"First Internet message" and ...

Can you please provide a crisp, definitive, technical definition of what an 'intranet' is (similar to the one I just provided for 'internet' - "disparate networks tied together with packet switches which examine the internet-layer headers")? If not, it's just marketing-speak, and should go where "Hitchhiker's Guide" said marketing should go. (Having said that, only half-jokingly, I should add that I am fully aware that _really good_ marketing people are worth their own weight in gold-pressed latinum; the prime example being Steve Jobs, who invented several products that people didn't know they needed/wanted until he produced them.) That's not the definition used by the originators of the term: see the Cerf/Kahn paper. (I basically regurgitated it, above.) I can guarantee you that that is not correct (sorry). In 1982, which is approximately when the term was created, you _had_ to have a USG connection to get connected to the Internet. And the ARPANET was always called the ARPANET until its last remnants were turned off in 1990 (although use of NCP was discarded in January 1983, considerably earlier, so it was only used as a component of the Internet after that). In fact, I recollect the conversion with Vint Cerf (at an INENG/IETF meeting, IIRC) where the term 'Internet' was suggested/adopted; in fact I may have been the person who suggested it, although the memory is now too dim. The adoption was _solely_ to do with the need for a name for the large internet we were all connecting to, and _nothing_ to do with organizational stuff. Noel