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So its not the MKI invented in 1970 at NPL in the UK? I'm confused, the article on Donald Davis states that ARPA incorporated this idea into ARPANET so its totally confusing. Especially since this article cites the creation as mid 1980s, well after MKI and MKII. Can anyone shed some light on this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.97.184.173 ( talk) 18:34, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
I think the confusion is that the article originally stated that ARPANET was the first 'multi-node' packet switched network, which it was. The packet switching implemented by Davies only utilized a single node. But we are splitting hairs at this point :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chrono85 ( talk • contribs) 15:31, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
This section was removed, wondered why?
Now it is back. Anyway. Please check this section "Scenario", an episode of the U.S. television sitcom Benson (season 6, episode 20—dated February 1985), was the first incidence of a popular TV show directly referencing the Internet or its progenitors. The show includes a scene in which the ARPANET is accessed. [1]
I asume that Riptide was earlier because they are receiving information via a satelite connection in the pilot premiered on January 3, 1984. Unfourtunately I have only found a German version of it ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEEvTWoDdoo). The time codes are 0:56:18 - 0:56:22 but mainly 0:57:18 - 0:57:52.-- P. Adamik ( talk) 12:51, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
References
This is an intermediate state. Eventually the stuff about the invention of packet switching is going to get moved to the packet switching page (just as some of this was moved here from the History of the Internet page), and more about the history of the ARPANet is going to get added here, as I have time to write it.. This is an improvement on what used to be here, though. Noel 08:07, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Not sure where to put this (from November 21 and 1969):
-- mav 05:54, 22 Nov 2003 (UTC)~
I'm not sure about the nearby material that says they were connected "using modems": I think the link speeds were of the order of 56k, and the modems of that era were not even remotely near that speed (think 1200 bps): the links were more probably DS0 leased lines. -- The Anome 09:25, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)
According to [1] "The T1 standard was developed in the United States in the early 1960's." This [2] says "Also in 1963 digital carrier techniques were introduced. [...] T1 quickly became the backbone of long distance toll service and then the primary handler of local transmission between central offices." So it's quite plausible that the circuit was part of a then-existing digital trunk system. However, it would be nice to have a reference which can settle this one way or another. -- The Anome 12:39, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
[3] describes original link speeds as having been 56k. For 1960s modems, even 600 bps over an end-to-end analog connection was "high speed". The nearest other possible solution were the FDM interleaving solutions. But why would anyone install this, when T1 was commercially available from 1962 onwards? Allowing for bit-robbing, a single DS0 demultiplexed from a T1 would be 56k, exactly the data rates quoted in the source. -- The Anome 12:57, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Phil Karn also says here [4] that "Actually, the ARPANET backbone links were almost all 56kb/s." -- The Anome 13:05, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Well, there are a zillion links to Wesley Clark, and almost certainly all of them mean the general. So although I'd like to make it a disambig page, and then have separate pages for the general and the computer scientist, it's probably too much work to be worth it. If I can figure out the computer scientist's middle name, we can put his page under that (or. more likely, his initial), with a note somewhere on the main Wesley Clark page to refer to it. Noel 17:04, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)
source:The Computer History Museum ([http://www.computerhistory.org/copyright/ fair use])
source:The Computer History Museum ([http://www.computerhistory.org/copyright/ fair use])
I e-mailed Leonard and he outlined that the following was incorrect in the ((cur) (last) 08:23, 4 Nov 2004 Jumbuck m (robot Adding:id)) entry:
This is what was originally in the entry: "Leonard Kleinrock had performed tests on store and forward message systems in 1961, and wrote a very important book in 1964 covering queueing theory and routing in store and forward networks, although this work did not include the concept of breaking a user's message up into smaller units for transmission through the network."
Leonard wrote to me with the following:
I have updated the page accordingly. However there does seem to be some dispute - so I would like updaters to consult with Lenoard Kleirock before making changes his e-mail address is at www.lk.cs.ucla.edu - it would be even better if we could get Paul Baran and Donalad Davies in the dialog to thrash this out amongst themselves - they could then propose a nice summary that would sort out any inconsistencies - So whoever wants to take this on please be my guest! -- Kim Meyrick 21:44, 10 Nov 2004
Leonard Kleinrock has responded with the following which i post on his behalf:
"Both comments by jnc miss the point. I was not suggesting that others not be mentioned. In fact, I include the contributions of Baran and Davies in every presentation I make regarding the history of the Internet Jnc's referral to bogus claims is amazing! It may be that he has not looked at the source documents. Anyone familiar with those documents would be able to provide a more balanced view of the early work than he has articluted." -- Kim Meyrick 18:00, 12 Nov 2004
Ah, the joys of people adding stuff to articles piece-meal. At ARPANET#Initial ARPANET deployment it says:
and then later on it says:
So how could a message have been sent on Oct 29 when the first link allegedly wasn't there until November 21? Alas, I don't have the time right now to ressarch this: can someone else straighten this out? Noel (talk) 00:41, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Another good addition would be the time zone when this is figured out. I don't usually advocate laziness when it comes to research, but time zones are just a little much. LtDonny ( talk) 18:37, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
According to [5]:
I know Mike Brescia well, he's a very careful engineer, so I would take his data as fairly definitive. I have left mention of the 230KB speed in the article, but said it was not much used due to cost/computing concerns. Noel (talk) 04:12, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
It might be good to move this section to Internet history or perhaps start a new one on "ARPANET history" so that ARPANET could just be about the actual nature of the network without all the history.-- Carl Hewitt 05:47, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
No thanks, Internet history has its own share of controversy, we don't need more! ;) But seriosuly, there's an article on Packet Switching, this information belongs there, and I'd support a move. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 13:57, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
I removed this quote from Larry Roberts:
because it frankly conflicts with other things he said, at other times and other places. E.g.:
which is completely 180 degrees away from the first quote!
I don't know for sure what's going on with him. I speculate that in part he's trying to buttress the role of Kleinrock (with whom he had shared an office at MIT, so they were/are old friends, and who has been on a campaign to try and claim credit for packet switching); in part, he also seems irritated (rightfully) at the common myth that "the ARPANET was created to survive a nuclear war". But in any event, with that level of self-contradiction, I don't think one can take anything he says (especially in recent years) as gospel. Noel (talk) 05:42, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
Sigh - another place where the history books seem to disagree! Dream Machine says (pp. 276) that:
but Where Wizards says:
and I would think they can't both be right. Although I assume the "previous February" above means February, 1966, since Gatlinburg was in October, '67, and I suppose it could have been February, '67 which was meant, which would remove that direct conflict. (Alas, Dream Machine gives no source, so I can't check to verify which one was meant.)
Still, even if it was Febuary '67 (removing the conflict), it's kind of mind-boggling that he could have had lunch with Baran in February '67, when Roberts was already working on the ARPANET (he'd started on that at DARPA at the end of '66), and neither one of them brought up the topic of networking. (I can just imagine the conversation: "So what are you working on now for DARPA?" "Oh, computer networking." "Oh really, I did a big project on that!" etc, etc.)
I shouldn't be surprised if Dream Machine has it right; Roberts probably forgot about it until someone found some old travel records, or something. Noel (talk) 09:05, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
BTW, that Baran interview (a few pages on) has some interesting thoughts on attribution, which I reproduce here because they are so incredibly apt:
Having been there myself :-), I an in absolute, perfect agreement with these sentiments. Noel (talk) 15:43, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
Davies found out about Baran's work from a MoD official after a presentation he gave at NPL in March, 1966. Source: Norberg/O'Neill, pp. 161. Noel (talk) 09:05, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
I added a bit about Mr. Herzfeld's statement on the impetus for ARPAnet. However, I have a hard time seeing where to put the links I used as reference. I admit ignorance of the protocol for citation (e.g., what I should make a note (named reference?), and what deserves simply an external link. Therefore, I will give them here, and anyone interested in polishing my contribution, please do, with my thanks.
I took the quote from an article at about.com. For credentials on Mr. Herzfeld, I looked to his entry at the staff pages of Potomac Institute.
I've corrected where the article says Herzfeld was "director of ARPANET from 1965 to 1967" since the 'net didn't exist before 1969. Rick Smith 18:32, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
Some clown who clearly never read any of the early RFCs just moved the article to ARPANet, which was NEVER the title of the network. That constitutes original research in violation of Wikipedia's strict no original research policy. It may also constitute possible use of Wikipedia as a soapbox in violation of What Wikipedia is not. I am posting my message to that user below. To all admins tracking this article: I suspect that User:Nethac DIU is a troll who should be blocked for possible vandalism.
We need an admin to clean up Nethac DIU's mess immediately. -- Coolcaesar 20:21, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
FWIW, those of us who were actually involved at the time, the terms were ARPAnet (and DARPAnet). The 'all caps' that one occasionally sees referred to in RFCs happened because many computers at the time had single case, typically upper case only. However, we actually referred to it as ARPAnet, since the 'net' part was not the initials of an acronym. I believe this has been mentioned before.
-- UnicornTapestry ( talk) 13:51, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
Well, I were wrong. I thought ARPANet was the official name, and I've seen written ARPANet, with two last letters in lower-case. I'd never think that would make such a problem.
But then, ARPANet is incorrect because it is traditionally ARPANET, or just a non-standard spelling?
—
Nethac DIU,
complaints, suggestions?—
20:37, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
I deleted "YOU SUCK" someone put in the middle of the article. I am a newbie to Wiki, but I think it was the user 207.63.191.20. Can some1 ban him if its true pls. Gavin 00:42, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
See what happens when Weird Al does a video for White and Nerdy? Chris-marsh-usa ( talk) 02:23, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
Lint Much? Shouldn't use an autolint sys Not loose enough Haskell or 4chan — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:280:4E80:1799:92C:DA28:B6AC:BC25 ( talk) 23:29, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
The section on the growth of the network has: "By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host being added approximately every twenty days." and a few lines later "In 1984, the U.S. military portion of the ARPANet was broken off as a separate network, the MILNET. Prior to this there were 113 nodes on the ARPANet."
Which is confusing if not contradictory. Can anyone shed any light? Citations would help. -- Philbarker 16:38, 25 April 2007 (UTC)--
I needed information on DARPAnet (when the philosophy and name change occurred, etc). However, keying DARPAnet redirected me to ARPAnet, which isn't precisely synonymous. Further, the ARPAnet article contains no mention of DARPA at all. What gives? Shouldn't readers be able to find this on Wikipedia?
Also, I'm curious why the ARPAnet is fully capitalized? I no longer have reference material from the era, but I believe ARPAnet was the original spelling.
regards, -- UnicornTapestry ( talk) 10:57, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
+1 to whoever wrote this gem of a phrase. May it remain on Wikipedia for ever. Tempshill ( talk) 18:41, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
what do we call arpanet today?
-- 69.38.215.226 ( talk) 16:40, 9 October 2008 (UTC)w
I'm still queasy about UnicornTapestry's insistence on changing the article title from ARPANET to ARPAnet. As a history major who specialized in the history of computer science and computing, I've read hundreds of books and thousands of articles and ARPAnet has always been used only by a tiny minority of them.
All major books on the history of the Internet (which judging from their bibliographies are all based on thorough reviews of primary sources) consistently use the spelling ARPANET. Examples include Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner & Lyon (a husband-wife team of technology journalists), Casting the Net by Peter Salus (who holds a Ph.D. in linguistics and is an accomplished computer scientist and historian), Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Campbell-Kelly and Aspray (both professional historians), and Inventing the Internet by Janet Abbate (also a professional historian). There are also a few books that use ARPAnet, but they tend to be non-historical books by persons who are not historians, who are merely mentioning ARPANET briefly before transitioning to a different topic; an example is Executive Strategy by Frederick Betz. I haven't found any book by a professional historian (who by training would be careful to mirror the usage in the primary sources) that uses ARPANET.
Also, UnicornTapestry's claim that ARPAnet was the intended usage in the older RFCs but couldn't be typed due to lack of lower case has no historical support and is mere unsupported speculation. For one thing, it's immediately obvious from running a Google search on the RFCs for the term ARPANET that the overwhelming majority of RFCs use the spelling "ARPANET," especially the ones published prior to 1990 when ARPANET was still alive. Furthermore, even back in 1971 it's clear that several of the ARPANET sites could handle upper and lower-case text, as evidenced by the ongoing discussions over how to properly handle text transmission over TELNET connections between those sites and sites that could handle only upper-case text. This debate is preserved in several RFCS such as 139, 206, and 318.
From what I can tell, the first published sources using the spelling ARPAnet were Ed Krol's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet (1987) and his subsequent book, The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog. (1993) (of which excerpts were heavily quoted and attributed in RFC 1462). But Krol didn't get involved with the Internet until 1985 and did not publish RFCs prior to 1987, which makes sense because he was at NCSA in 1985 when it got the contract to move the Internet from ARPANET to NSFNET and therefore wasn't really involved in ARPANET per se prior to the contract. Practically all RFCs use ARPANET, with a couple using Arpanet (RFCs 508 and 756). RFC 3869 uses ARPAnet in a brief discussion of Internet history, but that's probably borrowed from the spelling Krol introduced.
The point I'm getting at is, it's obvious that ARPAnet is a neologism invented after the fact by Krol or someone he knew at NCSA during the time period when ARPANET was being phased out in favor of NSFNET (1985-1990). But ARPANET during its period of development (1967-1972) and its heyday (1972-1985) was consistently spelled as such. Wikipedia should reflect the actual historical record as evidenced by the actual spelling recorded in the vast majority of RFCs and the literature by professional historians and technology journalists who have reviewed numerous primary sources and interviewed all the key ARPANET players (Engelbart, Taylor, Kleinrock, Licklider, Kahn, Cerf, et al.). Wikipedia should not reflect after-the-fact, groundless wild speculation based on a rather thin reed: the fact that some computer terminals during the relevant period could not support lower case. In law school, as well as graduate programs for historians, one would be lucky to get a C (if not an F) for building speculative arguments like that with such a thin foundation.
If no one objects, I'm going to revert this article back to the correct spelling within a few weeks. -- Coolcaesar ( talk) 08:58, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Coolcaesar all points. A Brief History of the Internet, written by people who were definitely involved in the development of ARPANET and who had access to both lower and upper case keys uses uppercase ARPANET throughout. Likewise the journal publications they produced at the time use upper case. On UnicornTapestry's point about "ARPA" being an acronym but not "NET", well maybe it's unsatisfactory but there are other examples, in the UK we have [JANET]. -- Phil Barker 18:58, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
J.M. McQuillan, "The New Routing Algorithm for the ARPANET," IEEE Transactions on Communications, COM-28, 711-719, May (1980). And many others with ARPANET in the title from BBN in the appropriate time period. BBN designed the thing, I suppose they knew how to spell it when they were writing about it. I have several college level textbooks that use ARPANET from 1984 and 1988. Note that NSFNET and TYMNET and all of the networks at the time capitalized the "net". I have several books that use the sequence "the ARPA network" often and one from 1988 that uses "the ARPA net" once (notice the space between ARPA and net): perhaps this is how the confusion started. I have to agree with Coolceasar in that the sources overwhelmingly show that the appropriate spelling should be "ARPANET" with a redirect from "ARPA network" and "ARPA net". But, I do not agree with personal attacks: please keep the discussion respectful. — Dgtsyb ( talk) 12:31, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
I have been asked to comment. I don't know all the rules and protocols here, but I'll do my best. For those who don't want to read to the end, both sides are right in their own way.
When historians say that modern man finds it almost impossible to understand the context of past eras, they usually speak of 400 years or 4000 years ago, but we see it's difficult to understand as little as 40 years ago. To me, our young lawyer friend cops an attitude that if you remember the 60s you weren't there. Be that as it may, let's look beyond the rhetoric.
First, the implication leveled about working in small mom and pop shops. In the mid 60's, there were no small mom and pop shops. Computers were so valuable, we recycled antique Bendix, Burroughs and Honeywells into what you'd call today print servers and spoolers. If you had a computer, you were one of three things: a major corporation, a major government agency, a college or university. Remember what Al Gore said in 1992, that they were shocked when they came into the White House and found typewriters instead of computers. (I grant you the preceding administrations were behind the times, but it serves to demonstrate.)
Typewriters segues us into keyboards. I can appreciate when our lawyer friend points to documentation dated 1968 that refers to a mixed case terminal, that he seems to assume (or not, because the argument sounds like doublespeak) mixed case must have been in common use, like assuming an 1940's ad for automatic transmissions meant all cars must have had them. All caps terminals were the norm through about 10 years later. Computer languages required all caps and wouldn't have known what to do with lower case if available. APL, an interesting language, found only limited distribution partly because it used characters not found on ordinary keyboards.
Ourselves were a little ahead of the curve, but it was only about 30 years ago that mixed case keyboards for programmers were to be found in most every shop. Before that, if you wanted mixed characters, you had to use gawd-awful SGML or other specialized text manipulation programs. Until 20 years ago, newspapers and magazines used typesetters and not computer data entry people.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned ADA, but it wasn't till C rolled around that we saw the first widely popular language accepting mixed case. Then, you could distinguish old school from the new young guys because old timers banged out all caps and young guys banged out all lower case. This both argues for and against both positions.
The ORIGINAL original term? Probably ARPA Net or ARPA net (or possibly even ARPA NET, DARPA Net, etc.) Somewhere along the line they were jammed together. I can see that mixed case is a little more meaningful, in other words, using lower case net implies a level of semantics not found in the all caps version, but I don't know if any of us were thinking about that back then. Certainly 25-30 years ago, you saw ARPAnet floating about. 40 years ago, you did not, at least as I recall. Does that make mixed case a neologism as our young lawyer argues if it became common only during the last 30 out of 40 years? Or does it imply ARPANET itself is neologist compared to ARPA Net? That's not up to me to decide.
Our developer friend argues that 40 years ago that using mixed case was well-nigh impossible. Let's say it was difficult. S/he is right about having only all caps keyboards. That's mostly what was available. Programmers didn't change case if they didn't have to because you had to jump through hoops to get it. (Does anyone remember what a double-punch was?) In fact, we didnt' know what "case" meant. Same with the DOD guys, they wouldn't know the shift key on their typewriters if it bit their little finger.
There's another complication no one's brought forward. I once wrote an article describing General Electric's Network for Information Exchange, or GEnie. General Electric used mixed case and so I used mixed case when writing the article, but by the time editors stuck their oars in, the final story read GENIE. 20 years later, which version is considered historically correct?
As I said at the beginning, both sides have their points. I've limited spelling the term more than once out here so not to influence. I'm cautious because lawyers love to win rather than search out the truth. The sneering doesn't impress me and that saying he's appalled we didn't know we had mixed case terminals or would know IEEE journals. That having been said, though, doesn't mean s/he must be wrong---or right, or that their developer friend is either. It's not clearcut unless you decide upon rules of engagement. Was mixed case 25-30 years ago right or should you now specify all caps from an era when that's all they had? Me, I'm not going to let that GEnie out of the bottle. You decide, I'm going fishing.
Been there, done that. Deke 64.45.228.207 ( talk) 06:13, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
I said previously that I appreciated cc has made thousands of edits. What I left unsaid is that some of us didn't appreciate the way he smears and sneers as he's done for years and is demonstrated here. cc relies upon ridicule to win his arguments. If you're winning, he'll ignore your points and leer at your spelling errors. He likes to argue that lawyer logic is somehow superior to computer logic or the reasoning of others. He's like Karl Rove's advice how not to lose, not to debate your opponent, but destroy your opponent. He tells it like it wasn't. I hadn't thought about it until it was mentioned above, but we really didn't have mixed case (generally) available to us even though cc argues otherwise, and then he screams original research when someone tries to tell him how it really the times really were. TeX and sgml had to have provisions to convert case because most computers couldn't. Check the logs- None of this is new, he's been doing this for years. Notice that old time geeks didn't take up the cause because the terms been used both ways. Frankly cc (and some others like him) are the reason many of us stopped editing. We didn't need the personal attacks. Has ut been back since cc smeared them? The problem Phil is that cc's in the room drive those with real knowledge out.
Well, about now someone we all know will be invoking WP:I'mRightYou'reWrong. Gotta run. Client434 ( talk) 01:19, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
Two things, well three
The article text says "disassembling data into datagraphs, then gather [sic] these as packets" but never explains what a datagraph is. Apart from the bad grammar, the sentence is confusing as I can find no reference to the word "datagraph" (other than as meaning a graph plotted from a set of data, or as a trade name). The closest I can find is "datagram" but that has a very specific meaning within the context of the User Datagram Protocol which is analogous to the term "packet" within the context of the Transmission Control Protocol, so I don't think that is what the original poster meant. Any clues, anyone? 83.104.249.240 ( talk) 03:33, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
Would the Growth of the network chapter be more readable if the information was presented as a table of dates and corresponding IMP amounts? -- 84.249.164.59 ( talk) 01:33, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
Does anybody have a source or more information about the thousands of connections that were opened up when the initial 4-node network was deployed? The linked reference [5] does not seem to mention it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by TomScrace ( talk • contribs) 00:00, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
I think the anomaly thing is a joke and should be deleted. There is nothing about it in the reference ([5]) - I think the guy just put a random reference to prevent removal of the sentence. Ldk linux ( talk) 18:33, 14 October 2009 (UTC)
The lead doesn't explain very clearly who used the network and for what. I think this is essential information that should be included in the lead summary. 86.133.247.170 ( talk) 02:22, 25 November 2009 (UTC).
The lead paragraph says that the ARPAnet was developed by DARPA. Only, DARPA didn’t exist at that time. It was formed to take over ARPA when the CIA no longer wanted to fund it. DoD didn’t want to fund it either, but was essentially forced into it by an uproar from the participating sites. Apologies if this has already been discussed. Objective3000 ( talk) 15:01, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
* * *
The two paragraphs above are pure speculation; I believe every word of them to be incorrect. I know most of it to be incorrect.
The word "Defense" being in there to stroke Republicans is childish silliness -- though it seems reasonable today, when childish silliness is the norm in much of Washington. The fact is that in the 89th Congress Senator Mike Mansfield, a Democrat, indeed the Democratic leader in the Senate, had tacked what came to be called "the Mansfield Amendment" nto some money bill, making it illegal for any military agency to spend money on non-military research. This was a nice pious thought -- that one should stop the military from corrupting civilian research -- but it has no contact with the Real World(tm). ARPA was changed to DARPA, sometme in early 1972, purely as a fig-leaf to give the appearance of compliance with the Mansfield Amndment.
The pre-DARPA funding was from the Pentagon, not CIA, and most of the money in most of the years came from the Air Force. Certainly I would be very unsurprised if there turned out to have been some projects (not the Net) which received joint funding from ARPA and from CIA, e.g. in the tapping of Russian cables, some cute stuff that went on in the Baltic, and so on. These projects, however, were operational, with both scientific and military components; they were not research in the R&D sense. The research base and the financing of the secure retaliatory triad is a story which has still not yet been made public, afaik.
Johnny Foster, of Livermore and then of the JFK White House, would be one good authority on this. Ed Applewhite's papers, whenever they are made public, will also make some of it clear.
Remember the Agency was up to its ass in Vietnam at the time. Long term scientific and technological studies were the least of its worries.
-dlj.
david.lloydjones@gmail.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by DavidLJ ( talk • contribs) 20:48, 10 June 2013 (UTC)
On first glance of the article, seeing the diagram "ARPANET LOGICAL MAP, March 1977" made me think ARPANET was started in 1977 which I knew was wrong. The internet is full of earlier diagrams with one dated "April 1971". Would anyone have a problem if I replaced the 1977 diagram with the 1971 diagram? Neilrieck ( talk) 14:37, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Found Website with an archive: http://www.arpanetdialogues.net/ -- 79.232.76.150 ( talk) 23:09, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
Hello,
During the late 80's and early 90's when I was eleven years old, using a dialup modem connected to Tymnet, I switched over from Tymnet to Telnet, and hanging around a government chatroom, a government employee gave me a text message that stated, the outdial number he gave me was to Arpanet, and that I will be it's first user. I connected to Arpanet with this outdial number he gave me and it said on the screen...
(something like) Arpanet. "Operation Red Sand" Government Property and Copyright(r)All Rights Reserved.
Login: Password:
But, I noticed something wrong as if it was not connected at the back to anything, as if it were a splash page. I do not think there was a valid answer to the login and password question.
Can you add me as the first user of Arpanet? maybe, the first user of the Internet evolution? My name is Ken Pochinko, username: Miley Lindsey password: arpanet
70.181.249.210 ( talk) 12:46, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
I was working for the Department of Defense in R&D support in the 1980's. We were told specifically that ARPAnet (aka DARPAnet) was developed as an interconnected web to provide for continuous computer connectivity in the event of a hostile nuclear strike. Either someone was lying then, or someone is lying now. Unfortunately, I do not have any documentation to verify what I was told by my superiors, but perhaps some research is in order? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.124.92.254 ( talk) 15:37, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
I can vouch for the "take Defense out of your name to get money from Democrats". I worked for DTI Associates in Arlington, VA (today a sector of Kratos Defense and Security Solutions) and such was the tale of how the name changed from Defense Technology, Inc: expanding the company into Federal civilian I.T. during the Clinton years. Civilians in the Federal government were averse to the word "Defense". Chris-marsh-usa ( talk) 02:32, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
During several automated bot runs the following external link was found to be unavailable. Please check if the link is in fact down and fix or remove it in that case!
-- JeffGBot ( talk) 00:58, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
I have been studying history of computing for twenty years now, and have read a lot about the origins of Internet. But throughout all these years, some key aspect was always missing, as if everybody forgot to talk about it - so I decided to start talking about it right now. Arpanet, the predecessor of Internet, was a military project - so how, and why, did it go from military project to university project intended for public service? Re-reading this article today I learnt that Arpanet, even tough being a military project, was developed by universities from its very start - but so many unanswered questions remain. Did the Arpanet initial funding from the military (and the CIA too, as I read today from this article and talk) stop, and if so why? I read a professor stating "Arpanet was a failed military project". Was it really deemed a failure by the US DoD? Afterwards, had the universities complete freedom to carry on the project on its own, and if so why there was no secrecy over a former military project, or was it over some parts the universities had to do without? How did happen this "military give away project to universities" thing? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ignacio.Agulló ( talk • contribs) 16:39, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
I just watched said movie. No ARPANET references. I'm removing the line. 64.142.28.55 ( talk) 23:43, 19 August 2012 (UTC)
Wings Over The Gulf (Discovery Channel) describes Iraq as having had an "Internet-ted radar system [or network]". I am not a military person, but I think the implication is that Iraq's radar network was intended to survive partial destruction. Maybe it has something to do with the now obvious rumor that "The Internet was intended to survive nuclear war". Could a military person elaborate on (a) the concept of radar networks and (b) the Internet-Nuclear War hoax? Chris-marsh-usa ( talk) 02:17, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
I think it is unrealistic to suggest that nuclear war survival was not a motivating factor. It seems feasible that it would have came up in discussion at least.
If you look at anecdotal evidence
Mike Muuss at the balistics research facility tested the BSD and BBN implementations of TCP/IP.
Kirk McKusick says they both made suggestions for the benchmark, he says the BSD guys suggested throughput as the goal, and said that BBN suggests:
""how well it works in the face of large packet rate losses" because of course to the military, if you drop a nuclear bomb on chicago, you want to make sure it routes down through dallas"
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds77e3aO9nA at around 34 minutes.
So you've got someone who was around when the TCP/IP implementations ultimately used in ARPANET were being tested, with these pointers to consideration at least for large packet losses. And his belief of a link to nuclear war survival, I think it is a bit naive just to call it a "myth" and completely rule out that there could it could even be a CONSIDERATION. 86.178.32.217 ( talk) 16:12, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
The first sentence of this article, that ARPAnet was the first packet-switched network, is incorrect.
The first packet-switched network may have been the proprietary Usenet (same name, different, earlier, Usenet), the network which Digital Equipment used to connect all its customers.
At the time when I was user number 300 on ARPAnet, (back when the addresses were all bangs! because TCP/IP hadn't come along yet) in 1971, ARPAnet, or "the Net" as we called it, had seven nodes: MIT, Utah (or Brigham Young, I forget, wherever Ivan Sutherland was), Wisconsin, University of Edinborough, the Brit Defense Establishment, Bolt Beranek and Newman, and somebody on the coast, probably Stanford Research, precursor to today's SRI.
At this time, compared to ARPA's seven nodes and 300 users, Usenet had 400 nodes, all DEC's customers, and they loosly kicked around the number 10,000 users, assuming, imho a little loosely, an average of 25 people at each customer site.
Then again, it may not have been the first: both MIT and University of Waterloo, Ontario, had packet switched networks in operation pretty early on, quite possibly before ARPA came into the picture. Somebody at Carnegie Corporation would be the person to ask: they wrote the original outlines, four or five three-inch thick binders of good stuff that I read in Toronto in 1962.
David Lloyd-Jones david.lloydjones@gmail.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by DavidLJ ( talk • contribs) 20:23, 10 June 2013 (UTC)
This section is really quite silly. These are mostly fictional inventions that have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual ARPANet or DARPANet or anything having to do with these actual organizations. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Objective3000 ( talk • contribs) 00:07, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Twobells ( talk · contribs) has twice removed the second conjunction from the following sentence, rendering it grammatically incorrect in American English, the language of this article:
Packet switching was based on concepts and designs by Americans Leonard Kleinrock and Paul Baran, British scientist Donald Davies and Lawrence Roberts of the Lincoln Laboratory. (emphasis mine. reference removed)
His rationale for doing so is that a conjunction only goes at the end of the sentence, but as can be seen, the sentence has three at various points in the sentence, joining elements of various clauses. To remove the bold-faced and creates a problem with the first modifier in the final clause because only Kleinrock and Baran are Americans. To be clear the modifier applies to them, their names are joined by and in the first sub clause, thus limiting the description American to them. The second modifier, British, applies to Donald Davies. Without the limiting conjunction, the modifier American would apply to all of the names the series, as separation by commas would suggest. That leaves us with: Americans Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, British scientist Donald Davies and Lawrence Roberts, thus creating a new nationality: American British, since both modifiers are now applied to Davies and Roberts.
In other words, to be grammatically correct and accurate, the conjunction between the first two must stay. Hopefully this will prevent an endless edit war over grammatical minutia. -- Drmargi ( talk) 15:49, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
"The ARPANET was an early packet-switching network and the first network to implement the Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, which became the technical foundation of the Internet." it sez here.
I associate this "the technical foundation" stuff very much with the public relations department of MCI, puffing up that company's own importance after they acquired Vint Cert ("Cerf," obviously, but I love "Cert" as a Freudian slip!) as a director or senior officer. (Somebody please correct me on which it was.)
MCI's pioneering, to my mind, deserves most kudos not for TCP/IP, but for their microwave line between St. Louis and Chicago, which both demonstrated it, and a lot of other good engineering, no doubt, but also cleared out the legalistic underbrush in Washington, and made it clear to the world that the age of copper wire was over. (Some fashion designer at the time was trying to make us all wear green suits, but I have only ever seen two. One was on the MCI lobbyist who visited my office in the Rayburn House Office Building in 1968 or '69, and the other on a Secret Service man I almost bumped into when President Nixon passed me on his way to the Senate Dining Room about that time. They, the suits, not the lobbyist and the security guy, then vanished without a trace, and upscale polyester was the rag trade's next inane try.)
The fact is the Internet was perking along quite nicely, i.e. it had its foundations in place, with all those bang-bang-bang addresses, before the excellent Cerf came along and eased expansion with his development of TCP/IP/.
TCP/IP was useful, and is today necessary, but it's the ceiling of the first floor, or maybe the floor of the mezzanine.
It's not any foundation.
David Lloyd-Jones ( talk) 11:52, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
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References
Items numbered 47 through 55 are missing retrieved dates. -- Panarej2 ( talk) 14:42, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
Please, it's always 'the' ARPANET. See e.g. the DARPA report "A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade", which always uses the definite article; it never uses the bare term "ARPANET" as a subject, object, etc. I'm not sure how the use of bare "ARPANET" got started (perhaps by someone who wasn't a native English speaker), but it's wrong. Noel (talk)
I suppose it doesn't matter much, but there is at least one error in the 1977 ARPANET image in the infobox. Rutgers had a PDP-10 followed by a DEC-20 on the net. They never had a PDP-11; although they later had a VAX-11, not connected to the IMP. O3000 ( talk) 12:11, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
This article could really do a better job of explaining the relation of ARPENET to the modern internet. Some sources describe “the internet” as direct descendent of ARPENET while other suggest it was created as a separate network that operated alongside ARPENET for a short while but using technologies first developed and tried out in mass on ARPENET and that for a time they where operating in parallel before the last bits of ARPENET where shut down. So exactly what is the deal? Was the modern internet essentially what was once ARPENET but now under a different name or did they both exist in parallel at one time, with ARPENET only contributing packet-switching technology to the internet but with both being technically separate networks? Notcharliechaplin ( talk) 03:51, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
Interesting bit at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49842681 which includes a couple of early maps: one hand-drawn by Larry Roberts dated (by the BBC) 1969, and another undated but apparently preceding the ones used in this article. These are credited Getty but presumably also exist in the public domain.
The latter map is divided into East Coast (Mitre, Burroughs, Harvard, BBN, MIT and Lincoln), West Coast (Rand, SDC, UCLA, Stanford, Ames, SRI and UCSB) and other (Utah, Illinois, Case and Carnegie) sites, and every site is served by at least two connections. MarkMLl ( talk) 07:23, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
Burroughs is rarely mentioned in this context, but at the time they had a significant involvement with military computers and communications hardware. I'm told that
"From it's position on the map, I suspect it was either the Burroughs Research Center in Paoli, Pennsylvania (suburban Philadelphia), or their Great Valley Laboratories (GVL), about four miles away, next door to the Tredyffrin facility where the B8500, B7700, and other large systems originated. The Tredyffrin is still a Unisys facility, although they no longer own it and have leased it for years. The last I knew, they occupied only half of the building.
"I think the location is likely GVL Building #3. That is where the Illiac IV was assembled in the late 1960s and early '70s. I worked in GVL #1 during the summer and fall of 1970 as a new hire, and my apartment-mate was an electrical engineer working on the I/O subsystem of the Illiac IV. I saw the IV several times. I also saw an IMP in the room with it, although my roommate had to tell me what it was. So there was definitely at least the possibility of an ARPANET node in GVL #3 in 1970.
"The military/special projects would have been next door in the GVL buildings. The Tredyffrin building was originally constructed for the B8500 project, so I think it belonged to corporate engineering. After the B8500 product failed, that site became the home of the B7000-series systems. The military/space business got sold off to one of the big U.S. contractor firms a long time ago (probably in the '90s)."
Above from Paul Kimpel in the context of discussion of his B5500 emulator. MarkMLl ( talk) 07:14, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure DARPA contracting with BBN to add TCP/IP qualifies as a commercial partnership - the Department of Defense contracts with commercial entities for a number of reasons.
If the intent here is to discuss commercial adoption of TCP/IP, as per Internet protocol suite#Adoption, that's the commercial adoption of TCP/IP for non-ARPANET use. As that section indicates, it wasn't just the BBN BSD stack. Guy Harris ( talk) 21:49, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
You can time-share a computer - mainframe or otherwise - by directly attaching terminals to the computer; that doesn't require packet switching or even circuit switching. You can also have dial-up access, which just requires circuit switching on the plain old telephone service network.
In addition, time-sharing normally referred to conversational access, of the sort that, on the ARPANET, was provided by Telnet. The ARPANET also supported FTP and email.
(And, of the four initial machines on the ARPANET, only the IBM System/360 Model 75 is generally considered a "mainframe". The SDS 940 could be considered a midicomputer, and the SDS Sigma 7 could either be considered a minicomputer or perhaps an early supermini; the PDP-10 might be considered a mainframe, but it was generally thought of as a different type of machine from an IBM mainframe.) Guy Harris ( talk) 08:30, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
1st to use TCP/IP? It's my understanding that testing was simultaneous with SATNET, and full adoption was done by others before arpanet? Satnet went over in early 82, ARPNET in Jan 83 (officially, defacto dec 82)... 86.142.118.35 ( talk) 23:12, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
Hey all, Even though it is undoubted and actually referenced that e-mail has grown very quickly in ARPANET traffic since its inception, this actual figure seems unreferenced and even considered as dubious in a recent discussion of the History of computing "SIGCIS" mailing list. References 9 and 84 do not actually state that figure at all and should refer to the previous sentence. I am thus witching the references to the previous sentence,removing the dubious claim, replacing it with a similar, but unquantified, phrasing, adding a valid reference to it. Feel free to discuss it here. Alexandre Hocquet ( talk) 23:57, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
It seems there is a source for 75%, which has been referenced in Hafner (1996) and reused elsewhere:
Looks like this can be restored in the article. Whizz40 ( talk) 20:38, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
The following statement in the last sentence of the lead seems inaccurate:
This implies that the Internet was newly created after ARPANET was decommissioned, which contradicts established facts, including other Wikipedia articles such as History of the Internet. To suggest that the Internet came about only after it was commercialized is obviously false, as this ignores the fact that email, Usenet, IRC, etc. were developed and active much earlier. The actual infrastructure and technologies of the Internet did not magically change after 1990. The Internet was known as the Internet for many years beforehand. In short, what I am saying, is that the Internet in 1990 was not a "new world-wide network." Laval ( talk) 08:15, 9 November 2020 (UTC)
Epilogue: dropped the words "new" and "future" and merged the two proposed sentences to read as follows:
-- Whizz40 ( talk) 18:59, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
For editors looking to improve or update this article and seeking reliable sources for ARPANET history, I've recently learned of two historical documents from or about DARPA that have been made available online:
I don't currently have time myself to see if these sources can help improve this article, but I thought I would leave them here in case other editors do have the time. - Dyork ( talk) 12:09, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
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So its not the MKI invented in 1970 at NPL in the UK? I'm confused, the article on Donald Davis states that ARPA incorporated this idea into ARPANET so its totally confusing. Especially since this article cites the creation as mid 1980s, well after MKI and MKII. Can anyone shed some light on this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.97.184.173 ( talk) 18:34, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
I think the confusion is that the article originally stated that ARPANET was the first 'multi-node' packet switched network, which it was. The packet switching implemented by Davies only utilized a single node. But we are splitting hairs at this point :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chrono85 ( talk • contribs) 15:31, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
This section was removed, wondered why?
Now it is back. Anyway. Please check this section "Scenario", an episode of the U.S. television sitcom Benson (season 6, episode 20—dated February 1985), was the first incidence of a popular TV show directly referencing the Internet or its progenitors. The show includes a scene in which the ARPANET is accessed. [1]
I asume that Riptide was earlier because they are receiving information via a satelite connection in the pilot premiered on January 3, 1984. Unfourtunately I have only found a German version of it ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEEvTWoDdoo). The time codes are 0:56:18 - 0:56:22 but mainly 0:57:18 - 0:57:52.-- P. Adamik ( talk) 12:51, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
References
This is an intermediate state. Eventually the stuff about the invention of packet switching is going to get moved to the packet switching page (just as some of this was moved here from the History of the Internet page), and more about the history of the ARPANet is going to get added here, as I have time to write it.. This is an improvement on what used to be here, though. Noel 08:07, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Not sure where to put this (from November 21 and 1969):
-- mav 05:54, 22 Nov 2003 (UTC)~
I'm not sure about the nearby material that says they were connected "using modems": I think the link speeds were of the order of 56k, and the modems of that era were not even remotely near that speed (think 1200 bps): the links were more probably DS0 leased lines. -- The Anome 09:25, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)
According to [1] "The T1 standard was developed in the United States in the early 1960's." This [2] says "Also in 1963 digital carrier techniques were introduced. [...] T1 quickly became the backbone of long distance toll service and then the primary handler of local transmission between central offices." So it's quite plausible that the circuit was part of a then-existing digital trunk system. However, it would be nice to have a reference which can settle this one way or another. -- The Anome 12:39, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
[3] describes original link speeds as having been 56k. For 1960s modems, even 600 bps over an end-to-end analog connection was "high speed". The nearest other possible solution were the FDM interleaving solutions. But why would anyone install this, when T1 was commercially available from 1962 onwards? Allowing for bit-robbing, a single DS0 demultiplexed from a T1 would be 56k, exactly the data rates quoted in the source. -- The Anome 12:57, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Phil Karn also says here [4] that "Actually, the ARPANET backbone links were almost all 56kb/s." -- The Anome 13:05, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Well, there are a zillion links to Wesley Clark, and almost certainly all of them mean the general. So although I'd like to make it a disambig page, and then have separate pages for the general and the computer scientist, it's probably too much work to be worth it. If I can figure out the computer scientist's middle name, we can put his page under that (or. more likely, his initial), with a note somewhere on the main Wesley Clark page to refer to it. Noel 17:04, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)
source:The Computer History Museum ([http://www.computerhistory.org/copyright/ fair use])
source:The Computer History Museum ([http://www.computerhistory.org/copyright/ fair use])
I e-mailed Leonard and he outlined that the following was incorrect in the ((cur) (last) 08:23, 4 Nov 2004 Jumbuck m (robot Adding:id)) entry:
This is what was originally in the entry: "Leonard Kleinrock had performed tests on store and forward message systems in 1961, and wrote a very important book in 1964 covering queueing theory and routing in store and forward networks, although this work did not include the concept of breaking a user's message up into smaller units for transmission through the network."
Leonard wrote to me with the following:
I have updated the page accordingly. However there does seem to be some dispute - so I would like updaters to consult with Lenoard Kleirock before making changes his e-mail address is at www.lk.cs.ucla.edu - it would be even better if we could get Paul Baran and Donalad Davies in the dialog to thrash this out amongst themselves - they could then propose a nice summary that would sort out any inconsistencies - So whoever wants to take this on please be my guest! -- Kim Meyrick 21:44, 10 Nov 2004
Leonard Kleinrock has responded with the following which i post on his behalf:
"Both comments by jnc miss the point. I was not suggesting that others not be mentioned. In fact, I include the contributions of Baran and Davies in every presentation I make regarding the history of the Internet Jnc's referral to bogus claims is amazing! It may be that he has not looked at the source documents. Anyone familiar with those documents would be able to provide a more balanced view of the early work than he has articluted." -- Kim Meyrick 18:00, 12 Nov 2004
Ah, the joys of people adding stuff to articles piece-meal. At ARPANET#Initial ARPANET deployment it says:
and then later on it says:
So how could a message have been sent on Oct 29 when the first link allegedly wasn't there until November 21? Alas, I don't have the time right now to ressarch this: can someone else straighten this out? Noel (talk) 00:41, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Another good addition would be the time zone when this is figured out. I don't usually advocate laziness when it comes to research, but time zones are just a little much. LtDonny ( talk) 18:37, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
According to [5]:
I know Mike Brescia well, he's a very careful engineer, so I would take his data as fairly definitive. I have left mention of the 230KB speed in the article, but said it was not much used due to cost/computing concerns. Noel (talk) 04:12, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
It might be good to move this section to Internet history or perhaps start a new one on "ARPANET history" so that ARPANET could just be about the actual nature of the network without all the history.-- Carl Hewitt 05:47, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
No thanks, Internet history has its own share of controversy, we don't need more! ;) But seriosuly, there's an article on Packet Switching, this information belongs there, and I'd support a move. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 13:57, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
I removed this quote from Larry Roberts:
because it frankly conflicts with other things he said, at other times and other places. E.g.:
which is completely 180 degrees away from the first quote!
I don't know for sure what's going on with him. I speculate that in part he's trying to buttress the role of Kleinrock (with whom he had shared an office at MIT, so they were/are old friends, and who has been on a campaign to try and claim credit for packet switching); in part, he also seems irritated (rightfully) at the common myth that "the ARPANET was created to survive a nuclear war". But in any event, with that level of self-contradiction, I don't think one can take anything he says (especially in recent years) as gospel. Noel (talk) 05:42, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
Sigh - another place where the history books seem to disagree! Dream Machine says (pp. 276) that:
but Where Wizards says:
and I would think they can't both be right. Although I assume the "previous February" above means February, 1966, since Gatlinburg was in October, '67, and I suppose it could have been February, '67 which was meant, which would remove that direct conflict. (Alas, Dream Machine gives no source, so I can't check to verify which one was meant.)
Still, even if it was Febuary '67 (removing the conflict), it's kind of mind-boggling that he could have had lunch with Baran in February '67, when Roberts was already working on the ARPANET (he'd started on that at DARPA at the end of '66), and neither one of them brought up the topic of networking. (I can just imagine the conversation: "So what are you working on now for DARPA?" "Oh, computer networking." "Oh really, I did a big project on that!" etc, etc.)
I shouldn't be surprised if Dream Machine has it right; Roberts probably forgot about it until someone found some old travel records, or something. Noel (talk) 09:05, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
BTW, that Baran interview (a few pages on) has some interesting thoughts on attribution, which I reproduce here because they are so incredibly apt:
Having been there myself :-), I an in absolute, perfect agreement with these sentiments. Noel (talk) 15:43, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
Davies found out about Baran's work from a MoD official after a presentation he gave at NPL in March, 1966. Source: Norberg/O'Neill, pp. 161. Noel (talk) 09:05, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
I added a bit about Mr. Herzfeld's statement on the impetus for ARPAnet. However, I have a hard time seeing where to put the links I used as reference. I admit ignorance of the protocol for citation (e.g., what I should make a note (named reference?), and what deserves simply an external link. Therefore, I will give them here, and anyone interested in polishing my contribution, please do, with my thanks.
I took the quote from an article at about.com. For credentials on Mr. Herzfeld, I looked to his entry at the staff pages of Potomac Institute.
I've corrected where the article says Herzfeld was "director of ARPANET from 1965 to 1967" since the 'net didn't exist before 1969. Rick Smith 18:32, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
Some clown who clearly never read any of the early RFCs just moved the article to ARPANet, which was NEVER the title of the network. That constitutes original research in violation of Wikipedia's strict no original research policy. It may also constitute possible use of Wikipedia as a soapbox in violation of What Wikipedia is not. I am posting my message to that user below. To all admins tracking this article: I suspect that User:Nethac DIU is a troll who should be blocked for possible vandalism.
We need an admin to clean up Nethac DIU's mess immediately. -- Coolcaesar 20:21, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
FWIW, those of us who were actually involved at the time, the terms were ARPAnet (and DARPAnet). The 'all caps' that one occasionally sees referred to in RFCs happened because many computers at the time had single case, typically upper case only. However, we actually referred to it as ARPAnet, since the 'net' part was not the initials of an acronym. I believe this has been mentioned before.
-- UnicornTapestry ( talk) 13:51, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
Well, I were wrong. I thought ARPANet was the official name, and I've seen written ARPANet, with two last letters in lower-case. I'd never think that would make such a problem.
But then, ARPANet is incorrect because it is traditionally ARPANET, or just a non-standard spelling?
—
Nethac DIU,
complaints, suggestions?—
20:37, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
I deleted "YOU SUCK" someone put in the middle of the article. I am a newbie to Wiki, but I think it was the user 207.63.191.20. Can some1 ban him if its true pls. Gavin 00:42, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
See what happens when Weird Al does a video for White and Nerdy? Chris-marsh-usa ( talk) 02:23, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
Lint Much? Shouldn't use an autolint sys Not loose enough Haskell or 4chan — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:280:4E80:1799:92C:DA28:B6AC:BC25 ( talk) 23:29, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
The section on the growth of the network has: "By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host being added approximately every twenty days." and a few lines later "In 1984, the U.S. military portion of the ARPANet was broken off as a separate network, the MILNET. Prior to this there were 113 nodes on the ARPANet."
Which is confusing if not contradictory. Can anyone shed any light? Citations would help. -- Philbarker 16:38, 25 April 2007 (UTC)--
I needed information on DARPAnet (when the philosophy and name change occurred, etc). However, keying DARPAnet redirected me to ARPAnet, which isn't precisely synonymous. Further, the ARPAnet article contains no mention of DARPA at all. What gives? Shouldn't readers be able to find this on Wikipedia?
Also, I'm curious why the ARPAnet is fully capitalized? I no longer have reference material from the era, but I believe ARPAnet was the original spelling.
regards, -- UnicornTapestry ( talk) 10:57, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
+1 to whoever wrote this gem of a phrase. May it remain on Wikipedia for ever. Tempshill ( talk) 18:41, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
what do we call arpanet today?
-- 69.38.215.226 ( talk) 16:40, 9 October 2008 (UTC)w
I'm still queasy about UnicornTapestry's insistence on changing the article title from ARPANET to ARPAnet. As a history major who specialized in the history of computer science and computing, I've read hundreds of books and thousands of articles and ARPAnet has always been used only by a tiny minority of them.
All major books on the history of the Internet (which judging from their bibliographies are all based on thorough reviews of primary sources) consistently use the spelling ARPANET. Examples include Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner & Lyon (a husband-wife team of technology journalists), Casting the Net by Peter Salus (who holds a Ph.D. in linguistics and is an accomplished computer scientist and historian), Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Campbell-Kelly and Aspray (both professional historians), and Inventing the Internet by Janet Abbate (also a professional historian). There are also a few books that use ARPAnet, but they tend to be non-historical books by persons who are not historians, who are merely mentioning ARPANET briefly before transitioning to a different topic; an example is Executive Strategy by Frederick Betz. I haven't found any book by a professional historian (who by training would be careful to mirror the usage in the primary sources) that uses ARPANET.
Also, UnicornTapestry's claim that ARPAnet was the intended usage in the older RFCs but couldn't be typed due to lack of lower case has no historical support and is mere unsupported speculation. For one thing, it's immediately obvious from running a Google search on the RFCs for the term ARPANET that the overwhelming majority of RFCs use the spelling "ARPANET," especially the ones published prior to 1990 when ARPANET was still alive. Furthermore, even back in 1971 it's clear that several of the ARPANET sites could handle upper and lower-case text, as evidenced by the ongoing discussions over how to properly handle text transmission over TELNET connections between those sites and sites that could handle only upper-case text. This debate is preserved in several RFCS such as 139, 206, and 318.
From what I can tell, the first published sources using the spelling ARPAnet were Ed Krol's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet (1987) and his subsequent book, The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog. (1993) (of which excerpts were heavily quoted and attributed in RFC 1462). But Krol didn't get involved with the Internet until 1985 and did not publish RFCs prior to 1987, which makes sense because he was at NCSA in 1985 when it got the contract to move the Internet from ARPANET to NSFNET and therefore wasn't really involved in ARPANET per se prior to the contract. Practically all RFCs use ARPANET, with a couple using Arpanet (RFCs 508 and 756). RFC 3869 uses ARPAnet in a brief discussion of Internet history, but that's probably borrowed from the spelling Krol introduced.
The point I'm getting at is, it's obvious that ARPAnet is a neologism invented after the fact by Krol or someone he knew at NCSA during the time period when ARPANET was being phased out in favor of NSFNET (1985-1990). But ARPANET during its period of development (1967-1972) and its heyday (1972-1985) was consistently spelled as such. Wikipedia should reflect the actual historical record as evidenced by the actual spelling recorded in the vast majority of RFCs and the literature by professional historians and technology journalists who have reviewed numerous primary sources and interviewed all the key ARPANET players (Engelbart, Taylor, Kleinrock, Licklider, Kahn, Cerf, et al.). Wikipedia should not reflect after-the-fact, groundless wild speculation based on a rather thin reed: the fact that some computer terminals during the relevant period could not support lower case. In law school, as well as graduate programs for historians, one would be lucky to get a C (if not an F) for building speculative arguments like that with such a thin foundation.
If no one objects, I'm going to revert this article back to the correct spelling within a few weeks. -- Coolcaesar ( talk) 08:58, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Coolcaesar all points. A Brief History of the Internet, written by people who were definitely involved in the development of ARPANET and who had access to both lower and upper case keys uses uppercase ARPANET throughout. Likewise the journal publications they produced at the time use upper case. On UnicornTapestry's point about "ARPA" being an acronym but not "NET", well maybe it's unsatisfactory but there are other examples, in the UK we have [JANET]. -- Phil Barker 18:58, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
J.M. McQuillan, "The New Routing Algorithm for the ARPANET," IEEE Transactions on Communications, COM-28, 711-719, May (1980). And many others with ARPANET in the title from BBN in the appropriate time period. BBN designed the thing, I suppose they knew how to spell it when they were writing about it. I have several college level textbooks that use ARPANET from 1984 and 1988. Note that NSFNET and TYMNET and all of the networks at the time capitalized the "net". I have several books that use the sequence "the ARPA network" often and one from 1988 that uses "the ARPA net" once (notice the space between ARPA and net): perhaps this is how the confusion started. I have to agree with Coolceasar in that the sources overwhelmingly show that the appropriate spelling should be "ARPANET" with a redirect from "ARPA network" and "ARPA net". But, I do not agree with personal attacks: please keep the discussion respectful. — Dgtsyb ( talk) 12:31, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
I have been asked to comment. I don't know all the rules and protocols here, but I'll do my best. For those who don't want to read to the end, both sides are right in their own way.
When historians say that modern man finds it almost impossible to understand the context of past eras, they usually speak of 400 years or 4000 years ago, but we see it's difficult to understand as little as 40 years ago. To me, our young lawyer friend cops an attitude that if you remember the 60s you weren't there. Be that as it may, let's look beyond the rhetoric.
First, the implication leveled about working in small mom and pop shops. In the mid 60's, there were no small mom and pop shops. Computers were so valuable, we recycled antique Bendix, Burroughs and Honeywells into what you'd call today print servers and spoolers. If you had a computer, you were one of three things: a major corporation, a major government agency, a college or university. Remember what Al Gore said in 1992, that they were shocked when they came into the White House and found typewriters instead of computers. (I grant you the preceding administrations were behind the times, but it serves to demonstrate.)
Typewriters segues us into keyboards. I can appreciate when our lawyer friend points to documentation dated 1968 that refers to a mixed case terminal, that he seems to assume (or not, because the argument sounds like doublespeak) mixed case must have been in common use, like assuming an 1940's ad for automatic transmissions meant all cars must have had them. All caps terminals were the norm through about 10 years later. Computer languages required all caps and wouldn't have known what to do with lower case if available. APL, an interesting language, found only limited distribution partly because it used characters not found on ordinary keyboards.
Ourselves were a little ahead of the curve, but it was only about 30 years ago that mixed case keyboards for programmers were to be found in most every shop. Before that, if you wanted mixed characters, you had to use gawd-awful SGML or other specialized text manipulation programs. Until 20 years ago, newspapers and magazines used typesetters and not computer data entry people.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned ADA, but it wasn't till C rolled around that we saw the first widely popular language accepting mixed case. Then, you could distinguish old school from the new young guys because old timers banged out all caps and young guys banged out all lower case. This both argues for and against both positions.
The ORIGINAL original term? Probably ARPA Net or ARPA net (or possibly even ARPA NET, DARPA Net, etc.) Somewhere along the line they were jammed together. I can see that mixed case is a little more meaningful, in other words, using lower case net implies a level of semantics not found in the all caps version, but I don't know if any of us were thinking about that back then. Certainly 25-30 years ago, you saw ARPAnet floating about. 40 years ago, you did not, at least as I recall. Does that make mixed case a neologism as our young lawyer argues if it became common only during the last 30 out of 40 years? Or does it imply ARPANET itself is neologist compared to ARPA Net? That's not up to me to decide.
Our developer friend argues that 40 years ago that using mixed case was well-nigh impossible. Let's say it was difficult. S/he is right about having only all caps keyboards. That's mostly what was available. Programmers didn't change case if they didn't have to because you had to jump through hoops to get it. (Does anyone remember what a double-punch was?) In fact, we didnt' know what "case" meant. Same with the DOD guys, they wouldn't know the shift key on their typewriters if it bit their little finger.
There's another complication no one's brought forward. I once wrote an article describing General Electric's Network for Information Exchange, or GEnie. General Electric used mixed case and so I used mixed case when writing the article, but by the time editors stuck their oars in, the final story read GENIE. 20 years later, which version is considered historically correct?
As I said at the beginning, both sides have their points. I've limited spelling the term more than once out here so not to influence. I'm cautious because lawyers love to win rather than search out the truth. The sneering doesn't impress me and that saying he's appalled we didn't know we had mixed case terminals or would know IEEE journals. That having been said, though, doesn't mean s/he must be wrong---or right, or that their developer friend is either. It's not clearcut unless you decide upon rules of engagement. Was mixed case 25-30 years ago right or should you now specify all caps from an era when that's all they had? Me, I'm not going to let that GEnie out of the bottle. You decide, I'm going fishing.
Been there, done that. Deke 64.45.228.207 ( talk) 06:13, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
I said previously that I appreciated cc has made thousands of edits. What I left unsaid is that some of us didn't appreciate the way he smears and sneers as he's done for years and is demonstrated here. cc relies upon ridicule to win his arguments. If you're winning, he'll ignore your points and leer at your spelling errors. He likes to argue that lawyer logic is somehow superior to computer logic or the reasoning of others. He's like Karl Rove's advice how not to lose, not to debate your opponent, but destroy your opponent. He tells it like it wasn't. I hadn't thought about it until it was mentioned above, but we really didn't have mixed case (generally) available to us even though cc argues otherwise, and then he screams original research when someone tries to tell him how it really the times really were. TeX and sgml had to have provisions to convert case because most computers couldn't. Check the logs- None of this is new, he's been doing this for years. Notice that old time geeks didn't take up the cause because the terms been used both ways. Frankly cc (and some others like him) are the reason many of us stopped editing. We didn't need the personal attacks. Has ut been back since cc smeared them? The problem Phil is that cc's in the room drive those with real knowledge out.
Well, about now someone we all know will be invoking WP:I'mRightYou'reWrong. Gotta run. Client434 ( talk) 01:19, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
Two things, well three
The article text says "disassembling data into datagraphs, then gather [sic] these as packets" but never explains what a datagraph is. Apart from the bad grammar, the sentence is confusing as I can find no reference to the word "datagraph" (other than as meaning a graph plotted from a set of data, or as a trade name). The closest I can find is "datagram" but that has a very specific meaning within the context of the User Datagram Protocol which is analogous to the term "packet" within the context of the Transmission Control Protocol, so I don't think that is what the original poster meant. Any clues, anyone? 83.104.249.240 ( talk) 03:33, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
Would the Growth of the network chapter be more readable if the information was presented as a table of dates and corresponding IMP amounts? -- 84.249.164.59 ( talk) 01:33, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
Does anybody have a source or more information about the thousands of connections that were opened up when the initial 4-node network was deployed? The linked reference [5] does not seem to mention it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by TomScrace ( talk • contribs) 00:00, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
I think the anomaly thing is a joke and should be deleted. There is nothing about it in the reference ([5]) - I think the guy just put a random reference to prevent removal of the sentence. Ldk linux ( talk) 18:33, 14 October 2009 (UTC)
The lead doesn't explain very clearly who used the network and for what. I think this is essential information that should be included in the lead summary. 86.133.247.170 ( talk) 02:22, 25 November 2009 (UTC).
The lead paragraph says that the ARPAnet was developed by DARPA. Only, DARPA didn’t exist at that time. It was formed to take over ARPA when the CIA no longer wanted to fund it. DoD didn’t want to fund it either, but was essentially forced into it by an uproar from the participating sites. Apologies if this has already been discussed. Objective3000 ( talk) 15:01, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
* * *
The two paragraphs above are pure speculation; I believe every word of them to be incorrect. I know most of it to be incorrect.
The word "Defense" being in there to stroke Republicans is childish silliness -- though it seems reasonable today, when childish silliness is the norm in much of Washington. The fact is that in the 89th Congress Senator Mike Mansfield, a Democrat, indeed the Democratic leader in the Senate, had tacked what came to be called "the Mansfield Amendment" nto some money bill, making it illegal for any military agency to spend money on non-military research. This was a nice pious thought -- that one should stop the military from corrupting civilian research -- but it has no contact with the Real World(tm). ARPA was changed to DARPA, sometme in early 1972, purely as a fig-leaf to give the appearance of compliance with the Mansfield Amndment.
The pre-DARPA funding was from the Pentagon, not CIA, and most of the money in most of the years came from the Air Force. Certainly I would be very unsurprised if there turned out to have been some projects (not the Net) which received joint funding from ARPA and from CIA, e.g. in the tapping of Russian cables, some cute stuff that went on in the Baltic, and so on. These projects, however, were operational, with both scientific and military components; they were not research in the R&D sense. The research base and the financing of the secure retaliatory triad is a story which has still not yet been made public, afaik.
Johnny Foster, of Livermore and then of the JFK White House, would be one good authority on this. Ed Applewhite's papers, whenever they are made public, will also make some of it clear.
Remember the Agency was up to its ass in Vietnam at the time. Long term scientific and technological studies were the least of its worries.
-dlj.
david.lloydjones@gmail.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by DavidLJ ( talk • contribs) 20:48, 10 June 2013 (UTC)
On first glance of the article, seeing the diagram "ARPANET LOGICAL MAP, March 1977" made me think ARPANET was started in 1977 which I knew was wrong. The internet is full of earlier diagrams with one dated "April 1971". Would anyone have a problem if I replaced the 1977 diagram with the 1971 diagram? Neilrieck ( talk) 14:37, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Found Website with an archive: http://www.arpanetdialogues.net/ -- 79.232.76.150 ( talk) 23:09, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
Hello,
During the late 80's and early 90's when I was eleven years old, using a dialup modem connected to Tymnet, I switched over from Tymnet to Telnet, and hanging around a government chatroom, a government employee gave me a text message that stated, the outdial number he gave me was to Arpanet, and that I will be it's first user. I connected to Arpanet with this outdial number he gave me and it said on the screen...
(something like) Arpanet. "Operation Red Sand" Government Property and Copyright(r)All Rights Reserved.
Login: Password:
But, I noticed something wrong as if it was not connected at the back to anything, as if it were a splash page. I do not think there was a valid answer to the login and password question.
Can you add me as the first user of Arpanet? maybe, the first user of the Internet evolution? My name is Ken Pochinko, username: Miley Lindsey password: arpanet
70.181.249.210 ( talk) 12:46, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
I was working for the Department of Defense in R&D support in the 1980's. We were told specifically that ARPAnet (aka DARPAnet) was developed as an interconnected web to provide for continuous computer connectivity in the event of a hostile nuclear strike. Either someone was lying then, or someone is lying now. Unfortunately, I do not have any documentation to verify what I was told by my superiors, but perhaps some research is in order? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.124.92.254 ( talk) 15:37, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
I can vouch for the "take Defense out of your name to get money from Democrats". I worked for DTI Associates in Arlington, VA (today a sector of Kratos Defense and Security Solutions) and such was the tale of how the name changed from Defense Technology, Inc: expanding the company into Federal civilian I.T. during the Clinton years. Civilians in the Federal government were averse to the word "Defense". Chris-marsh-usa ( talk) 02:32, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
During several automated bot runs the following external link was found to be unavailable. Please check if the link is in fact down and fix or remove it in that case!
-- JeffGBot ( talk) 00:58, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
I have been studying history of computing for twenty years now, and have read a lot about the origins of Internet. But throughout all these years, some key aspect was always missing, as if everybody forgot to talk about it - so I decided to start talking about it right now. Arpanet, the predecessor of Internet, was a military project - so how, and why, did it go from military project to university project intended for public service? Re-reading this article today I learnt that Arpanet, even tough being a military project, was developed by universities from its very start - but so many unanswered questions remain. Did the Arpanet initial funding from the military (and the CIA too, as I read today from this article and talk) stop, and if so why? I read a professor stating "Arpanet was a failed military project". Was it really deemed a failure by the US DoD? Afterwards, had the universities complete freedom to carry on the project on its own, and if so why there was no secrecy over a former military project, or was it over some parts the universities had to do without? How did happen this "military give away project to universities" thing? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ignacio.Agulló ( talk • contribs) 16:39, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
I just watched said movie. No ARPANET references. I'm removing the line. 64.142.28.55 ( talk) 23:43, 19 August 2012 (UTC)
Wings Over The Gulf (Discovery Channel) describes Iraq as having had an "Internet-ted radar system [or network]". I am not a military person, but I think the implication is that Iraq's radar network was intended to survive partial destruction. Maybe it has something to do with the now obvious rumor that "The Internet was intended to survive nuclear war". Could a military person elaborate on (a) the concept of radar networks and (b) the Internet-Nuclear War hoax? Chris-marsh-usa ( talk) 02:17, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
I think it is unrealistic to suggest that nuclear war survival was not a motivating factor. It seems feasible that it would have came up in discussion at least.
If you look at anecdotal evidence
Mike Muuss at the balistics research facility tested the BSD and BBN implementations of TCP/IP.
Kirk McKusick says they both made suggestions for the benchmark, he says the BSD guys suggested throughput as the goal, and said that BBN suggests:
""how well it works in the face of large packet rate losses" because of course to the military, if you drop a nuclear bomb on chicago, you want to make sure it routes down through dallas"
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds77e3aO9nA at around 34 minutes.
So you've got someone who was around when the TCP/IP implementations ultimately used in ARPANET were being tested, with these pointers to consideration at least for large packet losses. And his belief of a link to nuclear war survival, I think it is a bit naive just to call it a "myth" and completely rule out that there could it could even be a CONSIDERATION. 86.178.32.217 ( talk) 16:12, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
The first sentence of this article, that ARPAnet was the first packet-switched network, is incorrect.
The first packet-switched network may have been the proprietary Usenet (same name, different, earlier, Usenet), the network which Digital Equipment used to connect all its customers.
At the time when I was user number 300 on ARPAnet, (back when the addresses were all bangs! because TCP/IP hadn't come along yet) in 1971, ARPAnet, or "the Net" as we called it, had seven nodes: MIT, Utah (or Brigham Young, I forget, wherever Ivan Sutherland was), Wisconsin, University of Edinborough, the Brit Defense Establishment, Bolt Beranek and Newman, and somebody on the coast, probably Stanford Research, precursor to today's SRI.
At this time, compared to ARPA's seven nodes and 300 users, Usenet had 400 nodes, all DEC's customers, and they loosly kicked around the number 10,000 users, assuming, imho a little loosely, an average of 25 people at each customer site.
Then again, it may not have been the first: both MIT and University of Waterloo, Ontario, had packet switched networks in operation pretty early on, quite possibly before ARPA came into the picture. Somebody at Carnegie Corporation would be the person to ask: they wrote the original outlines, four or five three-inch thick binders of good stuff that I read in Toronto in 1962.
David Lloyd-Jones david.lloydjones@gmail.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by DavidLJ ( talk • contribs) 20:23, 10 June 2013 (UTC)
This section is really quite silly. These are mostly fictional inventions that have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual ARPANet or DARPANet or anything having to do with these actual organizations. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Objective3000 ( talk • contribs) 00:07, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Twobells ( talk · contribs) has twice removed the second conjunction from the following sentence, rendering it grammatically incorrect in American English, the language of this article:
Packet switching was based on concepts and designs by Americans Leonard Kleinrock and Paul Baran, British scientist Donald Davies and Lawrence Roberts of the Lincoln Laboratory. (emphasis mine. reference removed)
His rationale for doing so is that a conjunction only goes at the end of the sentence, but as can be seen, the sentence has three at various points in the sentence, joining elements of various clauses. To remove the bold-faced and creates a problem with the first modifier in the final clause because only Kleinrock and Baran are Americans. To be clear the modifier applies to them, their names are joined by and in the first sub clause, thus limiting the description American to them. The second modifier, British, applies to Donald Davies. Without the limiting conjunction, the modifier American would apply to all of the names the series, as separation by commas would suggest. That leaves us with: Americans Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, British scientist Donald Davies and Lawrence Roberts, thus creating a new nationality: American British, since both modifiers are now applied to Davies and Roberts.
In other words, to be grammatically correct and accurate, the conjunction between the first two must stay. Hopefully this will prevent an endless edit war over grammatical minutia. -- Drmargi ( talk) 15:49, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
"The ARPANET was an early packet-switching network and the first network to implement the Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, which became the technical foundation of the Internet." it sez here.
I associate this "the technical foundation" stuff very much with the public relations department of MCI, puffing up that company's own importance after they acquired Vint Cert ("Cerf," obviously, but I love "Cert" as a Freudian slip!) as a director or senior officer. (Somebody please correct me on which it was.)
MCI's pioneering, to my mind, deserves most kudos not for TCP/IP, but for their microwave line between St. Louis and Chicago, which both demonstrated it, and a lot of other good engineering, no doubt, but also cleared out the legalistic underbrush in Washington, and made it clear to the world that the age of copper wire was over. (Some fashion designer at the time was trying to make us all wear green suits, but I have only ever seen two. One was on the MCI lobbyist who visited my office in the Rayburn House Office Building in 1968 or '69, and the other on a Secret Service man I almost bumped into when President Nixon passed me on his way to the Senate Dining Room about that time. They, the suits, not the lobbyist and the security guy, then vanished without a trace, and upscale polyester was the rag trade's next inane try.)
The fact is the Internet was perking along quite nicely, i.e. it had its foundations in place, with all those bang-bang-bang addresses, before the excellent Cerf came along and eased expansion with his development of TCP/IP/.
TCP/IP was useful, and is today necessary, but it's the ceiling of the first floor, or maybe the floor of the mezzanine.
It's not any foundation.
David Lloyd-Jones ( talk) 11:52, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
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References
Items numbered 47 through 55 are missing retrieved dates. -- Panarej2 ( talk) 14:42, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
Please, it's always 'the' ARPANET. See e.g. the DARPA report "A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade", which always uses the definite article; it never uses the bare term "ARPANET" as a subject, object, etc. I'm not sure how the use of bare "ARPANET" got started (perhaps by someone who wasn't a native English speaker), but it's wrong. Noel (talk)
I suppose it doesn't matter much, but there is at least one error in the 1977 ARPANET image in the infobox. Rutgers had a PDP-10 followed by a DEC-20 on the net. They never had a PDP-11; although they later had a VAX-11, not connected to the IMP. O3000 ( talk) 12:11, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
This article could really do a better job of explaining the relation of ARPENET to the modern internet. Some sources describe “the internet” as direct descendent of ARPENET while other suggest it was created as a separate network that operated alongside ARPENET for a short while but using technologies first developed and tried out in mass on ARPENET and that for a time they where operating in parallel before the last bits of ARPENET where shut down. So exactly what is the deal? Was the modern internet essentially what was once ARPENET but now under a different name or did they both exist in parallel at one time, with ARPENET only contributing packet-switching technology to the internet but with both being technically separate networks? Notcharliechaplin ( talk) 03:51, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
Interesting bit at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49842681 which includes a couple of early maps: one hand-drawn by Larry Roberts dated (by the BBC) 1969, and another undated but apparently preceding the ones used in this article. These are credited Getty but presumably also exist in the public domain.
The latter map is divided into East Coast (Mitre, Burroughs, Harvard, BBN, MIT and Lincoln), West Coast (Rand, SDC, UCLA, Stanford, Ames, SRI and UCSB) and other (Utah, Illinois, Case and Carnegie) sites, and every site is served by at least two connections. MarkMLl ( talk) 07:23, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
Burroughs is rarely mentioned in this context, but at the time they had a significant involvement with military computers and communications hardware. I'm told that
"From it's position on the map, I suspect it was either the Burroughs Research Center in Paoli, Pennsylvania (suburban Philadelphia), or their Great Valley Laboratories (GVL), about four miles away, next door to the Tredyffrin facility where the B8500, B7700, and other large systems originated. The Tredyffrin is still a Unisys facility, although they no longer own it and have leased it for years. The last I knew, they occupied only half of the building.
"I think the location is likely GVL Building #3. That is where the Illiac IV was assembled in the late 1960s and early '70s. I worked in GVL #1 during the summer and fall of 1970 as a new hire, and my apartment-mate was an electrical engineer working on the I/O subsystem of the Illiac IV. I saw the IV several times. I also saw an IMP in the room with it, although my roommate had to tell me what it was. So there was definitely at least the possibility of an ARPANET node in GVL #3 in 1970.
"The military/special projects would have been next door in the GVL buildings. The Tredyffrin building was originally constructed for the B8500 project, so I think it belonged to corporate engineering. After the B8500 product failed, that site became the home of the B7000-series systems. The military/space business got sold off to one of the big U.S. contractor firms a long time ago (probably in the '90s)."
Above from Paul Kimpel in the context of discussion of his B5500 emulator. MarkMLl ( talk) 07:14, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure DARPA contracting with BBN to add TCP/IP qualifies as a commercial partnership - the Department of Defense contracts with commercial entities for a number of reasons.
If the intent here is to discuss commercial adoption of TCP/IP, as per Internet protocol suite#Adoption, that's the commercial adoption of TCP/IP for non-ARPANET use. As that section indicates, it wasn't just the BBN BSD stack. Guy Harris ( talk) 21:49, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
You can time-share a computer - mainframe or otherwise - by directly attaching terminals to the computer; that doesn't require packet switching or even circuit switching. You can also have dial-up access, which just requires circuit switching on the plain old telephone service network.
In addition, time-sharing normally referred to conversational access, of the sort that, on the ARPANET, was provided by Telnet. The ARPANET also supported FTP and email.
(And, of the four initial machines on the ARPANET, only the IBM System/360 Model 75 is generally considered a "mainframe". The SDS 940 could be considered a midicomputer, and the SDS Sigma 7 could either be considered a minicomputer or perhaps an early supermini; the PDP-10 might be considered a mainframe, but it was generally thought of as a different type of machine from an IBM mainframe.) Guy Harris ( talk) 08:30, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
1st to use TCP/IP? It's my understanding that testing was simultaneous with SATNET, and full adoption was done by others before arpanet? Satnet went over in early 82, ARPNET in Jan 83 (officially, defacto dec 82)... 86.142.118.35 ( talk) 23:12, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
Hey all, Even though it is undoubted and actually referenced that e-mail has grown very quickly in ARPANET traffic since its inception, this actual figure seems unreferenced and even considered as dubious in a recent discussion of the History of computing "SIGCIS" mailing list. References 9 and 84 do not actually state that figure at all and should refer to the previous sentence. I am thus witching the references to the previous sentence,removing the dubious claim, replacing it with a similar, but unquantified, phrasing, adding a valid reference to it. Feel free to discuss it here. Alexandre Hocquet ( talk) 23:57, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
It seems there is a source for 75%, which has been referenced in Hafner (1996) and reused elsewhere:
Looks like this can be restored in the article. Whizz40 ( talk) 20:38, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
The following statement in the last sentence of the lead seems inaccurate:
This implies that the Internet was newly created after ARPANET was decommissioned, which contradicts established facts, including other Wikipedia articles such as History of the Internet. To suggest that the Internet came about only after it was commercialized is obviously false, as this ignores the fact that email, Usenet, IRC, etc. were developed and active much earlier. The actual infrastructure and technologies of the Internet did not magically change after 1990. The Internet was known as the Internet for many years beforehand. In short, what I am saying, is that the Internet in 1990 was not a "new world-wide network." Laval ( talk) 08:15, 9 November 2020 (UTC)
Epilogue: dropped the words "new" and "future" and merged the two proposed sentences to read as follows:
-- Whizz40 ( talk) 18:59, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
For editors looking to improve or update this article and seeking reliable sources for ARPANET history, I've recently learned of two historical documents from or about DARPA that have been made available online:
I don't currently have time myself to see if these sources can help improve this article, but I thought I would leave them here in case other editors do have the time. - Dyork ( talk) 12:09, 25 October 2021 (UTC)