[ih] ARPANET and Apollo 11

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: "Ian Peter" <ian.peter at ianpeter.com>

    > The launch of Arpanet has about the same relationship to the Internet
    > as the invention of the piston engine has to the Apollo moon landing.

I don't agree. First, the ARPANET was a key building block of the early
Internet (it was _the_ long-haul network tying together work at all the
various sites working on the early Internet, such as SRI, ISI, MIT, BBN,
etc). Next, the structure which evolved for protocol design on the ARPANET was
taken over, more or less as is (although slowly modified over time, of
course), by the early Internet work;there's a reason that there's one RFC
series that slowly segues from NCP-based protocols to TCP/IP-based
protocols. Finally - and perhaps the most telling of the close connection
between the two - all the early applications (TELNET, FTP, email, etc) were
straight ports of the ARPANET versions. It wasn't until we got to the Web that
we saw something sui generis.

	Noel