Correction: "
in his utterly false "retirement" in Lexington, Mass. in 1976."
Nope, typo: 1966.
Nope, typo: 1966.
On Tue, 15 Mar 2022 at 04:49, David Lloyd-Jones <david.lloydjones@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Willi,
You have shown us that you are full of good sentiments. Quite a lot of them. Very good ones. I assume that you know something about the start and development of the Internet but no such knowledge has found its way into your long post.
.
First proposed by Bacon in the fifteenth century or so, the 'Net was a solid policy proposal made by Vannevar Bush in 1945. It was made possible by the invention of packet-switching in the mid-1960 to 70s. Johnny Foster, JFK's science advisor in 1961, was the first person I know of to have done solid financing of the effort. Bush was working on wide-scale computer networking, along with many other things, when I met him in his utterly false "retirement" in Lexington, Mass. in 1976. This was well before your Reagan Administration.
The original present "internet" was ARPAnet (on which I was user #300 in 1971). This was financed before it really existed by ARPA when that "Agency" was more-or-less a slush fund passed around at random in the Pentagon. It continued as DARPAnet after they added that "D," for defence, to pretend compliance with the Mansfield Amendment. I worked on this on Congressional staff in 1969-71 and at MIT in '72. The D was tacked on in December '71 or January '72, I forget, but had been in the works ever since Mansfied, as Senator, had tried to prevent military money from corrupting civilian research. Unfortunately, civilian researchers cried piteously that they wanted to be corrupted. By then, Mansfied was ambassador to Japan....
When the scalability of the internetted nets, DARPAnet, began to seem limited, -- all those !!! "bangs," -- its growth was smoothed by the development of the present TCP/IP, credited to Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf. When Cerf later went to work for MCI, a hapless little phone company, their PR department tub-thumped that he was "the" founder of "the" Internet. Many people seem to have believed this inanity. More recently this has been toned down to "a" founder of the Internet. In fact packet-switching, the key invention, was largely the work of Lenny Kleinrock, under whom Cerf studied as a university student. Their much later contribution to TCP/IP has certainly been useful.
