[ih] Origination date for the Internet

[Bob Hinden]

Bob,

On Oct 28, 2010, at 10:40 AM, Bob Braden wrote:

> It is perhaps fun to identify all the technical milestones during
> R&D on internetworking, on IP, on TCP, on PUP, on packet radios in bread trucks, in packet satellites, ... , perhaps even on packet switching, none of these seem very germane to the original question -- when did *THE Internet* enter service.
> 
> Speaking as one of the soldiers in the trenches at the time,
> I have always counted the beginning of THE Internet as Jan 1, 1983. That was (to some us, memorable and for Dan Lynch, traumatic)
> the crunch time when we freed ourselves from the good old reliable
> NCP and leapt into the TCP/IP world.  (Was the new thing REALLY
> going to work at some realistic scale?) And we took with us a
> significant population of real network users, which justifies the
> capital I on Internet.
> 
> Someone had a T shirt bearing the inscription "I survived Jan 1, 1983" or something like that. I wish I had one.
> 

I still have my "I Survived the TCP Transition 1/1/83" red button.

In my view this was the time when the Internet became operational as people starting using it for their day to day work, instead of a set of researchers.  Conception and birth occurred earlier :-)

Bob