On 5/10/06, Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm old enought to remember before web browsers when I was in college. My college was on Bitnet (Because It's There) which connected at 9600 baud IIRC. Somewhere, there was a gateway that connected to the Arpanet (which morphed into what we think of as today's internet). There was telenet, Fidonet (BBS based with modems & PC and a store and forward system for mail and file transfer), UUCP base networks (usenet?) and several others.
Arpanet was originally for government and research. No commercial traffic was supposed to travel on it. There were newsgroups for selling/buying stuff that was a grey area. Heck, I sold a macintosh SE on it and at work bought a Sparc 1 motherboard. It took faith to buy something before eBay!
UUNET started to create another backbone (I forget the name) that allowed commercial traffic. This eventually led to AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and others to have an email gateway for thier users.
At some point, just after Mosaic came out (for the macintosh?, before the PC version certainly) Arpanet split into MILNET for the .mil sites and the rest of the net.
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There is this myth that "the Internet" exists as a single, cohesive
network. It does not, and never has. "The Internet" is a network of
networks. What that means is that a bunch of independent network
operators have agreed to exchange traffic with each other because it
benefits them. When you dial in to your ISP of choice (or plug in your
Ethernet cable or whatever), you're not connecting to the Internet.
You're connecting to your ISP. Your ISP probably connects to their
ISP. Their ISP (if you're lucky) connects to several other ISPs, who
connect to other ISPs, and so on. All these independent network
operators form "the Internet".
I'm old enought to remember before web browsers when I was in college. My college was on Bitnet (Because It's There) which connected at 9600 baud IIRC. Somewhere, there was a gateway that connected to the Arpanet (which morphed into what we think of as today's internet). There was telenet, Fidonet (BBS based with modems & PC and a store and forward system for mail and file transfer), UUCP base networks (usenet?) and several others.
Arpanet was originally for government and research. No commercial traffic was supposed to travel on it. There were newsgroups for selling/buying stuff that was a grey area. Heck, I sold a macintosh SE on it and at work bought a Sparc 1 motherboard. It took faith to buy something before eBay!
UUNET started to create another backbone (I forget the name) that allowed commercial traffic. This eventually led to AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and others to have an email gateway for thier users.
At some point, just after Mosaic came out (for the macintosh?, before the PC version certainly) Arpanet split into MILNET for the .mil sites and the rest of the net.
--
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.
- Daniel Webster
