488 private links
Nathan2055 Ars Centurion 7y 355 Subscriptor
mknelson said:
tjukken said:
"Without ARPANET, there would have been no Internet"I doubt that is true.
The internet is more than just wires between computers (or Tubes if you're from Alaska). It's the protocols that make it all work.
The origins of those protocols and the hardware they work on in many ways have their origins in the early work on ARPANET
This is exactly right.
ARPANET was, indisputably, the first network to implement TCP/IP, which eventually became the backbone protocols of the modern Internet. Now, ARPANET did not originally launch with TCP/IP; it originally used the far more simplistic Network Control Program, which had severe limitations and was not standardized outside of ARPANET. The need for a single, standardized protocol for sharing network resources that could be utilized by any computer system led to the development of the Transmission Control Program in 1974. Incidentally, the RFC for this system, RFC 675, is notable as it contains the first use of the word Internet, intended as a shorthand for "internetworking."
Transmission Control Program would later be split off into the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol, separating the transport layer and network layer for increased modularity. TCP/IP was declared the new standard for computer networking by the DoD in March 1982, and shortly after University College London did the same; and the entire network was rebooted and switched over on January 1, 1983. This is another candidate for the Internet's birthday, along with March 12, 1989 (Tim Berners-Lee submitting his original proposal for CERN to adopt an information management system based on "hypertext") , December 20, 1990 (the first hypertext web page using HTML and HTTP was published, www.cern.ch, describing the World Wide Web project), and January 1, 1990 (the first fully commercial Internet backbone, not controlled or limited in anyway by government or educational institutions, was switched on by PSInet).
That being said, I'd certainly argue that the first long-distance computer network connection, even if it wasn't using TCP/IP yet, makes the most sense to celebrate as the Internet's birthday.
