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

[Karl Auerbach]

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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