Sunday, January 25, 2026

Flashback: The Early Internet -- 1969 -- Flash Forward -- Claude -- Posted January 25, 2026

Locator: 49831INTERNET. 

This brings back so many memories. 

A map from early 1969. So much water under the bridge.

I graduated from high school in 1969. 

In 1984, I was shown the first packet of information sent on an early version of Fetchit or Mosaic or something along that line (I've long forgotten the details) sent from the Pentagon to a USAF hospital in eastern Turkey.  

This map popped up on my X feed today. 

Link here. 

The above map popped up on X today. This brought back a lot of memories. I vividly remember this map having read The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll, c. 1989. I was a mid-level officer in USAF, transitioning from RAF Lakenheath in England to Bitburg Air Base, Germany in 1989.

I had forgotten the name of the book, but google found it for me. The book:


I lost my first copy but ordered a second copy, and then, of course, lost that one, also, over the years. I think STEM students in middle school or high school might enjoy this book.


Still available Amazon for as little as $13. 

Tag: SRI (Stanford Research Institute -- Menlo Park), University of Utah, UCLA, and UCSB (UC-Santa Barbara).

 

Holy mackerel -- going down that rabbit hole.

From that "box" above, I went to locate the individual at University of Utah that led the effort from that location. That led me to Ivan Sutherland, see box above.

From there it was easy.

But this is amazing. Sutherland invented Sketchpad in 1962 while at MIT. A mathematician named Claude Shannon signed on to supervise Sutherland's computer drawing thesis. 

That was too tempting to ignore. 

AI prompt: Anthropic's Claude. Was Claude named after Claude Shannon?

Google Gemini: 


Claude Shannon, wiki: 

  • 1916 - 2001
  • American polymath, a mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor
  • "father of information theory"
  • the man who laid the foundations of the Information Age;
  • first to describe the use of Boolean algebra -- essential to all digital electronic circuits -- and helped found the field of artificial intelligence;
  • the roboticist Rodney Brooks declared Shannon the 20th century engineer who contributed the most to 21st century technologies;
  • formally introduced the term "bit";
  • the mathematician Solomon W Golomb described his intellectual achievement as "one of the greatest of the twentieth century."
    • USC: my alma mater -- whoo-hoo
    • among much else, his work went on to inspire Tetris;
    • Baltimore City College high school graduate --> Johns Hopkins --> Harvard University (Ph.D., 1957) --> University of Osla --> Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech (researched military and space communications) --> joined faculty of USC in 1963; awarded full tenure two years later;
  • accomplishments go on and on and on for Ivan Sutherland (and, really, all these folks)

For all the reading Charlie Munger did, it appears he was reading the wrong stuff. 

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A Musical Interlude

Link here. 


Wow, this brings back so many memories. 
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