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RE: [OM] Further on technology (R&D)

Subject: RE: [OM] Further on technology (R&D)
From: "Henry Bottjer-BA" <hcbottj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 01:07:23 -0400
Well, the Internet may have been developed as a result of government
research needs, but remember the internet is a communications network and
not just the World Wide Web.  Many people associate the internet with www
and email, but (as pointed out by Garth) it wasn't always that way.  The
whole concept of web pages, html, etc. came a bit later on from Tim
Berners-Lee.  The timeline at
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-276771.html?legacy=cnet shows a bit of
history.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Garth Wood
Sent: Saturday, August 03, 2002 8:45 PM
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [OM] Further on technology (R&D)


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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