[ih] Politics behind the Internet

[Craig Partridge]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2024 at 7:59 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>
>
> IIRC, there was little talk of "spreading" either politically or
> economically.  Simply put, there was no relevant audience reachable
> through the networks.   All users were internal, working on or for
> government projects.
>
>
I broadly agree with Jack but will disagree in one element - it wasn't all
inward focused on ARPA funded folks.  By 1980, computer science programs in
the United States noticed that departments that had ARPANET access were
experiencing greater research success, in part because it was easier to
collaborate with other researchers.  This led to the notion of providing
email and (limited) TCP/IP access to the Internet via CSNET, which was set
up as a joint DARPA-NSF program in 1981.  Broadly, that worked -- by 1986,
over 150 universities and research labs (such as HP Labs) were on CSNET, to
which you have to add the many universities directly on ARPANET.
Essentially, any top 100 and most top 200 research universities in the US
were on ARPANET or CSNET.

Thus when NSF was looking for a way to supercharge computing and research
in STEM, with supercomputers and network access, CSNET showed how that
could work.

Craig

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