if only they had kept it that way

That's pretty interesting - was your dad involved in the ARPA net back in the day?

I was trying to figure out the diagram and what computers they used back then. The only one that really stood out was the IBM 800 at RAND.

Apparently the RAND Corporation is not a benign organization.

New World Order: Insider Reveals Diabolical Secrets Of The Rand Corporation

Cuban-born journalist and author Alex Abella was allowed exclusive access inside the RAND Corporation to view their archives. What he discovered was a plot driven by mad scientists, behaviorists, and generals who were intent on starting world war three and fleecing the American people in the process. Once he was a skeptic on the subject of conspiracy theories and the new world order, but after his work with the RAND Corporation he is now convinced that this top secret think tank has been pulling the strings of American government for at least 60 years.

“We’re all the bastard children of RAND and we don’t even know it,” remarks Abella, as he charts how RAND started off as an organization centered around building new weapons for the military but ultimately expanded into politics, science, history and economics and was closely allied with the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. RAND’s decision in the 50′s to re-model the globe towards a new world order changed everything, with the development of “rational choice theory,” which turned people from being citizens into consumers, as rights and responsibilities were replaced with choices and people’s lives slowly came to be dominated not by integrity or what they stood for, but by what they spent their money on.

RAND’s ultimate goal was to have technocrats running every aspect of society in pursuit of a one world government that would be administered under “the rule of reason,” a ruthless world where efficiency was king and men were little more than machines, which is why RAND studied the social sciences because they were at a loss to work out how to deal with people and how human beings did not always act in their own predictable self-interests. There is no place for love, empathy or selflessness in the new world order that RAND and the Ford Foundation are working to create, and patriotism and altruism are adversarial to their aims.

Getting back to the IBM 1800, it appears that it's the main hub for the entire network.

The other one I recognized as a computer is the IBM 360/75.

When I was in the Air Force, my (now ex) wife (girlfriend at the time) worked at the SAGE building on base and this looks like what they used there in the mid 70's.

Maybe some of the computer experts here can make more sense of this diagram than I can.

It's pretty cool that you found this diagram.

When I was in The AF at Vandenburg in the 80s, they had huge banks of IBM 360s in a refrigerated area, These were used to handle all the the data for missile test launches and satelite launches. I doubt the whole bank had the computing power of one modern desktop computer.

I doubt the whole bank had the computing power of one modern desktop computer.

I've read that the computers used in the Apollo flights to the moon were about as powerful as a modern calculator or smart phone.

The Apollo Guidance Computer had approximately 64Kbyte.

In the movie "Apollo 13" (which I presume is pretty accurate) there are scenes of the engineers using slide rules to make major calculations about the flight.

Nowdays 64KB is what you'd find in a programmable toaster or coffee maker.

Fun with Hollerith cards.

That's pretty interesting - was your dad involved in the ARPA net back in the day?

No I just copied the title from the article at the source. Link provided up top.

In the movie "Apollo 13" (which I presume is pretty accurate) there are scenes of the engineers using slide rules to make major calculations about the flight.

I know that the original calculators didn't become widely available until about 1973 or so. They could only add, subtract, multiply and divide, and didn't even have a floating decimal point. They cost more than $200 (probably more than $1000) in today's dollars. Today I could get a better calculator for $1 at a dollar store.

Wasn't Al Gore the inventor of the Internet? I don't see his signature authorizing reproduction of the drawing without license.

A lot of that computer architecture is almost before my time. I had to look up PDP though I thought I knew it.... Programmed Data Processor.

It's a network map. But the protocol used in today's internet is certainly different from the one used with that diagram. I'm sure even email was not something that network could handle as it probably hadn't been invented yet. But networking is meaningless without some data going between the nodes so...

I'd term it a network, but to call it the first internet is to me not accurate. But I'd call it an ancestor, perhaps much as a camp fire is an ancestor to the modern oven.

In the movie "Apollo 13" (which I presume is pretty accurate) there are scenes of the engineers using slide rules to make major calculations about the flight.

We're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing. Looking back, given the technology with with it was done, that accomplishment will be considered one of the wonders of the world.

We're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing. Looking back, given the technology with with it was done, that accomplishment will be considered one of the wonders of the world.

Hurling men into a vacuum in 1960s technology on a giant firecracker maintaining life support....Yeah pretty awesome and wonderful. Real heroes sat on top of stories of explosives. Right Stuff. You bet.