[ih] New Republic Article - "How We Misremember the Internet’s Origins"

[Vint Cerf]

this is a totally bullshit article. For once I agree with Karl, I think.
It's basically a "what about" pivot full of irrelevance with regard to the
ARPANET and subsequent Internet developments that really were essentially
technical until commercialization entered into the picture, first with
equipment (routers/ethernet) and then services (ISPs) and then commercial
domain names and the WWW. Then social networking....

that sequence strikes me as largely orthogonal to the rant in the New
Republic.

bleah.

v


On Fri, Nov 1, 2019 at 11:43 AM Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> wrote:

> This got forwarded to me this morning:
> How We Misremember the Internet’s Origins
>
> https://newrepublic.com/article/155532/misremember-internets-origins
>
> This article seems very screedy to me.  Yeah we all knew that ARPA was a
> branch of the US Dept of Defense.  And we all knew that in at least some
> minds (especially the group I worked for, the Joint Chiefs of Staff)
> survivable communications during nuclear war were a concern.
>
> What rubs me wrong is how this article seems to try to paint people
> working on network ideas as somehow evil, somehow linked to the bad things
> such as the treatment of California indigenous peoples by the Spanish
> missionaries of the 18th century.
>
> OK, yeah, it is true that some some, and I emphasize only some, of the
> motivations for the ARPAnet tributary stream that eventually merged with
> others to for The Internet, were military and not the most politically
> correct in today's world.
>
> But there were a lot of other forces, motivations, and ideas at work.
>
> For example, pretty soon after I worked with the JCS I also started to get
> ideas coming out of Dave Farber's DCS project.  The idea of restructuring
> entire computers and operating systems around networks was something
> revolutionary to me.  And we see that idea now fruiting in the web of APIs
> now available on the net to build applications.  AWS and Google Map APIs
> are, to my mind, a direct result of Farber's DCS.
>
> The article fails to acknowledge those streams as well as the engendering
> of social networking via things like bulletin boards and Usenet.  And to
> me, that removes the foundation of credibility from the article.
>
>     --karl--
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