Welcome to Advent of Computing, the show that talks about the shocking, intriguing, and all too often relevant history of computing. A lot of little things we take for granted today have rich stories behind their creation, in each episode we will learn how older tech has lead to our modern world.
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episode 59: ALOHANET
ALOHANET was a wireless networking project started at the University of Hawaii in 1968. Initially, it had relatively little to do with ARPANET. But that relative isolation didn't last for long. As the two networks matured and connected together we start to see the first vision of a modern Internet. That alone is interesting, but what brings this story to the next level is the protocol developed for ALOHANET. Ya see, in this wireless network data delivery wasn't guaranteed. Everyone user shared a single radio channel, and terminals could talk over each other. So how did ALOHANET even function?
Selected sources used in this episode:
https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0707853 - The initial 1970 ALOHANET report
https://archive.org/details/jresv86n6p591_A1b/page/n3/mode/2up - Summary paper by Kuo, contains a map of ALOHANET
https://sci-hub.do/10.1145/1499949.1499983 - Khan's 1973 PRNET paperhttps://www.eng.hawaii.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/abramson1985-Development-of-the-ALOHANET.pdf - 1985 wrap-up of ALOHANET, by Abramson
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