<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>This got forwarded to me this morning:<br>
</p>
<div class="article-title" data-reactid="119"><span
data-reactid="121">How We Misremember the Internet’s Origins</span></div>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://newrepublic.com/article/155532/misremember-internets-origins">https://newrepublic.com/article/155532/misremember-internets-origins</a></p>
<p>This article seems very screedy to me. Yeah we all knew that
ARPA was a branch of the US Dept of Defense. And we all knew that
in at least some minds (especially the group I worked for, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff) survivable communications during nuclear
war were a concern.</p>
<p>What rubs me wrong is how this article seems to try to paint
people working on network ideas as somehow evil, somehow linked to
the bad things such as the treatment of California indigenous
peoples by the Spanish missionaries of the 18th century.</p>
<p>OK, yeah, it is true that some some, and I emphasize only some,
of the motivations for the ARPAnet tributary stream that
eventually merged with others to for The Internet, were military
and not the most politically correct in today's world.</p>
<p>But there were a lot of other forces, motivations, and ideas at
work.<br>
</p>
<p>For example, pretty soon after I worked with the JCS I also
started to get ideas coming out of Dave Farber's DCS project. The
idea of restructuring entire computers and operating systems
around networks was something revolutionary to me. And we see
that idea now fruiting in the web of APIs now available on the net
to build applications. AWS and Google Map APIs are, to my mind, a
direct result of Farber's DCS.</p>
<p>The article fails to acknowledge those streams as well as the
engendering of social networking via things like bulletin boards
and Usenet. And to me, that removes the foundation of credibility
from the article.</p>
<p> --karl--<br>
</p>
</body>
</html>