Xref: utzoo alt.folklore.computers:6188 comp.misc:10357
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bu.edu!shelby!eos!eugene
From: eugene@eos.arc.nasa.gov (Eugene Miya)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Internet: The origins
Message-ID: <7449@eos.arc.nasa.gov>
Date: 16 Oct 90 17:56:02 GMT
References: <1990Oct14.055739.7971@nmt.edu>
Reply-To: eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya)
Followup-To: alt.folklore.computers
Distribution: na
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Calif.
Lines: 63

In article <1990Oct14.055739.7971@nmt.edu> pefsnsr@jupiter.nmt.edu
(Paul Ford) writes:
>	(1) when was Internet created and by whom?
>
>and,	(2) what was the oiginal intended purpose of the network?

No one answered the question.  (The answer being 42).
Well, it kind of depends on how you regard its origins (Official:
early 1980s or when many pieces were in place).  Far better
experts are out there than me.

It sort of began before the ARPAnet.  You can read a couple of good
papers in Sieworiek, Bell, and Newell's old book on computer architecture
on the ARPAnet and Kuo's ALOHAnet (U. Hawaii).  It was an effort to
connect different kinds of computers together back when a school or
company had only one (that's 1) computer.  The first configuration of
the ARPAnet had only 4 computers, I had luckily selected school at one
of those 4 sites: UCLA/Rand Corp, UCSB (us), SRI, and the U of Utah.

Who? The US DOD: Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency.
ARPA was the sugar daddy of computer science.  Some very bright people
were given some money, freedom, and had a lot of vision.  It not only
started computer networks, but also computer graphics, computer flight
simulation, head mounted displays, parallel processing,
queuing models, VLSI, and a host of other ideas.  Far from being evil
warmongers, some neat work was done.

Why?  Lots of reasons: intellectual curosity, the need to have different
machines communicate, study fault tolerance of communications systems
in event of nuclear war, share and connect expensive resources,
very soft ideas to very hard ideas.  I wish some of the audio ideas
had gone further, VMS phone and Unix talk are kinda stupid, your
terminal or workstation should do audio (like a NeXT or an Etherphone).
[You get into areas where society isn't ready for computers here:
poltiical or social structure.]

I first saw the term "internetwork" in paper by folk from Xerox PARC
(another ARPAnet host).
The issue was one of interconnecting Ethernets (which had the
~256 [slightly less] host limitation).  Schoch's CACM worm program
paper is a good one.

I learned much of this with the help of the NIC (Network Information Center).

This does not mean the Internet is like this today.  I think the
early ARPAnet was kind of a wonderous neat place, sort of a golden
era.  You could get into other people's machines with a minimum of hassle
(someone else paid the bills).  No more.  There were commercial developments:
IBM had some stuff, but they had fairly homogeneous machines (DEC, too),
then there is Telenet [GTE] and Tymnet [McD-D], and other services.

--e.n. miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@eos.arc.nasa.gov
  {uunet,mailrus,most gateways}!ames!eugene
Where did I fit in?  I was a frosh nuclear engineering major hacker
(2 AM-4 AM, some times on Fridays and weekends rather than doing student
things: studying or dating, etc.) who was learning rather than implementing
things (well I did do an interactive SPSS and learned a lot playing chess
on an MIT[-MC] DEC-10 from an IBM-360).  Think of the problems:
32-bit versus 36-bit, different character set [remember I started with EBCDIC],
FTP then is largely FTP now, has changed very little.  We didn't have
text editors available to students on the IBM (yes you could use the ARPAnet
via card decks).  Learned a lot.
I wish I had hacked more.