[ih] ARPANET and Apollo 11

[Ian Peter]

well, Noel, the piston engine was a pretty important precursor to the 
engines which powered the space landing too. Without it the space landing 
would have never happened. I agree Arpanet carries a similar relationship to 
the Internet.

But to get to any understanding of what the Internet is as known today, you 
need to add to the Arpanet developments such as WWW(which you mention), the 
personal computer, broadband, Windows style OS, mobile phones, tablets, 
ecommerce engines, social networking, substantial microprocessor 
developments, and so many developments and interfaces that anyone looking at 
what was happening in 1969 would not see it as the same thing.

Ian Peter



-----Original Message----- 
From: Noel Chiappa
Sent: Friday, March 13, 2015 2:30 PM
To: internet-history at postel.org
Cc: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Re: [ih] ARPANET and Apollo 11

    > 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