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

[Brian E Carpenter]

Dan,

According to Hafner & Lyon in "Where wizards stay up late", pages 255-256 in my edition: "By the end of 1989, the ARPANET was gone." They describe a progressive shutdown managed by Mark Pullen during 1989. That book was published in 1996, so it was recent history.

RFC2235 says that in 1990 "ARPANET ceases to exist" with no month given.

This reference also says 1990 with no month: Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry G. Roberts, and Stephen Wolff. 2009. A brief history of the internet. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 39, 5 (October 2009), 22–31. DOI: 10.1145/1629607.1629613

The last time Net 10 was listed as "ARPANET" in the Assigned Numbers/Internet Numbers series of RFCs was RFC1166 in July 1990. (Maybe that's where the July 1990 date came from, if Hafner & Lyon are correct?) 

Jon reassigned Net 10 for other purposes by March 1994. It's hard to tell exactly when he removed the ARPANET reservation, since RFC1166 was the last of its line, unless somebody has historical dumps of the IANA address registry. Or if someone has Internet routing tables from 1989/90, when the did the route to Net 10 disappear?

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

On 02-Dec-20 14:56, Dan York via Internet-history wrote:
> 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
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> 
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