>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Offtopic: Internet is 30 years old Today!
>Date: Thu, 02 Sep 1999 12:18:16 -0400
>From: "John F. Woods" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>> The Internet is 30 years old today!
>
>It has been amusing to read the news coverage of the bickering back and forth
>over just what date should be the birth of the Internet; for some very odd
>reason, that date seems to be whenever the particular speaker became very
>important...
>
>> September 2nd is officially the 30th birthday of the Internet, being the
>> day that the first packets were sent between the Sigma 7 mainframe that
>> was the first internet node and its Honeywell based IMP (Internet Message
>> Processor) at UCLA.
>
>a-HEM. It would have been an ARPANET node and IMP stands for InterFACE
>Message Processor (or Interfaith Message Processor, according to a newspaper
>clipping on one of the MIT IMPs).
>
>Vint Cerf has properly pointed out that the 1969 date commemorates the
>ARPANET, which was a single physical network stretching across the country
>with a limit of something like 128 nodes (I forget exactly how many).
>It wasn't until the IP protocol came into being that disparate networks could
>be tied together into a single internet (small i); on the other hand, various
>hacked gateways stitched the ARPANET together with various campus networks
>moderately well (on a known-service basis) for years before IP finally became
>The Standard. (I'd also point out that Vint Cerf's January 1, 1983 date
>commemorates the death of NCP, not the birth of IP; IP went live I think in
>1980 or so, but coexisted on the ARPANET with NCP for those three years.)
>I know that Lincoln Labs' Applied Seismology Group was one of the first
>ARPANET IP sites.
>
>Those who insist that the invention of HTTP really signalled the "birth of
>the Internet as we know it" are simply wrong. That signalled the beginning
>of the end, the destruction of the Internet as a medium of information
>interchange to be replaced by a hollow mockery built in the image of
>cable TV...
>
>
--
"So foul a sky clears not without a storm" - Shakespeare
