[ih] Fw: Free Speech and ARPAnet?

[Belin, Daniel]

All,

I just wanted to thank everyone here who responded, provided interesting
perspectives and a lot of new knowledge (at least for me!).

It's really so cool to see this great conversation from you all, who were
actually there at the beginning (!).

Thanks so much.

Cordially,

Dan

*_______________________________________*
+1(703) 209-9608 | @dfbelin <https://twitter.com/dfbelin> | danielbel.in

On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 3:54 PM, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:

> >I'm more with the viewpoint previously expressed, that the freebooting
> >nature of the Internet was imported more from Usenet than the ARPAnet.
>
> I was never on the Arpanet (our department chair at Yale for some
> reason didn't think it was interesting) but it was always my
> impression that beyond the commercial restrictions of the AUP, nobody
> was anonymous and it was generally understood that if you were unduly
> annoying there would be repercussions.
>
> Usenet, on the other hand, was an unfunded project that ran under the
> radar for a long time.  Many (most?) of the servers were Unix systems
> whose primary job was to do something else, and the substantial
> telephone costs of the uucp transfers were mostly hidden in corporate
> phone budgets, particularly the ones at Bell Labs.  There was also a
> lot of friendly cooperation -- I spent one summer at our house at the
> NJ shore, brought my server with me, carefully looked at the phone
> rates and found that the node at the FAA's test center was a free
> local call even though it was over 30 miles away, and the guy who ran
> it kindly gave me a login to use for uucp and usenet.
>
> Given the sketchiness of the setup, we all (or nearly all) understood
> that if we were annoying we were likely to lose our connections, but
> given the much lower overall visibility, the discussions were pretty
> unfettered.
>
> R's,
> John
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