[ih] History of the Economics of the Internet?

[Jack Haverty]

FYI, there's a short but reasonable summary of the history around the 
"INTERgalactic NETwork" here:

https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/4.1/The-Intergalactic-Network-1962-1964/

and Lick's original 1963 memo is here:

https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/memorandum-for-members-and-affiliates-of-the-intergalactic-computer-network

But that doesn't really explain much of the concept, it just opened the 
discussion in subsequent meetings and proposals that in a few years 
resulted in the ARPANET.

Working with and for Lick through much of the 1970s, as a newly minted 
graduate I was thoroughly brought into the cult and didn't realize until 
recently that virtually all of my professional life had something to do 
with implementing Lick's vision.   It was fun too.

/Jack

On 7/29/26 08:16, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow wrote:
> in furtherance of "Lick's vision was broad and deep, envisioning a
> future "intergalactic network" where computers were somehow able to
> communicate with each other to help humans do everything humans do -
> like communicating by email."
>
> of note, there is/was the late Mark Weiser's vision of "Ubiquitous 
> Computing" whereby
> EXCERPTing from Mark Weiser's article, "The Computer for the 
> Twenty-First Century," Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991 
> [link below]:
>
>     The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They
>     weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are
>     indistinguishable from it.
>
>     Consider writing, perhaps the first information technology: The
>     ability to capture a symbolic representation of spoken language
>     for long-term storage freed information from the limits of
>     individual memory. Today this technology is ubiquitous in
>     industrialized countries. Not only do books, magazines and
>     newspapers convey written information, but so do street signs,
>     billboards, shop signs and even graffiti. Candy wrappers are
>     covered in writing. The constant background presence of these
>     products of "literacy technology" does not require active
>     attention, but the information to be conveyed is ready for use at
>     a glance. It is difficult to imagine modern life otherwise.
>
>     Silicon-based information technology, in contrast, is far from
>     having become part of the environment. More than 50 million
>     personal computers have been sold, and nonetheless the computer
>     remains largely in a world of its own. It is approachable only
>     through complex jargon that has nothing to do with the tasks for
>     which which people actually use computers. The state of the art is
>     perhaps analogous to the period when scribes had to know as much
>     about making ink or baking clay as they did about writing.
>
>     The arcane aura that surrounds personal computers is not just a
>     "user interface" problem. My colleagues and I at PARC think that
>     the idea of a "personal" computer itself is misplaced, and that
>     the vision of laptop machines, dynabooks and "knowledge
>     navigators" is only a transitional step toward achieving the real
>     potential of information technology. Such machines cannot truly
>     make computing an integral, invisible part of the way people live
>     their lives. Therefore we are trying to conceive a new way of
>     thinking about computers in the world, one that takes into account
>     the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves
>     to vanish into the background.
>
>     Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of
>     technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn
>     something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When
>     you look at a street sign, for example, you absorb its information
>     without consciously performing the act of reading.. Computer
>     scientist, economist, and Nobelist Herb Simon calls this
>     phenomenon "compiling"; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it the
>     "tacit dimension"; psychologist TK Gibson calls it "visual
>     invariants"; philosophers Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger call
>     it "the horizon" and the "ready-to-hand", John Seely Brown at PARC
>     calls it the "periphery". All say, in essence, that only when
>     things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without
>     thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals.
>
>     The idea of integrating computers seamlessly into the world at
>     large runs counter to a number of present-day trends. "Ubiquitous
>     computing" in this context does not just mean computers that can
>     be carried to the beach, jungle or airport. Even the most powerful
>     notebook computer, with access to a worldwide information network,
>     still focuses attention on a single box. By analogy to writing,
>     carrying a super-laptop is like owning just one very important
>     book. Customizing this book, even writing millions of other books,
>     does not begin to capture the real power of literacy.
>
>     Furthermore, although ubiquitous computers may employ sound and
>     video in addition to text and graphics, that does not make them
>     "multimedia computers." Today's multimedia machine makes the
>     computer screen into a demanding focus of attention rather than
>     allowing it to fade into the background.
>
>     Perhaps most diametrically opposed to our vision is the notion of
>     "virtual reality," which attempts to make a world inside the
>     computer. Users don special goggles that project an artificial
>     scene on their eyes; they wear gloves or even body suits that
>     sense their motions and gestures so that they can move about and
>     manipulate virtual objects. Although it may have its purpose in
>     allowing people to explore realms otherwise inaccessible -- the
>     insides of cells, the surfaces of distant planets, the information
>     web of complex databases -- virtual reality is only a map, not a
>     territory. It excludes desks, offices, other people not wearing
>     goggles and body suits, weather, grass, trees, walks, chance
>     encounters and in general the infinite richness of the universe.
>     Virtual reality focuses an enormous apparatus on simulating the
>     world rather than on invisibly enhancing the world that already
>     exists.
>
>     Indeed, the opposition between the notion of virtual reality and
>     ubiquitous, invisible computing is so strong that some of us use
>     the term "embodied virtuality" to refer to the process of drawing
>     computers out of their electronic shells. The "virtuality" of
>     computer-readable data -- all the different ways in which it can
>     be altered, processed and analyzed -- is brought into the physical
>     world.
>
>     How do technologies disappear into the background? The vanishing
>     of electric motors may serve as an instructive example: At the
>     turn of the century, a typical workshop or factory contained a
>     single engine that drove dozens or hundreds of different machines
>     through a system of shafts and pulleys. Cheap, small, efficient
>     electric motors made it possible first to give each machine or
>     tool its own source of motive force, then to put many motors into
>     a single machine..."
>
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20180624201034/http://www.ubiq.com/weiser/
> <https://web.archive.org/web/20180624201034/http://www.ubiq.com/weiser/>
> _https://web.archive.org/web/20180602090007/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html_
>
> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/512616/how-smart-watches-and-phablets-fulfill-a-20-year-old-prophecy-about-ubiquitous-computing/ 
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/s/512616/how-smart-watches-and-phablets-fulfill-a-20-year-old-prophecy-about-ubiquitous-computing/>
>
>
>     Papers
>
> Other writeups by Weiser on different aspects of Ubicomp can be found 
> in the following references:
>
>   * Mark Weiser. "The world is not a desktop
>     <https://web.archive.org/web/20180602072606/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/ACMInteractions2.html>".
>     /Interactions/; January 1994; pp. 7-8.
>   * Mark Weiser, "Hot Topics: Ubiquitous Computing
>     <https://web.archive.org/web/20180602102125/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiCompHotTopics.html>"
>     /IEEE Computer/, October 1993.
>   * Mark Weiser, "Some Computer Science Problems in Ubiquitous
>     Computing
>     <https://web.archive.org/web/20180329233244/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiCACM.html>,"
>     /Communications of the ACM,/ July 1993. (reprinted as "Ubiquitous
>     Computing". /Nikkei Electronics/; December 6, 1993; pp. 137-143.)
>   * *_Mark Weiser, "The Computer for the Twenty-First Century
>     <https://web.archive.org/web/20180602101331/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html>,"
>     /Scientific American,/ pp. 94-10, September 1991_*
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2026 at 9:48 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history 
> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>     Sorry, it's just something I remember.  No references that I know
>     about.  The 1970s were a time when email was the new toy and it
>     was used
>     for everything that used to be done by letters or journal and
>     conference
>     papers.  Most of that early 1970s email has probably not survived (I
>     have none of mine), except for some popular mailing lists of the era
>     such as HEADER-PEOPLE.
>
>     As I recall, most of the debate was between Lick and whoever was
>     at ARPA
>     in the early 1970s.   Lick's vision was broad and deep, envisioning a
>     future "intergalactic network" where computers were somehow able to
>     communicate with each other to help humans do everything humans do -
>     like communicating by email.
>
>     In contrast, ARPA was understandably focussed on the new ARPANET they
>     had just built.   At the time, users of the ARPANET were
>     restricted to
>     people who were working on some ARPA project.  That restriction
>     provided
>     a form of backpressure to prevent widespread spam.   So other
>     mechanisms
>     such as "stamps" were deemed unnecessary.  Backpressure dosn't
>     have to
>     be monetary.
>
>     Lick's vision was anticipating the rise of The Internet where spam
>     has
>     become a real issue.   ARPA had a much shorter vision which didn't
>     need
>     such mechanisms.
>
>     Some economic issues were introduced when NSF entered the Internet
>     project later in the 1980s.  NSF funded startup ISPs, but explicitly
>     made it clear that each had to become self-sufficient in a short time
>     (perhaps 2 years?  I forget...)
>
>     While I was later doing Internet projects at BBN in the 1980s, I
>     asked
>     one of the people reporting to me (Cyndi Mills) to start up a
>     research
>     topic (may have been an IETF working group?) focussed on
>     Accounting for
>     the Internet.   If we could gather data about usage of the Internet,
>     that would be a precursor to introducing some kind of payments for
>     usage.  That effort didn't get much interest either.
>
>     I guess there weren't enough economists in the research community.  I
>     wasn't an economist, but I did take several undergraduate courses in
>     Economics so I at least knew the basics.
>
>     /Jack Haverty
>
>     On 7/28/26 17:24, Dave Crocker wrote:
>     > On 7/28/2026 1:39 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>     >> We actually tried to introduce the notion of "stamps" to the
>     >> develolping email standards in the 1970s to provide a form of
>     >> negative feedback.
>     >
>     >
>     > I don't recall this.  Especially since the first (and I believe
>     only)
>     > spam in the 1970s, was the DEC one in 1978.
>     >
>     > Can you provide any details (or even better a citation)?
>     >
>     > As for schemes to try to prevent or counter email abuse, there have
>     > been enough over the years to prompt Cory Doctorow, many years
>     ago, to
>     > create a template for responding to such proposals.  I think it was
>     > intended for humor, but he did such a good job, some of us have
>     used
>     > it seriously:
>     >
>     > http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
>     >
>     > d/
>     >
>     > --
>     > Dave Crocker
>     >
>     > dhc at dcrocker.net
>     > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
>     > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
>     > +1.408.329.0791
>     >
>     > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter
>     > Northern California Coastal Region
>     > Information & Planning Coordinator
>     > American Red Cross
>     > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org
>
>     -- 
>     Internet-history mailing list
>     Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>     https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>
>
>
> -- 
> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
> living as The Truth is True
>

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