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

[Craig Partridge]

ACM SIGCOMM CCR, October 1990, p. 81 has an introduction to a collection of
ARPANET maps with comments from Vint Cerf.  The intro starts with "The
ARPANET was turned off this summer, after over 20 years in service."  The
introduction also has a timeline and its last entry is "July '90 - The
ARPANET is retired."

For reasons unclear, ACM has chosen not to digitize this part of CCR or its
intro but you can see it in the table of contents (
https://dl-acm-org.ezproxy2.library.colostate.edu/action/showFmPdf?doi=10.1145%2F381906
).

Craig (who was CCR editor at the time and has a copy near his desk...)



On Tue, Dec 1, 2020 at 6:56 PM Dan York via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> 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
> york at isoc.org<mailto:york at isoc.org> / +1-603-439-0024 / @danyork<
> https://twitter.com/danyork>
> <https://www.internetsociety.org/>
>
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>
> --
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>


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