[ih] Peter Salus / Baran's work

[Miles Fidelman]

John Day wrote:
> I think the nuclear war meme is really more tightly associated with the Internet than the ARPANET.  Remember when the ARPANET started, it was the height of the Vietnam War and the DoD was not very popular on college campuses.  In fact, I have heard tell there was initial reticence to being on the ARPANET because it was DoD, which lead to John Melvin’s famous line about ARPA, “It’s okay, our money is only bloody on one side.”  ;-)
>
> In 1970, it was far too early to talk about military use, since they didn’t know if it would work. Although it was pretty obvious that tif it did, it would have military uses. One would have not have gotten very far with the argument to build this purely for military use.  And also remember this was before the Muskie Amendment and ARPA was funding fundamental research, like NLS, the ARPANET, IlliacIV, etc.
>
>
On this, the record, and the oral history is crystal clear - the ARPANET 
was initially about making it easy to share resources - notably to let 
ARPA funded researchers use each others computers, without lots of 
travel costs or leased lines (remember, this was the age of one-off 
systems, not commoditized boxes and operating systems).

ARPANET mades its way into military use as a result of military folks 
adopting ARPANET email as a simpler, faster tool than the message 
switches of the day - leading to the DDN (I assume some folks remember 
the AUTODIN II shootout :-).  And then came all the tactical packet 
switching work.

It took years for packet technology to become mainstream for military 
use, and for message switching and telephony to take back seats (can you 
say ethernet vs. ISDN?), and we still have huge tactical telephony 
infrastructure.

Miles Fidelman



-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra