[ih] ARPANET history - any memories of CSnet & NEARnet

[Miles Fidelman]

Thanks Jack!

These are GREAT resources.  And particularly relevant to my current 
efforts to launch "civic.net" - essentially an "internet of community 
networks."  Kind of a followup to my earlier work at the Center for 
Civic Networking, trying to apply Internet style governance models to 
reinvigorating local town meetings (with some modest success).

This time around, I'm trying to apply some lessons learned by us, and 
others, in the design & application of FreeNets and other kinds of 
"community networks" - to provide focal points and tools for the growing 
number of projects that are trying to organize community-scale responses 
to climate change.

Right now, I'm in early program development mode, and I've been looking 
at the Internet, email, the web, FOSS, and the post Earth Day 
environmental movement as startup models - and the history of how the 
ARPANET grew from a germ of an idea, in a few people's heads, into 
global infrastructure has stuck with me.  These documents filled in a 
few holes in my knowledge of the formative days.

It's occurred to me that both CSnet & NEARnet are even clearer models of 
a pressing need, and a few people getting together to make things 
happen.  (I still think the 3-page NEARnet memorandum-of-agreement is a 
masterpiece.)

Given that some of the key players are on this list, I wonder if anybody 
might be willing to share - on-list or privately - their recollections 
of the earliest days - how the ideas of CSnet & NEARnet first arose, and 
how they evolved from the germ of an idea to running systems (who 
said/did what, to whom, when, where, how, why, etc.).  And if anybody 
here can suggest who might provide similar input re. USENET and BITNET - 
that would be an embarrassment of riches.

Thanks very much,

Miles Fidelman


Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> FYI, I stumbled across a government report written in 1990 but that I 
> hadn't seen before now.   It contains a summary of the creation and 
> evolution of the ARPANET and the beginnings of the Internet. Where it 
> talks about things that I personally experienced, it agrees with my 
> recollections.   So I tend to trust the other things it says that are 
> new to me even today.  I thought that internet-historians might be 
> interested too.
>
> The report is non-technical, but highlights some of the reasons for 
> the success of the project, leading to the Internet we have today, 
> such as the way in which people moved around between organizations, 
> political and managerial decisions within parts of the government, 
> activities for moving the technology from research to operations, and 
> other such non-technical drivers of the success of the Internet.
>
> See https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA239925.pdf    -- Chapter XX 
> (page 243)
>
> /Jack Haverty
>
>


-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown