RoninX Ars Tribunus Militum 12y 2,849 Subscriptor

Dibbit said:

tjukken said:
"Without ARPANET, there would have been no Internet"

I doubt that is true.

I kinda concur.
While Arpanet was very early and important, the way it is framed always brings to mind the image that everything grew out of this original network.

The truth is more that individual networks grew bigger and bigger and linked up. For instance, The Swiss network was already interconnected before hooking up to the "main node" so to speak.

If Arpanet hadn't been there, there would've been another big network that would've been appointed "the origin"

There would undoubtedly have been some sort of global computer network without the ARPANET, but it might have taken a very different form.

It could have evolved from something like Compuserve into a more cable-TV model, with a sharp distinction between computers that could serve information (which would need to be approved by the network supplier) and those that just accessed that information. So, like Comcast, except you would need Comcast's approval for any information you wanted to post to the network, and undoubtedly have to pay an additional fee.

Or it could have evolved from the heavily-regulated world of amateur radio, where some hobbyists were experimenting with packet radio for teletype communication -- where every user needs to have a license, and things like profanity are strictly prohibited.

Or it could have become a government bureaucracy, like the Post Office or the DMV, where the service is paid for by a combination of taxes and user fees, and all use is both licensed and tracked to individual users.

Or it could have grown out of Fidonet into an even more distributed model, where all of the networking was peer-to-peer, and evolving into a network that would have been like torrents on steroids.

Or it could have been built and owned by Microsoft and have only supported Windows PCs.

Or any one of a dozen other possibilities.

Computer networks were inevitable, but the fact that the Internet works the way it currently does -- for better or worse -- is directly a result of the architecture pioneered by the ARPANET.