From telnet to the WWW.


Connecting via telnet and learning some basic commands in order to search for a title wasn't really very complicated. It probably only looked that way. Southern Methodist University was developing a computerized search facility that was apparently rather cutting-edge for its time. I'm sure that the actual process of getting into the library catalog was much simpler than it seemed from the explanation, but getting through the explanation seemed to require an advanced academic degree:
 

PONI still exists today, and much of the catalog has been transferred to the web (with the rest probably soon to come). Knowing only the name of the university and the catalog, it took less than five minutes to find PONI on the web (http://webpac.smu.edu/) and to start running a search in one of the available libraries. So even if telnet wasn't very complicated, it's hard to make things easier than they are today.



Go to: ...and to get to school we had to walk through...