Where was the first wireless network ?

Chappe semaphore system in France:

major use was to distrubute the winning numbers for the French national lottery. And yes... it was encrypted.

Guglielmo Marconi invented wireless communications in late 19th century. I dont think he had a network though so this may not be the answer you want.

I had the first one..1984, wireless internet!

Bah... I had the first mass distribution of Usenet content to BBS's, without wires in about 1982. I would copy the daily Usenet messages and binaries from ihnp4 to a DC600A QIC cartridge tape, jump on my bicycle, and deliver the tapes to the BBS owners. They would also return the previous days tape for re-use. No wires anywhere in sight. There was also some discussion of using rockets, model airplanes, or blimp delivery, but it didn't fly.

Ahhhh..The BBS's with the C64 Come a long way, connecting with a Hayes a 2400 baud modem....

That's a long way? I remember how snappy the 300 baud acoustic couplers felt, migrating up from 110 baud modems.

About the same way I felt when we upgraded our 50 baud teletypes to 75 baud kleinschmidts! Only a couple of years ago, it seems like...... Anyone remember Morse code?

I used to run 50 baud Teletype model 15 printers, model 14 transmitter distributor, and model 15 typing reperf. I also had a Kleinschmidt printer. Really different from the Teletype. I ran all this stuff with

850 Hz frequency shift keying on 3.625MHz. The first dot matrix printer I saw was an Extel, which was a replacement for a Teletype model 15 for wire service use. The first inkjet printer I saw was an Olivetti. It was interesting in that each sweep of the print head only did one vertical dot per sweep of the head.

As for Morse, I haven't used it in a while, but still remember it. One of my projects for some day is to write a program that will generate telephone ring tones in Morse. I'd like the ringer to just give me the initials of the caller. Seems a lot easier than remember what dumb song I assigned to each of the callers.

On old modems and such, my first modem was a 300bps modem I built using an XR2206 and XR2211. I used this to call into the Source, an early consumer timeshare service. The Source had a cross assembler for the MC6800 processor. I had wire wrapped a small computer using it. I then wrote my code online on the Source, got back the binary code (Motorola S records) and sent them to an eprom programmer, burned the chip, plugged it in my wire wrapped machine, and got it running.

My first internet was telnetting from San Luis Obispo CA to the Cleveland Freenet where I had an account (ap621). Long time ago!

Harold

I learned on a Model 26 Teletype. It was possible to type at about 20 wpm, but no slower or faster. You had to time the keystrokes exactly right. Too soon would cause the giant carousel in the middle to go around again before typing. Too late and there would be an excessive delay. It was also really noisy. I graduated to Model 15 and 19 devices somewhat later. Everything was baudot.

While going to skool, one of my summer jobs was rebuilding old teletype machines for TELEX service. Mostly Model 33ASR machines, but some older 15 and 19's.

I went the other direction. In the early 1960's, our high skool radio club had a home made RTTY terminal (using tubes) complete with the 3" CRT to show the crossed loop pattern. When we obtained a Model 35 which we converted to ASCII. The RTTY converter was immediately butchered into a 110baud phone modem, and used to hack into all kinds of insecure systems.

The popular AEA PK232 TNC used those chips. Yuck.

Been there, done that. Eventually, the Source became Compuserve.

Such development was common practice in the early 70's. The company I worked for did Fairchild 3870 development on a Model 33 ASR, and Anderson-Jakkobsen acoustic modem (insert handset, close wooden lid, pray that nobody touches the box) via various timeshare services. Storage was paper tape.

There was a big blur between BBS operation, usenet (UUCP), and the internet. My first real internet connection was via a dialup BBS that hit the internet at TLG (the little garden) in San Francisco. Prior to that, it was Telebit modems polling uunet in Virginia, or prior to that, ihnp4 in Chicago. My phone bill was enormous. I still use UUCP over TCP for my email (because it always works).

Thanks for the nostalgia and memories of nightmares best forgotten.

My first "network" was in 1965/1966: shipping data from our PDP-7 at the UIUC campus to the phone exchange at the Chicago Circle campus and back to the UIUC PDP-7, using looped-back lines (dial into the C.C. exchange, then dial an access code to get a leased line, then dial back to the UIUC campus to another 110-baud modem port on the PDP-7).

I did this to test long-term data integrity of the PDP-7 and its comm.gear front-end. The whole kit ran perfectly for tens of minutes (sometimes a few hours) at a time, then a noise burst would eat the data for a few minutes, then the links would "self-heal". Eventually, we discovered the problem: some phone exchange operator at the C.C. campus, not believing that anybody could talk for hours, would bridge into the loop-back circuit to check for human voices, and would hear only "whistling"; when the operator tired of listening and removed the bridge, the links would work again.

snip

Thanks for the memories, Harold! I didn't think there were any of us oldtimers left still compos enough to be communicating on the Internet. But none of this 850 Hz FSK for me - we used military 16 channel VFT equipment ordered at great expense from the US of A. It used FSK +-42.5Hz, max channel speed

100wpm. They were AN/FGC61A and we ran them over 10KW HF ISB systems with rhombic antennas as big as a sheep paddock. Satellites put paid to all that.