[46116] in North American Network Operators' Group
FW: Purpose of the Internet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lixia Zhang)
Thu Mar 14 11:32:06 2002
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 08:31:08 -0800
From: Lixia Zhang <lixia@CS.UCLA.EDU>
To: <nanog@merit.edu>
Message-ID: <B8B6104C.10BF5%lixia@cs.ucla.edu>
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------ Forwarded Message
From: Lixia Zhang <lixia@cs.ucla.edu>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 21:55:25 -0800
To: Alan Hannan <alan@routingloop.com>, <nanog@merit.edu>
Subject: Re: Purpose of the Internet
On 3/13/02 9:14 PM, "Alan Hannan" <alan@routingloop.com> wrote:
> ......
> With regards to the purpose of the internet, I recall reading
> in the Prologue to _Where Wizards Stay Up Late_, by Katie Hafner
> and Matthew Lyon, a true anecdote about Bob Taylor. The authors
> quote Mr. Taylor as refuting that the purpose of the arpanet was
> to provide communications in spite of a nuclear attack.
>
> Rather, it is asserted, the purpose of the arpanet was to
> interconnect computers at various research/education facilities
> so as to allow researchers to share resources.
>
> We all heard that story too, but popular media tended to focus
> on the sensationalist nuclear story.
There might be a mixup between what's the purpose of *packet switching* vs
what was the originally intended use of ARPAnet.
For those interested: here is a paper by Paul Baran, inventor of packet
switching, "Some Perspectives on Networks-Past, Present and Future" back in
1977, recalling some of the history
http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/ifip.ps
Lixia
If you are really interested: another paper by Paul, "On Distributed
Communications Networks", published in IEEE Trans on communications back in
1964, http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/trans.ps (predated ARPANET)
Dave Goldberg of PARC (my ex-office neighbor) helped scan in these
historical papers.
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