[985] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Internet vs. Usenet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brad Templeton)
Mon Jul 15 00:53:27 1991
To: com-priv@uu.psi.com
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 91 0:37:53 EDT
From: Brad Templeton <brad@looking.on.ca>
In-Reply-To: <9107122141.AA24709@arthur.uchicago.edu>; from "francis@zaphod" at Jul 12, 91 4:41 pm
The simplest way to explain the difference between these two is to make
the analogy to hardware and software.
The internet is the "hardware," although it is actually a collection of
connections and protocol software. It provides people with connections and
streams of data and packets.
USENET is an application that runs on this hardware. Saying it is the same
as the internet is like saying that Unix is the same as a Vax. For a long
time, everybody serious in Unix ran on a Vax, (and at one time all Unix ran
on PDP-11s and friends) but you could run Unix on other hardware, and of
course use a Vax for other than Unix.
It is understandable why people get confused, as today they perhaps confuse
MS-DOS and an IBM-PC, though they are very different things.
