more on 35th Anniversary of the Internet (well the start of the Arpanet anyway djf)

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Ian Peter <ian.peter () ianpeter com>
Date: October 4, 2004 4:24:11 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: RE: [IP] more on 35th Anniversary of the Internet (well the 
start of the Arpanet anyway djf)

Hi Dave,

there's been a bit of a debate about Internet beginnings in our
Internet History newsletters (see www.nethistory.info) over the
last couple of months. To paraphrase:


In "Where Wizard Stay Up Late", we hear of a difference of
opinion between Bob Kahn (Co-inventor of TCP/IP) and Bob Taylor
(head of the Arpanet Project where the Internet supposedly
began) as to whether the beginning is Arpanet (1969) or TCP/IP
(1973).

The most common theory on Internet beginnings is the
Pentagon/1969/nuclear war theory. We can trace it back to
Silicon Valley gossip columnist Robert Cringely in his
"Accidental Empires" (first published 1992), and repeated in his
Nerds 2.01 television series later in the 1990s.  That's enough
to make in common opinion, but not enough to make it accurate!
Most historians dispute at least one aspect of this.

In the History of the Internet Ebook, I wrote as follows

"Neither the Pentagon nor 1969 hold up as
the time and place the Internet was invented. A project which
began in the Pentagon that year, called Arpanet, gave birth to
the Internet protocols sometime later (during the 1970's), but
1969 was not the Internet's beginnings. Surviving a nuclear
attack was not Arpanet's motivation, nor was building a global
communications network."

"What Arpanet did in 1969 that was important was to develop a
variation of a technique called packet switching. In 1965,
before Arpanet came into existence, an Englishman called Donald
Davies had proposed a similar facility to Arpanet in the United
Kingdom, the NPL Data Communications Network. It never got
funded; but Donald Davies did develop the concept of packet
switching, a means by which messages can travel from point to
point across a network. Although others in the USA were working
on packet switching techniques at the same time (notably Leonard
Kleinrock and Paul Baran), it was the UK version that Arpanet
first adopted." (www.theinternettapes.com)

Kim Veltman of the McLuhan Institute (see the link from our
International Histories page at www.nethistory.info) takes the
"packet
switching equals the Internet" argument a little further, and
suggests that the Europeans invented the Internet if that's the
case. He points to Louis Pouzin, who introduced the idea of data
grams and an Englishman, Donald W. Davies,  who was one of the
inventors of packet-switching as being important in the origins.

To quote Kim's paper,

"The National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain set up the
first test network on these principles [of packet switching] in
1968. Shortly afterward, the Pentagon's Advanced Research
Projects Agency decided to fund a larger, more ambitious project
in the USA. Hence an English project of 1968 inspired the
beginnings of the US Internet in 1969".

Ronda Hauben disputes the packet switching theory. To quote her
forthcoming paper,

"The history of the ARPANET and of packet switching, however,
is not the history of the Internet. To quote Robert Kahn, "What
the ARPANET didn't address was the issue of interconnecting
multiple networks and all the attendant issues that raised.""


And in our October newsletter Mitra Ardron takes it further with
another theory altogether.

"I would suggest that defining the history of the internet by the
particular protocol that won is only one way to do it. Ask
yourself - would it still be the internet if we were using ATM,
or X.25 or any of the other competing protocols? Of course it
would.

An alternative view of history tracks the history of the Internet
as the ubiquitous use of electronic "online" communications. The
history belongs at the applications level - with the development
of email, with the progression from proprietary databases to
Gopher and Wais to the World Wide Web, and from newsgroups and
conferencing through mailing lists and blogs.

One very significant trend which tends to get ignored is the
various online systems, the early Source, Compuserve, Dialcom,
and of course APC networks, Fidonet etc. If anything, the history
of the use of the Internet, at least from the point of view of
the public, owes more to that stream of development than the more
common version.

From that perspective, the switch from X.25 to TCP/IP around say
'92 for the transport was just something that was done when
cost/benefit of TCP/IP dropped below that of X.25."


So I don't think we have a defining birth date yet!


Ian Peter
Senior Partner
Ian Peter and Associates Pty Ltd
P.O. Box 10670 Adelaide St
Brisbane 4000 Australia
Tel (617) 3870 1181
Fax (617) 3105 7404
Mobile (614) 1966 7772
www.ianpeter.com
www.nethistory.info
www.internetmark2.org (Internet Analysis Report - 2004 now
available)
www.theinternettapes.com (check out the new Internet history
Audio CD and Ebook at this site)



> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ip () v2 listbox com
> [mailto:owner-ip () v2 listbox com] On Behalf Of Dave Farber
> Sent: Tuesday, 5 October 2004 1:25 AM
> To: ip () v2 listbox com
> Subject: [IP] more on 35th Anniversary of the Internet (well
> the start of the Arpanet anyway djf)
>
>
> ...... Forwarded Message .......
> From: John Shoch <shoch () alloyventures com>
> To: dave () farber net
> Date: Mon, 04 Oct 2004 07:52:22 -0700
> Subj: RE: [IP] 35th Anniversary of the Internet (well the
> start of the Arpanet anyway djf)
>
> Dave,
>
> There was a lot of great work done on both the Arpanet
> (packet switching) and the Internet (internetworking), and
> lots of people deserve credit.
> But the packets in 1969 were not internet packets, had no
> internet addressing, could not have been forwarded to a
> different network, etc., etc.
>
> This is rather like dating television back to Marconi -- a
stretch.
> -------------------------------------
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