It's for porn, you know.

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1622180]

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I thought that Warwick was still on X.25 in 1987...

[redshira.livejournal.com]

Ah, I shall have to ask Mr Beckett. I might have got it wrong, being far from knowledgeable in these things.

[royan.livejournal.com]

Some external connections still needed X.25 (if you wanted to get a terminal session to an Essex Computer Service host, say, though who knows why anyone would have been inclined to do that at 2am most nights for a couple of years) but IP was certainly being implemented around that time. Quite apart from external connectivity, we were programming to IP for local applications from, oh, shall we say the second week of the first year? :) You know, just after we found out that the Pascal we'd carefully learned over the summer was next to useless for anything system-programming-y.

The question speaks of "the internet", though, and regardless of IP implementation, that was certainly available from the get-go for email, Usenet etc.