Talk:NCSA Telnet
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Was Clarkson Telnet a derivative of NCSA, or the other way around? I remember being at Illinois STreet Residence Hall in 1992 and helping set up the residence hall labs, and I thought we installed Clarkson Telnet, which is ironic, considering we were at U or I, home of NCSA.
Jim
Jim, NCSA Telnet was written from the ground up (ok, not quite, I cribbed the terminal emulator from another project that I'd written from scratch, but in that case, I developed and owned all the code and contributed it to the U of I). At any rate, almost no portion of NCSA Telnet was derived from another work at the time. Sadly, there was very little available source sharing when we started working on it in early 1986, so we had to do everything ourselves.
The beginnings of the internet
editIn my mind the NCSA Telnet, MIT TCP/IP and CMU TCP/IP software packages were the real beginnings of the internet as we know it today. It was these software packages that first put personal computers on the internet. These software packages democratized the internet and laid the ground work for the Web.
In 1988 I got the MIT TCP/IP code working on a 286 AT clone with a 3C501 network card. Just getting this code compiled and configured probably took a week. Later that year I got the CMU code running on a similar system. It was slightly easier to get running than the MIT code. About a year later I read about the NCSA Telnet project on the PC-IP news group and downloaded the code. The code was so much neater and so much simpler that the other two code bases. I was able to get it working in an hour or so. These were THE 3 code bases for getting a PC on the internet in the early days. I believe it was the CMU code that first really abstracted out the driver for the different network cards. Then the guys at FTP Software published the Packet Driver Specification. I am sure because of the ease with which it could be built and modified, the NCSA Telnet code quickly became the predominant software used on PCs.