Re: [COFF] Happy birthday, the Internet! - COFF

7 Apr 2021

Re: [COFF] Happy birthday, the Internet!
...
  From: Jim Carpenter 
...
  But even that isn't really correct, as the
Internet is a network of
 networks and Arpanet was all alone. 
Correct: the ARPANET was merely an ancestor (albeit an important one) of the
Internet. (The most important, in terms of technical influence, was CYCLADES,
"the key intermediate technical step between the ARPANET and the Internet".)
The ARPANET was later sort of subsumed into the Internet, as its original
long-haul backbone ("sort of" because the ARPANET's main protocol was
discarded, in doing so), but that's not too important.

If you want to select _a_ birthday for the Internet, I'd pick the day they
settled on the IPv4 packet format; we know when that was, it was the second
day of the 15/16 June, 1978 meeting (see IEN-68). I'm not wedded to that
date, if someone has a better suugestion (e.g. the firt PRNET to ARPNET test),
I'm open to hearing why the alternative's preferable.

	Noel