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From: malc@tahoe.unr.edu (Malcolm L. Carlock)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Internet: The origins
Message-ID: <4775@tahoe.unr.edu>
Date: 17 Oct 90 05:01:53 GMT
References: <1990Oct14.055739.7971@nmt.edu> <1990Oct14.191149.29927@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <*QY%WN#@rpi.edu> <4771@tahoe.unr.edu> <4773@tahoe.unr.edu>
Reply-To: malc@tahoe.unr.edu (Malcolm L. Carlock)
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Organization: We are the Fighting Uruk-Hai, Doodah, Doodah
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In article <*QY%WN#@rpi.edu> sigma@pawl.rpi.edu (Kevin J Martin) writes:
>gsh7w@astsun.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Hennessy) writes:
>>In article <1990Oct14.055739.7971@nmt.edu> pefsnsr@jupiter.nmt.edu (Paul Ford) writes:
>>[Internet to be administered by IBM, possibly due to Houston Chronicle
>> trash?]

Is this confirmed?  Where did the original information appear?

>I think he's worth thumbing our collective noses at.  He can be the one who
>IBM sends to the hundreds/thousands of universities and a wide variety of
>private institutions to inform them of how IBM is going to commandeer their
>Internet.

Last time I heard, IBM barely had a USENET feed at all, and the trickle they
did have was regarded by them with the deepest suspicion.  Wonder if we can
expect them to "clean things up real good" ?  And does it mean that email and
file transfer will now be based on the 80-column computer card model as is
the case on BITNET?  :-D

Seriously, I wonder about the wisdom of handing over a (highly successful)
network whose nature is nonproprietary over to a large and powerful entity
who has, and will probably continue to have, a sizeable interest in its own
proprietary networking strategies.

Indeed, send the bozo around to explain to everyone.  I'm sure the various
sites will be able to come up with some suitable "welcomes" for him.


The ARPANET has been around in some form since at least the very early 1970's.
Conversion to the TCP/IP protocols, which the Internet uses today, began in
1980 or so, with TCP/IP becoming the only accepted protocol on the ARPANET
in 1983.  At about the same time, DARPA funded BBN (Bolt, Baranek, and Newman)
to implement the Internet protocols under Unix, and funded Berkeley to
integrate them into BSD, as part of an effort by DARPA to make an implemen-
tation of the protocols available at low cost.  Right about that time, lots o'
computer science departments were using BSD, and were also picking up second
and third Unix boxes for the first time, and connecting them using local area
networks.  As a result of this timing, and of the particulary useful way that
Berkeley built their internetworking utilities, such as rcp, to use the
protocols, TCP/IP usage took off in a big way, within a relatively short
period of time.

Douglas Comer's book "Internetworking with TCP/IP", from which I've plagiarized
much of the above paragraph, talks further about the history of the Internet
(and need for an Internet), and in greater detail.


It was the USENET which was begun at Duke, rather than the Internet.  I think
they started in the mid 70's or so, using two machines, a 1200 baud line
(classic!) and UUCP.  Later, of course, USENET traffic started to get carried
on the Internet, even eventually getting its own special protocol (NNTP) for
the purpose.  That's a whole 'nother story, however.


There are others who will undoubtedly be able to come up with far more
Internet folklore than I have here.


Malcolm L. Carlock              Internet:  malc@unrvax.unr.edu
				UUCP:      uunet!unrvax!malc