[ih] ARPANET vs ARPAnet?

[Dave Crocker]

Vint Cerf wrote:
>     > IEEE style guide says "Arpanet: the oldest of the networks on the
>     > Internet; initial capital only"
> 
> Uggh. *Totally* bletchiferous. Worse than all three of the other options, any
> of which I would *much* prefer to this.
> 
> And how do we straighten out the IEEE? Would pointing out that all the
> original documents use "ARPANET" do the trick?


OK.  So there's not much question that "ARPANET" was the original form.

The question is whether the string ought to be permitted to mature.

Lower case was rare back then.  In addition all upper case is geeky.

Now, maybe geeky is fine, and certainly falling back on claims of 
historical accuracy make the all-upper choice valid.

My own view is that terms should become a naturalized part of the 
languge and that means they should match normal case choices.

So I happen to think that "Arpanet" is more refined...

d/

ps. THis also means we should get the hyphen out of email.

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net