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azande
8th-August-2005, 12:38 PM
The Internet is 10 years old.

A very good article (http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech_pr.html) on Wired.

Clive Long
8th-August-2005, 01:11 PM
The Internet is 10 years old.

A very good article (http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech_pr.html) on Wired.
I have a pedantry itch I gotta scratch

I feel that 1995 date is a bit suspect.

Having a look at a few references, mainly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml#Origins

If we loosely deifne the internet as: "freely accessible" (public?), interconnection of networks using TCP/IP protocols, with no network architectural restrictions to the routes between hosts

then internet-type organisations of networks were in place before 1995.

(ArpaNet (1970's) was originally a military-use packet switched network - that established some of the network architectural principles of the internet - but it didn't initially use TCP or IP. So Arpa can be considered an important pre-cursor)

For example: Thus, by 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications. Electronic mail was being used broadly across several communities, often with different systems, but interconnection between different mail systems was demonstrating the utility of broad based electronic communications between people

The term "internet" was in use before 1985, (e.g. in IETF and IAB) - but meant things somewhat different to today

The 1995 event was probably: NSF's privatization policy culminated in April, 1995, with the defunding of the NSFNET Backbone. The funds thereby recovered were (competitively) redistributed to regional networks to buy national-scale Internet connectivity from the now numerous, private, long-haul networks.

i.e the "internet" (or at least its supporting infrastructure) changed from a publicly financed, academic oriented network to a commerically driven market-environment.

Most histories I have read are US biassed and ignore contributions of other countries.

Clive

LMC
8th-August-2005, 01:15 PM
**spoiler**

Here (http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm)'s how it ends...

azande
8th-August-2005, 01:29 PM
I have a pedantry itch I gotta scratch
~snip~
Clive
Yep I know, technically you are right..... the ten years are from the Netscape IPO (but then is when the internet as we now it was born..... maybe.... :wink: )

Clive Long
8th-August-2005, 05:36 PM
Yep I know, technically you are right..... the ten years are from the Netscape IPO (but then is when the internet as we now it was born..... maybe.... :wink: )
Having challenged the 1995 date, the raising of the Internet / Web et. al. to general public consciousness was probably around that time.

For those interested in such matters :wink: an article I was directed to that gives some feeling for the scale of data volume that is to be generated over the next few years and the challenges that will pose to store, catalogue, navigate and derive any sense from is covered by

http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/documents/report_datadeluge.pdf

And the latest, greatest thing (allegedly) is The Grid (http://www.nesc.ac.uk)

Enough. :grin:

Clive

azande
8th-August-2005, 10:07 PM
And for whoever is interested in the complete history, I would suggest the book:
Where wizards stay up late by Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684832674/qid=1123535219/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202-8824742-5086237).

I found it very interesting and not geeky at all.