Didn’t it all start at DARPA?
Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet
ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml 3 weeks agoIt is so complicated that you’re both correct and incorrect. US government added to it, yes. I’d argue the fundamental work was independent researchers from multiple countries (UK, USA, France). I’d argue the critical infrastructure was multiple non-profits.
Also the question is “what exactly is the beginning of the internet”. Is it usenet? Telnet? Arpanet?
0x0@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
btaf45@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Nope. The US government Department of Defense literally funded and created the internet. It was initially called Arpanet and mainly US government sites. This is why few people use the .us domain. Because the initial domains .gov, .mil, .org etc were all USA sites. Usenet does not require the internet and telnet is simply one program using the internet.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
No. The internet has so many beginnings that it is impossible to say only one group created it.
The internet, like its design, is a co-operation between many different groups.
It goes back even further than 1777, where the French mechanical telegraph was the first way to send long distance messages. And therefore is considered as one of the beginnings of the of the internet.
Or in 1830 where Brits invented a way to send electronic messages over copper cables.
Or in 1860 where they started laying sea cables to connect landmasses.
It is typical that the US claims to have invented something when it is clearly a collaborative effort.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJU-KYMREbQ
btaf45@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I never claimed that other countries do not do valuable things, but these things are not the internet.
I’m talking about something very specific: the Internet. It was created by the US DOD in the 1960’s. Without that happening what would have likely developed are a bunch of private networks like Compuserve, AOL, MSN etc that charge us by the hour.
Why is it important to you to revise history on this particular topic? Creating the internet was not even a collaborative effort within the USA. It was done entirely by one single government agency, the Department of Defense.
ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
That is an interesting point of view. Very USA exceptional. It’s also dumbed down a lot. ARPANET is a computer network, but it’s not internet, nor it was the first. It kickstarted popularity of computer networks in the USA and provided first FTP and (I think) first remote login.
Popularity of computer networks in USA definitely was a formative quality over the 20 years of international development of the Internet.
But saying ARPANET was the internet is like saying black and white TV was Netflix.
First computer network to send packets to another computer was British NPL network. Then US government founded ARPANET, built upon that. Except that DARPA besides having own researchers outsourced to Stanford, BBN and University College of London (“How the Internet Came to Be”, quoting I forgot whom from DARPA).
Then French Cyclades computer network built upon ARPANET and proposed that multiple networks should be able to communicate with each other.
Then USA non-profit IEEE looked at all that proposed TCP/IP for cross-network communication, and that is the thing that (after many iterations over a decade) led to the Internet not being separate networks like AOL or Computerverse or whatever.
Now we’re getting closer to the internet and it’s time for en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_data_network
First was Spain with RETD , then France, then USA with Telenet. Then Canada. Then in 1978 we started connecting those separate networks. I think the first properly working project was …wikipedia.org/…/International_Packet_Switched_Se… between British post office and USA post office.
On those public data networks the Internet’s physical layer was built.
In USA U.S. National Science Foundation was founding more and more computer networks, including CSNET. That’s still not internet. It’s 1980 and it will take a decade of new inventions (Ethernet, LAN, DNS) and improvements & implementations (like to TCP/IP) before we will get the internet.
Here’s a nifty source for that decade, because I spent 50 minutes writing this post before I noticed I’m arguing with a guy over the internet about the internet.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet (there is a nice timeline list there).