At 07:17 PM 8/3/2002 -0400, Joe Gwinn wrote:
[snip]
>>But government - in any country - did not "invent" the internet. That is
>>certainly just not true.
>
>Umm. No, it *is* true. US DoD's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency)
>provided all the original funding. Their intent was to build a communications
>system that would survive nuclear war, which meant that the communications
>system could not be centralized. Because the system had to be able to survive
>the abrupt loss of any subset of nodes and links, all nodes and links had to
>be able to constitute themselves into a working network without manual
>intervention. (There are a number of histories of the birth of the ARPANET,
>the predecessor of the Internet, that tell the story.)
And virtually all of them get the story wrong, too. One of the actual
architects of the early ARPA initiative was interviewed for a lengthy article a
few years back in "The Sciences" (IIRC), disabusing his audience of the notion
that the Internet grew out of an initiative to have a network that could
survive a nuclear war. The *real* reason the basics of the network were
created back then was because researchers in various locations around the
country all wanted access to the same mainframe computers at the same time, and
back then, it was pretty much a "one computer, one terminal" affair. After
about a half hour of lobbying his immediate manager for funds, this individual
walked out of the meeting with $500 G's of funding (and in the late-1960s, to
boot) and a few ideas.
The rest is history. Details in the article "Casting the Net" in the
September/October 1996 issue of "The Sciences," published by the New York
Academy of Sciences. (Can't find my issue at the moment, but whatever...)
Garth
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