fiction short story
"Answer".
In more modern terms: digitization and automation having escaped
from human control. Not from commercial control though, but that's
quite the opposite of human control.
|
After 10 years, in 1993, my involvement in both EUnet and NLnet came
to an end. But old networkers (and Pentagon old socks...) may still
remember my
1 April 1984 kremvax!chernenko
alias.... (And for your amusement here's a link to a collection of
April Fools on the Net
throughout the years).
In the course of time I've been involved in various working groups,
committees, working parties, ideas, etc. on networking topics, both
on a national and an international scale, among others of SURFnet
(the Dutch national research network) and RIPE (the European regional
IP registry). I even managed to produce a real Internet standard
(RFC 1537, which was obsoleted just a few years later, like so
many standards). :-)
Last, but certainly not least, on 9 June 1999 I was completely
taken by surprise when I received a high Royal Decoration (in Dutch:
"Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw") for doing apparently useful
things on an international scale. But even
that couldn't make me
lose my humor. :-)
Since "casting the net" has always been a collective effort, I'd like to
share this honour with a number of my former colleagues Teus Hagen, Jaap
Akkerhuis, Jim McKie (†), and Daniel Karrenberg (later one of the
founders and head of RIPE); with Ted Lindgreen, founder of NLnet (with
'more than a little bit' of pressure from CWI ;-)); and with several
people in many other countries in Europe and abroad. In the latter category
I'd like to specifically mention Armando Stettner (USA/'decvax'), Dan
Lorenzini (USA/'philabs'), Rick Adams (USA/'seismo'), Tohru Asami
(Japan/'kddlabs'), and Robert Elz (Australia/'munnari'). And special
thanks go to Keld Simonsen (Denmark/'diku') for providing us all with the
necessary vital energy through his constant supply of 'Daim' (Danish
candy bars) at the EUnet backbone meetings. :-)
BTW, it's interesting to note that such a small seed - just a few
people interested in, and having a need for, "networking" - eventually
led to Amsterdam becoming a focal point and "digital roundabout" on the
information superhighway: the Amsterdam Internet Exchange or AMS-IX started
on the WCW campus, next to CWI. Its largest branch is still located there
and is still growing; so much so that the sidewalks there may soon be half
a meter above street level, because of the massive bundles of data cables
underneath them. ;-) Later a colocation data center ("Amsterdam AMS17
Data Center") was built on the WCW campus (the area by then already having
been renamed "Science Park"), almost opposite the CWI building.
The AMS-IX has become one of the largest internet exchange points in the
world, and a relatively old (1998-2008) sample of their 10-years traffic
statistics overview gives a good impression of the explosive growth of
internet traffic already in those days. Interestingly, AMS-IX's policy
is as practical and idealistic as that of the early starters of networking:
neutral, independent and not-for-profit.
At CWI I've also been involved in more recent ("recent" in hindsight)
networking developments:
Started with experiments in 1993, in cooperation with other research
institutes on campus, a 155 Mbit/s ATM network was installed at
CWI connecting some 100+ workstations and servers, over an all-fibre-optic
network, with some servers having multiple 155 Mbps links. It worked
like a charm, but due to the rapid development and deployment of
Fast Ethernet and later 1 MGbit/s Ethernet, and in particular also
the high cost of ATM equipment, within institutes ATM became obsolete in
a relatively short time. In those years the speed of CWI's main Internet
connection (to/via SURFnet) increased to 155 Mbit/s too, initially
via ATM, later via POS (Packet Over
Sonet).
But that wasn't the end of our Need for Speed: in July 2000 CWI entered
a new "speed era", when a new core switch/router with Gigabit-speed ports
was installed, with our core servers having single or even multiple
1 Gbit/s links to it. At the same time our SURFnet connection was
upgraded to 1 Gbit/s. And in 2005, the year after my retirement,
10 Gbit/s had already become sort of a commodity. On the experimental
side a speed record was set on April 2 (perhaps intentionally
not
on April 1!) 2024 by Aston University (UK) researchers.
It's also interesting to make a comparison here between the low and high
ands of the networking speed spectrum during our "networking history":
In 1983 CWI installed its first ethernet: 10 Mbit/s shared, through
a thick yellow coax cable that old computer nerds will still remember
as "thick ethernet"
('
10BASE5').
Lots of people declared us insane, or somewhat politer wording for
the same, because "we would
never ever be able to fully use
this truly immense bandwidth". But our insanity paid off: within a
couple of years 10 Mbit/s
shared just didn't suffice
anymore to meet the ever increasing traffic and speed demands, and
10 Mbit/s
switched "thin ethernet"
('
10BASE2')
was the next step, which in turn was soon followed by 100 Mbit/s
(switched) ethernet. In the decades that passed since the early
networking days, the speed of CWI's external connection went up from
three hundred to
ten billion bits per second...
It's interesting to note that in that same period the speed at the
high end of the range went up from 10 Mbit/s to a whopping
100 Gbit/s, or a 10.000-fold increase, whereas in the same
period the speed at the low (consumer) end went up from 300 bit/s
to 100 Mbit/s, a 300.000-fold increase! What's next? Here
the story takes a turn, and not exactly a positive one. Whereas
the Netherlands have long been leading in bringing internet to the
masses, it was overtaken by Sweden: already as early as 2012 home
connections of 1 Gbit/s speed were available there. And perhaps
even more important: at affordable prices. In 2024 the situation
did change somewhat: for (fiber) home connections the speed had
gone up to 1 Gbit/s, but the prices stayed high. Comparison
of prices to those in Sweden was no longer possible, due to the
massive competition-driven obfuscation of them.
The last couple of years before my retirement I spent part of my time
working in a for me completely new and really cute environment: CWI's
all-females Personnel Department (later renamed to P&O when that
abbreviation widely became the fashion). For them I arranged a
set of brand-new pc's with flatscreens (until then the department
had been a dumping place for pc's that had become obsolete for
scientists), I managed their computers and in addition created an
at that time state-of-the-art website for it instead of a section
on CWI's then really old-fashioned webstie. Not only was this
environment new and completely unrelated to what I was used to,
it was interesting too, being an all-girls department. ;-) The
picture shows most of the gang. Looking at it, you may be wondering
why I'm looking so bloody serious in such cute and cheerful company;
well, so do I...
But it's all over and history. Well, in a sense. After a farewell
symposium on September 16, 2004, where also Rick Adams was
invited to and where he gave an interesting and very personal
view on transatlantic networking history,
I entered the state of enlightenment and rest called "retirement".
Well... rest? Hm. I'd rather call it the next phase of restlessness.
I had plenty of things to do, and staying away from computers might
well have had an effect on me not unlike stopping to breathe.
That "plenty to do" already started before my retirement: in May 2003
I became technical volunteer at the Cruquius museum, an old
steam-powered pumping station dating from 1849, with its boilers
removed and the machinery now briefly working only every now and then
for demos, driven by hydraulic power.
Part of my work comprised of kicking the museum into the computer
and internet era, which in that old building was far from trivial
while keeping the cables out of signt as much as possible. But
most of my work consisted of mechanical-technical work as member
of a group called the "Stoomploeg" ("Steam team") maintaining a
magnificent and unique piece of 19th-century, in those days
state-of-the-art, hardware: the world-famous Cruquius steam engine,
the largest steam engine ever built (144 inch cylinder diameter).
And in April 2010 the extreme makeover entered its last phase, when
I was asked, in a personal and quite unusual direct way, to become
curator of another museum: Stoomgemaal Halfweg (Halfweg steam pumping
station), also from the 19th century (1852), but - as opposed
to the Cruquius - with a still fully functional steam engine
and - manually operated! - coal-fired steam boiler. Not
only worked there as curator, but also as technician, and in addition
I created an extensive, in-depth new website with often event-related
extra pages. The site, in combination with other PR, proved to be very
successful in attracting new visitors ("we never knew there as such an
interesting museum bearby"), more than doubling the yearly number of
visitors. My steamy and very satisfying position there lasted till
the end of 2014 (too much work and ageing), but I stayed as technical
volunteer and visitors guide thereafter, until highly unpleasant
management changes - with no respect for history and the massive
amount of work spent by the technically highly competen volunteers
on keeping the machinery going and repainting it in its glorious
colors - made me (and a whole lot of my colleague-volunteers)
decide to irreversibly quit in 2020. A really sad end of a truly
most pleasant period.
If, after reading all of the above, you might think that I'm utterly
proud of myself, then that perception needs some serious correction.
Apart from a few negative things - where elsewhere do you never
experience those in one way or another? - I've very much enjoyed
by far the most of my working life, I've had my share of pleasure and
fun. But being a workaholic, at CWI I've also experienced what a
burnout means and what profound physical and mental effects it has on
you. And when I reached the age of 80, I strongly experienced what
effect that has or can have on your physical and mental wellbeing.
But I'm really glad,
very glad indeed, that I've "seen it
all happen" and that I've been so actively involved in a development
that has had such a profound impact on society, resulting in what
for millions of people has become an integral, and for many even
addictive, part of life. But let's be real: I certainly wasn't the
only one in that all, far from that, and
all players
do
deserve credit. But also, for that matter: sort of blame, for making
- unwantingly and to their own and unpleasant surprise -
spam, phishing, hacking, digital theft (both of money and stricly
personal data/information, digital threats, privacy violation, and
many more negative things digitally possible.
Let's take a brief moment to reflect on what caused the internet to
grow so explosively to its current - and ever expanding -
state. Several factors, all resulting from things that have been
developed and taken place within a relatively short time span, have
contributed to that:
| • |
An action - this time a positive one - from the European
Commission to break the national PTT's monopolies, resulting in a
steep decline of the costs of telephone calls and leased lines.
At the negatieve side that was followed by commercial takeovers
and concentrations, leading to an increase in prices and
new or massively expanding monopolies, sanctioned by the government
and by what we stubbornly keep calling "laws" and "judges". This led
to the Netherlands having the highest internet subscription rates
of almost all European countries. And of course they don't have any
incentive to make them "market-conform" - wxcept that in their
perception they are market-conform, but with the market"
being their own market - like they do every time when raising
prices, unfounded and on short term, making believe that it is for
"improvements", "extra service" (which in some cases leads to
loss of a facility, unless you start paying for that formerly
included faciliy, etc.
|
| • |
A
judgment by the European Court
(1985) that national PTT's could no longer forbid third party traffic
over leased lines. Consequently, where such a prohibition was part of
national legislation, that legislation had to be - and was -
changed, a;beit in some cases with quite some delay.
|
| • |
The advent of fiber optics, which tremendously increased the speed at
which data could be carried over (long) cables, including transoceanic
ones. Cables that later came under threat of disruption by Russian
spy ships, disguised as commercial or fishing ships, collectively
known as Russia's "shwadow fleet"..
|
| • |
The invention at CERN of the World Wide Web (1990, usually designated
"www", "web", or incorrectly "internet" (lowercase 'i') by software
developer Tim Borrners-Lee and his project manager Robert Cailliau.
An inventien that "married hypertext to the Internet". Soon thereafter
the first graphical web browser was developed at NCSA: Mosaic (1992),
soon followed by Netscape Navigator (1994), both by Mark Andreessen
and Eric Bina, with especially Netscape immensely popularizing the
Web. So much so that in a relatively short period of time www became
application #2, right after e-mail. The biggest mistake Mark
made, once the browsers were a success after voluntarily
and in their own time extensive testing - and in fact debugging -
by numerous people worldwide, was to start demanding money for them.
He got vehemently cursed for that and soom dropped the idea. Later
the Big Tech companies incorporated a browser into their system,
each with their own possibilities and quirks, effectively creating
a vendor-lock-in and leading to the notorious "browser war", until
they were legally forced to also offer the possibility of installing
of other browsers too and giving user the choice of making one of
them their default
|
| • |
The activities of (in the Netherlands) groups like HCC, IAF, Knoware
and XS4ALL ("the day we started, before 7:00 pm already 500(!)
customers had subscribed"), set up to provide the "common, non-scientific,
user" with e-mail, and later full internet access (including of course
web browsing). BTW, it took the Dutch PTT years to also become
interested in that strange new phenomenon and get actively involved in
it ("money, money, money..."), and in particular: get used to it, witness
how a famous Dutch cartoonist depicted it.
|
| • |
The advent of internet over ADSL, VDSL, CTV-cable, and later glass
fiber, with speeds upto 1 Gbit/s and at affordable prices,
making broadband internet (the 'digital highway') a commodity for
the general, technical or non-technical, public.
|
| • |
The advent and development of high-quality audio and video streaming
services like Spotify, Netflix and many others, later extended with
the possibility to store streams online for a period of days, weeks
or even months, without the need for private, local video recorder.
|
| • |
The invention, rise, and massive addiction to "smart"phones - which
in fact are pretty dumb things, but also in various respects extremely
dangerous (especially for privacy and for disseminating the most blatant
nonsense and desinformation) devices - and high-speed mobile data
networks, along with absolute privacy disasters like Facebook (aka
faecesbook), LinkedIn, Instagram ("insta"), TikTok, X (formerly Twitter),
Telegram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and many, many more. And besides being
privacy disasters, they can also be dangerous, even lethal, witness the
'Facebook murder'
in the Netherlands in 2012 or the
'WhatsApp lynchings'
in India. Dating apps too have led to murders, in the majority of cases,
as usual, on girls and women: 1) fuck them, 2 kill them,
3) flee or pay corrupt and trigger-happy "law enforcement".
|
It's an understatement that Internet has had a profound effect on society
and has deeply pervaded the life of zillions of people. So much so
that the abbreviations "DNA" and "SMS" have got brand-new meanings:
"Digital Network Addiction" resp. "Social Media Stress". Even so:
enjoy it, but exercise keeping yourself in control to avoid addiction
and mental health problems, and be and stay aware that the internet
also has - and worldwide become a playground of preference for
criminals, lunatics, grooming, sex offenders, drugs sellint, and a
cheap and convenient vehicle for the most serious threats to privacy,
health, personal life and freedom, and in particular for (s)extortion.
for a large part for ignorant, uneducated, credulous superstitious,
and conspiracy-believing people - (collectively known for short
as no-brainers).
Be aware that governments - including your own and foreign ones -
are monitoring and collecting your data traffic, your whereabouts, literally
your everything. And not only governments do so, cameras, camera-equipped
doorbells, tv-sets, [the converters of) solar panels, they all have private
information about you, track you and your activities, and often send those
data to countries where you'd really
never would want them, including
neo-nazi states like Russia, Iran and Israel. And don't make yourself any
illusions that such devices are in any way secure and privacy-friendly.
Sure enough, they
appear to be so, but that's merely in the way
they're described in ads ("the louder and the more convincing, the better").
However, reality and trustworthiness are completely different things. And
your highly personal "smart"phone? That may well be or become infected by
ransomware or spyware, including the already mentioned phone-intruding
"child porn detecting" software (read: malware).
Interestingly, whilst the Netherlands have played a forefront role in
the adaptation and spreading of the Internet, and a key Internet Exchange
is still located in Amsterdam (actually there are several(commercial)
locations and data centers now, it is now (a
o 2023/2024)
lagging in a humiliating way in the adaptation of a modern Internet
protocol like IPv6, of secure DNS, etc.
Here I must add - of confess - though that I myself don't have IPv6
enabled, but for a good reason: reverse-mapping for IPv6 is conspicuouely
lacking, so you're in the limbo as to where/whom/what remote system or
[piece of] software you're connecting to - it might well be garbage,
lousy, poorly protected or rightout hackerish or hacked.
But at the good side, SIDN and SIDN Labs have worked hard on new protocols
and services to make the Internet a better, safer, and nitwit-proof place.
But let's be real: it's an arms race against criminals, often government-
driven or at least facilitated, and similar types, the kind of hominids
commonly known as "influencers" and often looking like plastic dolls, etc.
are working hard to disrupt the real, useful Internet. Internet has become
a perfect place for disinformation, medical (!) and "healthy food"
nonsense theft (data and financial), gambling, addiction to the worst
possible shit and (addictive and even lethal) substances/drugs, including
smoking and (even more) "vaping" (for youngsters usually the first step
to addictive smoking), etc. But also to the nonsense spread/promoted by
official organizations. Here I'm referring to what is commonly called
"biological food". That's sheer nonsense though, because a) the
opposite of "biological" is "synthetic", b) synthetic food doesn't
exist (yet, but industry and commerce are trying hard), and b) the
human digestive tract is
not suitable for this "biological"
food, which in practice comes down to (almost) only eating vegetables,
made edible by the addition of truckloads of spices and taste-suppressing
additions. The only reason why "biological" is a success is the massive
PR and indoctrination (e.g. by (paid) "opinion makers", by commerce and
even by official institutes who really should get better informed and do
more really
scientific research instead of blindly repeating
ad infinitum the
desinformation spread by the masses. Really, the
human digestive tract is
not suitable for digesting vegetables
only: too short, inapt to digest the cellulose cell walls of vegetables
(which is why ruminants like e.g. cows have seven (!) stomachs and
ruminate (regurgitate and re-chew) their food.
On quite another, extremely important subject, about misogyny, brute force,
discrimination and other misbehaviour against/towards females, including
the most abject maltreatment, like strangling, stabbing or shooting them
to death (kind of common usage in the USA, just like the almost monthly
school shootings), even if they're pregnant. Even in "civilized" countries,
there is widespread discrimination, abuse and raping of women and girls.
And worst of all: the nazi-like practice - and even laws that
denies women the most basic female right of abortion, even when the
pregnant woman's life is in danger or a stake, in some cases going as
far as "laws" putting a penalty of 99 years (!) in jail
- which obviously boils down to a lifelong delayed death after
bars or lifelong postponed murder - after they've gone through
the utterly harsh procedure of abortion. And that even when the abortion
literally saved her life, as in the case of an ectopic pregnancy leading
to massive and often lethal blood loss due to a ruptured Fallopian tube.
In those states - with in the US Texas as the worst example, its
laws even forbidding pregnant women to cross a border with one of the
humane abortion-allowing adjacent states and to other countries
(the fact that airlines dorbid pregnant women to fly with them isn't
helpful either). Abd then there are those countries where women are
regarded and (mal)treated as simply nothing more than (sex) objects,
inferior creatures, existing (or rather: sort of existing) only for
the sexual "needs" (read: pleasures and satisfaction) of men and
for producing ever more offspring, adding to the world's already huge
overpopulation and eventually to its destruction.
The video mentioned further on in the Free a Girl support entry contains
paramount and blood-curling examples of human-shaped cell blobs that
wrongly and euphemistically regard and call themselves "real men".
In reality however they're just devils, equipped with an uncontrolled
and hyperactive sex drive and without even the slightest idea about
"humanity". And even worse and humiliating is the situation in Afghanistan,
where women are considered and treated as property of males, "needing"
their "protection", not allowed to leave the house without "male"
accompaniment (read: warden), treated as their (sex) slaves and
child-production machines, deprived of all things normal in human life,
like any form of education reading or writing books, television, of
course internetwork and something as basic as personality, and in a
most humiliating addition to that, forced to dress in a way that keeps
their bodily shapes hidden and invisible. However, hiding their often
big breasts from view with a thin, baggy black dress is doomed to fail.
At the same time there is the really shameful situation that organizations
that are crucial for society and social functioning, like banks, health
care (including hospitals), authority on various levels, etc. are
explicitly or in fact
forcing people,
including in particular
the elderly, to use other means. Sadly, the usual official response
is "sorry, we can't help you, you have to solve it yourself".
| literature |
| Bas Kist |
domeinnamen.nl |
ISBN 9789057593932 |
Peter van Dijk /
Erik-Jan Gelink |
Gekte.com |
ISBN 9789025415488 |
| Monique Doppert |
Internet Pioniers |
ISBN 9789075727869 |
| Christiaan Alberdingh Thijm |
Het nieuwe informatierecht |
ISBN 9789039522493 |
| Cordula Rooijendijk |
Alles moest nog worden uitgevonden |
ISBN 9789045013671 |
| Peter Olsthoorn |
25 jaar internet in Nederland |
ISBN 9789492280008 |
| Martin Wainwright |
April Fool's Day |
ISBN 9781845133443 |
| once a hobby: genealogy |
This website used to include a comprehensive Beertema family tree
(Dutch: stamboom) and its related family trees. two decades of
genealogical research irrefutably showed the family name "Beertema"
to be unique worldwide, with every individual bearing this name
being member of one and the same family.
The family name started with Leendert Eppes Beertema in 1811, when
Napoleon decreed it mandatory for every family that didn't have a
family name to choose and register one. Previously individuals were
named "son of" / "daughter of" followed by their
father's
name (not mother's name, because iit was a partiarchical system).
The family's
lineage could be traced back much further, to
±1600, to a couple in the village of Blijham, in the Eastern
part of Groningen, the husband (Lendert Synts (several spellings
have been found) being from Nesserland (an island in the Ems/Eems,
facing the city of Emden, Germany) and his spouse (Gepke Hermens)
from Dersum (also Germany). As far as I know no research has been
done in German archives into pre-1600 lineageing. Nesserland later
became part of the expanding city of Emden, but its name lives on
in the street name "Nesserlander Straße" along Emden's harbour.
Sadly, I had to decide to take all the family trees, compiled &
maintained as a hobby in more than 20 years, offline due to new
EU privacy regulations. And a couple of years later, with my health
declining and no family member willing to equally conscientiously
maintain them and not publish them on any of the insane "social" media,
I took the ultimate, irreversible, but also saddening step of deleting
them all beyond recovery.
| last but not least: life is more... |
...than just technology. Life in particular is about humanity. Or
at least:
should be about humanity. Most governments and
leaders however don't care about humanity, or only pretend to do
so for personal, financial or electoral (real electoral, not by
fake elections where the opposition is suppressed, silenced, put
in jail or otherwise excluded for cooked-up "reasons") profit,
e.g. through mendacious pr, ads, paid "influencers", etc. So
it's up to
serious organizations that focus on
practical
forms of humanity and fighting abuses, through active participation
in them and/or by donating to them. Fortunately there are lots of
such organizations. Some that I would recommend supporting or
donating to are listed below.
Note Some of the sites listed have one or more
issues, like: (partly) not working with some privacy-friendly
browsers; content and/or interaction of NL sites not (fully) in
Dutch; poor reachability (website and/or organization); site
written without knowledge of "backward compatibility". Even so
I've included the links to those sites, because I consider goal
and activities - an active and badly needed way of practical
humanity, especially towards females - to be infinitely more
important than some technical or language issues. I want to add
though that, if an organization I've donated to starts sending me
spam - including ads, begging for more, promotional stuff,
referrals to [items on] the bubonic plague euphemistically called
"'social'" media", etc., - it will be taken off this list and
I'll never donate to it anymore.
» Two serious warnings «
• The Free a Girl videos linked to contain shocking images
and language and therefore are not suitable for youngsters nor for the
faint of heart!
• When I make a donation and I subsequently get
spam, ads, begging for more, etc., the organization is taken off the
list and I won't donate to it anymore.
|
The Greek motto at the top of the page is a quote from Olympia I,
one of the Odes of the ancient lyric poet Pindar (ca. 518 BC -
438 BC). It roughly translates as: "The highest boon is the blessing
of every day".
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|
all good things must have an end
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