[ih] Question - reference source for formal decommissioning of ARPANET in 1990?

[Dan York]

Question for this group… does anyone know of a source (preferably online) that says something definitive about the decommissioning of the ARPANET in 1990?

As I mentioned some time back, I’ve been doing some editing of Wikipedia pages as a personal project during these pandemic days, and on both of these pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

There is the statement:

  "The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.”

This was flagged by another editor as “citation needed”. In searching around, I found many articles that made a reference to the ARPANET being decommissioned in 1990 (either in February or July depending upon the article), but nothing I would call “definitive” (or in Wikipedia lingo a “reliable source<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources>”). Most articles seem to be repeating info that probably came from other articles!   But nothing “official” that states that ARPANET ended in 1990.

I searched in our own (ISOC) history docs. I found an ICANNWiki page<https://icannwiki.org/ARPANET> that similarly states at the end that the ARPANET was shut down in 1990 but again provides no source. I searched RFCs. I searched for early NSFNet documents that might mention it. I’ve found many articles (including from people on this list) about the birth and early years of the ARPANET, but haven’t yet found anything about its ending.

Any suggestions or pointers?

Thanks,
Dan

P.S. For the purpose of removing the “citation needed” flag, I added a reference on one of those links to a 2019 media article that mentioned the ARPANET ending in 1990, but that’s not a good reference and I’d like to replace it with something more definitive.

--
Dan York, Director, Web Strategy / Project Leader, Open Standards Everywhere<https://www.internetsociety.org/ose/> / Internet Society
york at isoc.org<mailto:york at isoc.org> / +1-603-439-0024 / @danyork<https://twitter.com/danyork>
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