History of the Early Internet Years (1971-1989) Quiz

Answer: Ray Tomlinson

Researcher Ray Tomlinson was an American computer programmer for BBN Technologies who, in 1971, was working on ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet. He used a program called SNDMSG to send a message to himself on a different computer.

Tomlinson has said that the message was "completely forgettable, probably 'QWERTYUIOP' or 'Testing 1-2-3."

Answer: Playboy playmate

Lena Sjööblom, born March 31, 1951, was Playboy's November 1972 Playmate of the month, and one particular photo of her from that photo spread was cropped to reveal just her head and shoulders, and that image became ubiquitously used by tech workers experimenting on ways to digitally compression image files. The process became essential for finding an efficient way to send graphics over the Internet.

The Swedish model encouraged a respelling of her name from Lena to Lenna so that it would be pronounced correctly with the short "e" which she preferred over the long "e" sound in her name.

Answer: Vint Cerf

Vint Cerf used the term "Internet" in a research paper in which he outlined the use of Transmission Control Protocol, the common computer language that all computers on the Net would eventually come to utilize. Robert Kahn was a key co-worker of Mr. Cerf in their work on enabling inter-computer communication and is also credited with being a "Father of the Internet".

Those other famous Cerfs all passed away before the Internet was born.

Answer: Usenet

Usenet was created by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, and University of North Carolina graduate student Steve Bellovin. It was a text-based online discussion group used by Unix users. At its peak, roughly 140,000 people used Usenet, but it has declined greatly since1993 with the rise of the world wide web.

Theory/Net is considered by some as possibly the first mailing list, created in 1977, linking 100 researchers via email. Compuserve, aka CIS, was an early commercial online service provider in the 1980s that was eventually acquired by AOL in 1997.

Answer: Minitel

Minitel was accessible by terminals supplied by the French telephone company. Those terminals had a small screen and keyboard, which allowed users access to various online services and information. Its original purpose was to give access to directory assistance and business data but it spread out quickly to different sources of practical info.

Xanadu was a pay-per-use hypertext database of information founded in 1981, while Prodigy (originally called Trintex) launched in 1988, and allowed dial-up access to various online services.

Answer: smileys

Emoticons, or smileys, emerged in 1982, an outgrowth of the Happy Face design created by Harvey Ross Ball in the 1960s. Emoticons are combinations of typographic symbols that represent an emotion, i.e. :-) indicating happiness. Some were more imaginative such as humorist Dave Barry's >8-0-(&) which meant, "realizing that one has a tapeworm."

Eventually technology developed actual yellow-colored faces to replace the typography if one chose to use them.

Answer: bulletin board system

The computer bulletin-board system was a way of chatting, playing video games, engaging in discussions, emailing from system to system, and getting software downloads. With the rise of Internet technology the popularity of BBS started to wane in the mid to late 1990s.

Answer: William Gibson

William Gibson spearheaded the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction in the '80s, along with writers like Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling and others. In Gibson's "Neuromancer" he described it as "consensual hallucination" in which users experienced a sensory immersion in a virtual reality world. Since then, the "cyber-" prefix has been attached to the beginning of many other words.

Answer: Symbolics.com

On March 15, 1985, "symbolics.com" became the first registered .com domain name when a computer systems company based in Massachusetts named Symbolics Inc. grabbed it. They specialized in hardware and software design for their computer programming language, called Lisp, a contraction of "list processing".

Answer: AOL

When the Control Video Corporation start-up failed and von Meister left the company in 1985,
It became Quantum Computer Services which offered three online services: American Online, PC-Link, and Q-Link: Together with Apple, Quantum launched AppleLink in 1988 for Apple II and Mac computers; and with the Tandy Corporation, Quantum launched PC Link, a service for PCs. In October 1989, Quantum and Apple split up and they changed their name to America Online.