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East High School is the closest public high school to the University of Utah. Because of this proximity the school was fortunate to get a direct T1 (1.5 Mbps) connection in 1992 (93?).

The original domain was east.east-slc.edu before it was standardized to east.k12.ut.us circa 1995.

After school every day for a few hours the East High CS room would be full of students exploring the new online world: surfing gopher, playing MUDs, Usenet, and using NCSA Mozilla on the DEC station. This is when Yahoo! was all hand curated.

Students could even dial in to one of 2 modems and connect to the Internet from home. It was glorious.



A high school with a T1 connection was pretty sick! I don't know quite how to translate it into terms younger readers can appreciate.


5 gigabit symmetric right now, if you're American.


The thing is, nobody in the US cares about the network any more; it's been good enough for twenty years. I don't even know how fast mine is. It was very different then. People had modems that pushed 9.6kbps, 14.4kbps, 28.8kbps, 33.6kbps, then 56kbps. Each upgrade was substantial because it was the limiting factor -- I remember each one, as you can see -- and obviously way slower than that mythical T1.


> nobody in the US cares about the network any more

Definitely not true if you live in a rural area.


I can personally attest to this, until I moved out to the city, I was significantly kneecapped in terms of what speeds I could have and it had an impact given how many services just implicitly assume you have high bandwidth and more or less lock you out if you don't. And I was one of the "lucky" ones in the sense that I was on a well known national cable provider, heaven forbid you were on telecom DSL or (for the really poor sods out there) V.92 or ISDN.


Is this true? I thought it was closer to 5 megabit.


Skyline High School had a teletype terminal by 1978. I think it connected to the University of Utah, though I am not absolutely certain. But that was a long way below a T1 line...


I recall in the late 70s that my high school also had a teletype terminal and an IBM card reader that connected to a mainframe for the whole school district. As a student I had some awareness that it was unusual. I was also working PT at a Radio Shack at the same time and saw the first arrival of a TRS-80 to our store.

Despite that early exposure to computing technology I went other directions for the next couple decades.


Some Utah school districts still use the k12.ut.us domain in places, for school and grade management: https://skystu.jordan.k12.ut.us/




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