[ih] ARPANET and Apollo 11

[John Day]

I would really have to disagree with this. And this is mistake that the press makes a lot.  Confusing the Internet with the uses of the Internet.

My favorite example was a very short New York Times article merely reporting HP 3rd quarter earnings that said they weren’t performing as well as Google, Salesforce.com <http://salesforce.com/>, and another, I think it was Facebook. But none of these companies are in the same market space as HP. It was a ludicrous comparison.

The Internet is not the use of the Internet.

Right now, I would be concerned about the reputation of the Internet.  Most of what people are hearing about it is identity theft, the loss of privacy, cyber-crime, cyber-warefare, threats to their well-being, if not caused, enabled by the Internet.  We are lucky to live in a period with a relatively docile population that seems to take the attitude that it is hopeless to try to do anything about it.  50 - 100 years ago, it could be looked on as the instigator of the end of a rather idyllic period, that is if the Ministry of Truth even allows it to be known what a time before the Internet was like.


> On Mar 12, 2015, at 23:48, Ian Peter <ian.peter at ianpeter.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 
> 
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