Memory, and the Internet of '94

It was October of '94, and I'd just gotten myself an account on the Aristotle network, which was a 2MB (wow! more than a floppy!) home directory that I could access from the new laboratories around the campus. This was a direct copy of the Project Athena system at MIT, we just used NFS instead of AFS, dunno why.

Now, the entire university campus had a single 9600bps link to the internet, that was about 500-1000 computers at that time, most of them disconnected from the internal network. I remember getting FTP speeds of 10 bytes/second. Most downloads would be by ftp-mail (an email-to-ftp gateway), which would compilate matters as most mail transfer agents had 64KB message limits. A single computer had a dedicated modem that would connect during low-rate hours via a non-routable connection to another computer in Athens, which was better connected to the Net. People that had accounts to both machines were widely sought after :-).

After the '94-'95 Christmas leave, I noticed that the 'Net was blazingly fast! Some search and talks later, I was told that the University had gotten a dedicated 64kbps link. Happy happy joy joy, as I had started to discover the web (via Mosaic).