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The recent anti-US edits are not helpful. If people bother to study the actual history, y'all will discover that the project had a strong international component from the very start. Many of the most important ideas distinguishing it from the earlier ARPANET work came from the CYCLADES work of Louis Pouzin in France. The research group at Stanford which did the initial concept work included Gerard LeLann from IRIA in Frnce, Dag Belsnes from the University of Oslo, and Kuninobu Tanno from Japan. The actual Internet project included a number of non-US personnel and groups, including Peter Kirstein and his group at UCL, NDRE in Norway (with Paal Spilling and Yngvar Lundh), as well as a number of individual non-American participants (e.g. Danny Cohen (Israel), me (from Bermuda), etc). If you want to add an international flavour, try adding that, instead of adding irrelevant stuff, e.g. about X.25 (which was, frankly, basically completely irrelevant), and about Donald Davies (who played a role in the ARPANET work, duly noted in that article, but had nothing to do with the Internet). But the fact remains that the project was principally driven and staffed from the US, and its simply rewriting history to try and pretend otherwise. Noel (talk) 02:57, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
PS: For instance, now that I check, X.25 wasn't done until 1976 - but the early Internet work was done in 1973, several years before X.25! So X.25 is in no way a significant part of the history of the Internet. Noel (talk) 05:56, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
Here's a partial list of the errors in the material recently added to History of the Internet.
Noel (talk) 15:17, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
This what a typo. I'd intended to write internetworking. Which by definition is the unification of diferent physical networks.
Um... Packet switching is inherently an internetwork technology, not sure I can imagine any other way it would be used?
Well, the article on Packet Switching gives Davies credit?
Then edit this to be correct. Say that X.25 is a branch of the early ARPANet development. I do not accept it's a clone of ARPANet since Telenet
X.25 was the home for a wide wide range of comercial public access networks, including AOL and Compuserve. Leaving them out makes it appear that comercial public access networks sprung up after NSFnet.
I dispute this. USENET, and BBSs in general gave the Internet it's "geek" culture. Remember, ARPANET was a military development, the D in DARPA. The mailing list culture came over from USENET and the colleges where research took place.
Fair enough, I won't dispute this. However, between 1985 the X.25 college and institute networks in europe were being converted over to a European Internet so it is important to note that ARPANET was the US Internet backbone. (see http://www.mkaz.com/ebeab/history/)
Never the less, the section in question was solely about the development of TCP/IP.
Which lacks any of the European Internet based around CERN.
I'll re-edit to adress your concerns, and restore information on the non-ARPANET contrabutions to The Internet.-- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 10:45, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
Expanding out the UUCP section, since Usenet was a very significant and widespread pre-cursor to the modern Internet. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 16:57, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
The following material is not relevant here, most of it because it describes work that had no influence on the development of the Internet. It might be appropriate for an article on History of computer networking; perhaps someone would like to move it there. Noel (talk) 07:31, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
During the 1970s, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, had developed its own internetworking system, CERNET, independantly developed but sharing some aspects of ARPANET.
In 1979 students at Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of using simple Bourne shell scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line with nearby University of North Carolina. Following public release of the software, the mesh of UUCP hosts forwarding on the Usenet news rapidly expanded. UUCPnet would also create gateways and links between Fidonet and dial-up BBS hosts.
UUCPnet hosts would link in a large mesh network of hosts that allowed broadcasting of data from one site to the rest of UUCPnet. However, unlike true packet switched networks, UUCPnet lacked a method to simply address other hosts on the network. To send e-mail to a user would require you to know to path to that user's host from your own, which was known as a bang path. Users had to consult a UUCPnet Map to find the route. Some would publish routes from their own node to popular and well connected nodes to simplify the process.
Oh, here's yet another mistake: and the Internet had spanned the atlantic (in the CERN section). If you will look at the 1982 map, you will see sites labeled "NDRE" (the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, in Norway, oddly enough), and "UCL" (University College London, in London, equally oddly). Since Norway and the UK are on the other side of the Atlantic, at least the last time I checked, this statement joins the long list of other errors you have inserted into this article.
If I seem like I'm getting really irritated, I am. I'm tired of fixing mistakes you keep introducing into the article because you know nothing of the history, and don't seem to be willing to take the effort to educate yourself. Please take more time to research things before you edit articles. Noel (talk) 07:39, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
Since this has devloved quickly into biggoted personal attacks, I'm going to step back from this article. However, I have to say that this article is not an article about the history of the internet. And has become a history of ARPANET. UUCPnet had a big cultural and technical impact on the early Internet, and I fail to understand the excising of this from history. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 10:32, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
There is a *lot* of information here that is about ARPANET specificaly. There is already an article on ARPANET, and it actualy lacks some of the information here. So unless anyone has any major dispute, I will be trimming down the content on ARPANET, moving some of it to the ARPANET article, and giving a 'main article' pointer to the ARPANET article. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 17:13, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
Coppied over from the peer review page. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 12:36, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
Informally, just looking it over, it is severely lacking in stuff on the European side, such as JANET. In general, the real problem is that the article seems rather unclear as to what it is describing: the origin of the physical structures? The emergence of internet "culture" (in which case it would have to cover things like BBSes, from which big chunks of internet culture today emerged? The origin of the software and protocols? (e.g., the article seems to discuss things like e-mail, aka, the SMTP protocol.) These various questions are answered only partly, in a confused order. Sdedeo 03:13, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
I think this seriously cuts to the problem we have. The whole article has no real unified structure, or any clear definition on what history we are telling. I suggest that we basicaly need a total re-write, starting with the basics.
-- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 12:36, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
Going through the article for a re-write. Discovered already that we'd missed out on some important stuff. We wern't mentioning Robert Taylor at all, and had been giving the impresion that Licklider had initiated the ARPANET project when Taylor had. The article gives far too much focus on Licklider over others. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 17:20, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
Initial work on the rewrite is done see Talk:History_of_the_Internet/rewrite. Things yet to be done,
Anyone willing, chip in on the page. Anything major changes on the current page, and I'll try to merge them in. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 18:17, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
One good way to spot things we should include, is the page's What Links Here list. There will be articles here, where there is a referal or 'see more' link to History of the Internet. Such as on Gopher Protocol, Search Engine and BITNET. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 19:49, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
Skeleton article layout, with headings ready to be filled. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 23:48, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
The rewrite is prety much done. It's been reformed into a more readable format, with information grouped by subject. Technical detail has been removed in preference to summary and direction to main articles. I've moved some ARPANET specific information to the ARPANET page, if there is any other info that needs moving to other articles, now is the time to do so.
Once we've checked over the re-write, we can paste it over the current article. Unless someone has a major objection, or there are any corrections to be made to the page, it'll probably happen some time next week. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 17:39, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
Hi John -- I've looked over the rewrite [2] and it looks fantastic, really very good. The main thrust of my remarks I think you've answered very well, by breaking things into subsections and making clear what's being discussed. Again, I think you've done a wonderful job here, congratulations. This seems like a great skeleton to build off of (although IMO it can also be considered "finished".) Sdedeo 18:11, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
The rewrite has been merged in. Since no one had big issues with it, the NPOV tag has been removed. I think we could start working on this to get it to featured article standard. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 21:23, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
Since you asked (above) for cites about the ARPANet influence, here they are.
(I'm putting them here at the bottom since you seem not to read comments further up, such as my I agree that the Internet absorbed some cultural influences from the UUCP world later on and Note that the Internet also absorbed sizeable user communities, and their social traditions, from other networks, such as BITNET and HEPNET from above.) Anyway, here we go:
So there's plenty of substantiation in published works for the contention that the ARPANET was the principal source for the Internet (and not just on a technical level, that particular assertion is unquestioned).
This conclusion is easily verified by thinking about what the major applications running on the Internet are. (I looked for, but couldn't find, a table that ranked them all via, e.g. percentage of traffic, so this list is garnered from looking at a number of secondary sources, e.g. [3]) Almost all are either recent developments (such as peer-peer multimedia) of the Internet itself, or go back to the old ARPANET/Early-Internet community.
Yes, as I already agreed, other network communities brought their own cultures into the Internet when they joining, enriching and modifying it when they did so. But if you look at the relative contributions of each, there's no way you can make a case that any of them had as large a contribution as the ARPANET/Early-Internet community (remember, after 1983, when NCP was turned off, there was no ARPANet anymore, except as a (mostly-invisible) component of the early Internet).
So I have no problem mentioning them as later contributors to the Internet, but they are all secondary. If you want to claim otherwise, i.e. that the ARPANET is not the most significant influence on the Internet, I would in turn ask you for citations for any statements to that effect in major, well-researched publications.
And of course the ARPANet's role as the principal technical precursor of the Internet (modulo CYCLADES, which was already mentioned in the article before you showed up) is a given. Noel (talk) 21:32, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
The reason:
is because the page I cited was support for this statement by me:
statement, and indeed and the page cited, by the person who actually wrote the Imlac Mazewar (Steve Colley) says "I believe the first Maze and the two machine version happened in '73" - i.e. well before the Xerox one, which according to this page, by the person (Jim Guyton) who actually wrote the Xerox version, happened in '77 or so (based on his hiring sometime around late '76, and his report that "Over the next year I spent a lot of nights working on getting Mazewar running". That page also notes that the Xerox one was inspired by, and based on, the Imlac/PDP-10 one.
As to the ARPANet usage, this page says "When Greg Thompson appeared at [MIT] in 1974, he brought with him .. some of the Imlac games that he had encountered at NASA Ames. Among these was Maze." .. "Early in its life, we played Maze across the Arpanet with players at USC" which shows that play across the ARPANet preceded the Xerox version (which was '77 at the earliest, as indicated above). Noel (talk) 14:17, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 |
The recent anti-US edits are not helpful. If people bother to study the actual history, y'all will discover that the project had a strong international component from the very start. Many of the most important ideas distinguishing it from the earlier ARPANET work came from the CYCLADES work of Louis Pouzin in France. The research group at Stanford which did the initial concept work included Gerard LeLann from IRIA in Frnce, Dag Belsnes from the University of Oslo, and Kuninobu Tanno from Japan. The actual Internet project included a number of non-US personnel and groups, including Peter Kirstein and his group at UCL, NDRE in Norway (with Paal Spilling and Yngvar Lundh), as well as a number of individual non-American participants (e.g. Danny Cohen (Israel), me (from Bermuda), etc). If you want to add an international flavour, try adding that, instead of adding irrelevant stuff, e.g. about X.25 (which was, frankly, basically completely irrelevant), and about Donald Davies (who played a role in the ARPANET work, duly noted in that article, but had nothing to do with the Internet). But the fact remains that the project was principally driven and staffed from the US, and its simply rewriting history to try and pretend otherwise. Noel (talk) 02:57, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
PS: For instance, now that I check, X.25 wasn't done until 1976 - but the early Internet work was done in 1973, several years before X.25! So X.25 is in no way a significant part of the history of the Internet. Noel (talk) 05:56, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
Here's a partial list of the errors in the material recently added to History of the Internet.
Noel (talk) 15:17, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
This what a typo. I'd intended to write internetworking. Which by definition is the unification of diferent physical networks.
Um... Packet switching is inherently an internetwork technology, not sure I can imagine any other way it would be used?
Well, the article on Packet Switching gives Davies credit?
Then edit this to be correct. Say that X.25 is a branch of the early ARPANet development. I do not accept it's a clone of ARPANet since Telenet
X.25 was the home for a wide wide range of comercial public access networks, including AOL and Compuserve. Leaving them out makes it appear that comercial public access networks sprung up after NSFnet.
I dispute this. USENET, and BBSs in general gave the Internet it's "geek" culture. Remember, ARPANET was a military development, the D in DARPA. The mailing list culture came over from USENET and the colleges where research took place.
Fair enough, I won't dispute this. However, between 1985 the X.25 college and institute networks in europe were being converted over to a European Internet so it is important to note that ARPANET was the US Internet backbone. (see http://www.mkaz.com/ebeab/history/)
Never the less, the section in question was solely about the development of TCP/IP.
Which lacks any of the European Internet based around CERN.
I'll re-edit to adress your concerns, and restore information on the non-ARPANET contrabutions to The Internet.-- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 10:45, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
Expanding out the UUCP section, since Usenet was a very significant and widespread pre-cursor to the modern Internet. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 16:57, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
The following material is not relevant here, most of it because it describes work that had no influence on the development of the Internet. It might be appropriate for an article on History of computer networking; perhaps someone would like to move it there. Noel (talk) 07:31, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
During the 1970s, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, had developed its own internetworking system, CERNET, independantly developed but sharing some aspects of ARPANET.
In 1979 students at Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of using simple Bourne shell scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line with nearby University of North Carolina. Following public release of the software, the mesh of UUCP hosts forwarding on the Usenet news rapidly expanded. UUCPnet would also create gateways and links between Fidonet and dial-up BBS hosts.
UUCPnet hosts would link in a large mesh network of hosts that allowed broadcasting of data from one site to the rest of UUCPnet. However, unlike true packet switched networks, UUCPnet lacked a method to simply address other hosts on the network. To send e-mail to a user would require you to know to path to that user's host from your own, which was known as a bang path. Users had to consult a UUCPnet Map to find the route. Some would publish routes from their own node to popular and well connected nodes to simplify the process.
Oh, here's yet another mistake: and the Internet had spanned the atlantic (in the CERN section). If you will look at the 1982 map, you will see sites labeled "NDRE" (the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, in Norway, oddly enough), and "UCL" (University College London, in London, equally oddly). Since Norway and the UK are on the other side of the Atlantic, at least the last time I checked, this statement joins the long list of other errors you have inserted into this article.
If I seem like I'm getting really irritated, I am. I'm tired of fixing mistakes you keep introducing into the article because you know nothing of the history, and don't seem to be willing to take the effort to educate yourself. Please take more time to research things before you edit articles. Noel (talk) 07:39, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
Since this has devloved quickly into biggoted personal attacks, I'm going to step back from this article. However, I have to say that this article is not an article about the history of the internet. And has become a history of ARPANET. UUCPnet had a big cultural and technical impact on the early Internet, and I fail to understand the excising of this from history. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 10:32, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
There is a *lot* of information here that is about ARPANET specificaly. There is already an article on ARPANET, and it actualy lacks some of the information here. So unless anyone has any major dispute, I will be trimming down the content on ARPANET, moving some of it to the ARPANET article, and giving a 'main article' pointer to the ARPANET article. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 17:13, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
Coppied over from the peer review page. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 12:36, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
Informally, just looking it over, it is severely lacking in stuff on the European side, such as JANET. In general, the real problem is that the article seems rather unclear as to what it is describing: the origin of the physical structures? The emergence of internet "culture" (in which case it would have to cover things like BBSes, from which big chunks of internet culture today emerged? The origin of the software and protocols? (e.g., the article seems to discuss things like e-mail, aka, the SMTP protocol.) These various questions are answered only partly, in a confused order. Sdedeo 03:13, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
I think this seriously cuts to the problem we have. The whole article has no real unified structure, or any clear definition on what history we are telling. I suggest that we basicaly need a total re-write, starting with the basics.
-- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 12:36, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
Going through the article for a re-write. Discovered already that we'd missed out on some important stuff. We wern't mentioning Robert Taylor at all, and had been giving the impresion that Licklider had initiated the ARPANET project when Taylor had. The article gives far too much focus on Licklider over others. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 17:20, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
Initial work on the rewrite is done see Talk:History_of_the_Internet/rewrite. Things yet to be done,
Anyone willing, chip in on the page. Anything major changes on the current page, and I'll try to merge them in. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 18:17, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
One good way to spot things we should include, is the page's What Links Here list. There will be articles here, where there is a referal or 'see more' link to History of the Internet. Such as on Gopher Protocol, Search Engine and BITNET. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 19:49, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
Skeleton article layout, with headings ready to be filled. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 23:48, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
The rewrite is prety much done. It's been reformed into a more readable format, with information grouped by subject. Technical detail has been removed in preference to summary and direction to main articles. I've moved some ARPANET specific information to the ARPANET page, if there is any other info that needs moving to other articles, now is the time to do so.
Once we've checked over the re-write, we can paste it over the current article. Unless someone has a major objection, or there are any corrections to be made to the page, it'll probably happen some time next week. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 17:39, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
Hi John -- I've looked over the rewrite [2] and it looks fantastic, really very good. The main thrust of my remarks I think you've answered very well, by breaking things into subsections and making clear what's being discussed. Again, I think you've done a wonderful job here, congratulations. This seems like a great skeleton to build off of (although IMO it can also be considered "finished".) Sdedeo 18:11, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
The rewrite has been merged in. Since no one had big issues with it, the NPOV tag has been removed. I think we could start working on this to get it to featured article standard. -- John R. Barberio talk, contribs 21:23, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
Since you asked (above) for cites about the ARPANet influence, here they are.
(I'm putting them here at the bottom since you seem not to read comments further up, such as my I agree that the Internet absorbed some cultural influences from the UUCP world later on and Note that the Internet also absorbed sizeable user communities, and their social traditions, from other networks, such as BITNET and HEPNET from above.) Anyway, here we go:
So there's plenty of substantiation in published works for the contention that the ARPANET was the principal source for the Internet (and not just on a technical level, that particular assertion is unquestioned).
This conclusion is easily verified by thinking about what the major applications running on the Internet are. (I looked for, but couldn't find, a table that ranked them all via, e.g. percentage of traffic, so this list is garnered from looking at a number of secondary sources, e.g. [3]) Almost all are either recent developments (such as peer-peer multimedia) of the Internet itself, or go back to the old ARPANET/Early-Internet community.
Yes, as I already agreed, other network communities brought their own cultures into the Internet when they joining, enriching and modifying it when they did so. But if you look at the relative contributions of each, there's no way you can make a case that any of them had as large a contribution as the ARPANET/Early-Internet community (remember, after 1983, when NCP was turned off, there was no ARPANet anymore, except as a (mostly-invisible) component of the early Internet).
So I have no problem mentioning them as later contributors to the Internet, but they are all secondary. If you want to claim otherwise, i.e. that the ARPANET is not the most significant influence on the Internet, I would in turn ask you for citations for any statements to that effect in major, well-researched publications.
And of course the ARPANet's role as the principal technical precursor of the Internet (modulo CYCLADES, which was already mentioned in the article before you showed up) is a given. Noel (talk) 21:32, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
The reason:
is because the page I cited was support for this statement by me:
statement, and indeed and the page cited, by the person who actually wrote the Imlac Mazewar (Steve Colley) says "I believe the first Maze and the two machine version happened in '73" - i.e. well before the Xerox one, which according to this page, by the person (Jim Guyton) who actually wrote the Xerox version, happened in '77 or so (based on his hiring sometime around late '76, and his report that "Over the next year I spent a lot of nights working on getting Mazewar running". That page also notes that the Xerox one was inspired by, and based on, the Imlac/PDP-10 one.
As to the ARPANet usage, this page says "When Greg Thompson appeared at [MIT] in 1974, he brought with him .. some of the Imlac games that he had encountered at NASA Ames. Among these was Maze." .. "Early in its life, we played Maze across the Arpanet with players at USC" which shows that play across the ARPANet preceded the Xerox version (which was '77 at the earliest, as indicated above). Noel (talk) 14:17, 16 September 2005 (UTC)