[ih] Internet or internet i

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Karl Auerbach 

    > It is largely a matter of personal whim.

Not quite; the two words do (or were supposed to) have different meanings.

    > never really felt a need to elevate one or the other to a level that
    > suggested that there were no others.

I recall (and contributed to, IIRC) the discussions which led to adoption of
'Internet'.

The motivation for adopting a name for 'the' Internet was mostly practical,
IIRC - we needed to be able to distinguish between the one large internet
which many people were connected to, and the many smaller ones (which in those
days were a lot more common, it wasn't an automatically done thing to connect
one's LAN to the Internet - in fact, at that point, there weren't even
products to enable one to do so - and IIRC it also pre-dated the commercial
availabilty of LANs).

The use of the capitalized form for the large internet struck us as
appropriate since there was a lot of precedent for distinguishing a
particular, significant member of a class with captital letters - 'White
House' for instance. Had I known that down the line people (e.g. the AP) would
see it as a matter of taste, I'd have argued for using a different word
entirely.

Also, I don't think that at the time, everyone bought into the vision that the
collection of TCP/IP networks was going to grow into the ubiquitous Internet
of today, which might have been a possible motivator for what some might see
as a grandiose name. (Had people done so, the variable length addresses of
IPv3 would surely not have been jettisoned.) Indeed, quite a few years later,
large parts of what had by then become the IETF were still on board with the
'TCP->ISO conversion' (or whatever the jargon was, my memory of it has faded).

	  Noel