"First Internet message" and ...

Ooops, editing error: Should have been "to translate from the 'addresses' used by the hosts to the". Here are Jack's thoughts on how 'the Internet' is no longer a true internet: Circa 1984, I remember giving lots of presentations where one theme was that we had spent the first 10 years of the Internet (taking the 1974 TCP paper as the start) making it possible for every computer to talk with every other computer.BB We would spend the next 10 years making it not possible to do such things, so that only communications that were permitted would be possible. Sadly, I'm not sure that ever happened. The commercial world started adopting TCP big time. The government decided to focus on using COTS - Commercial Off-The-Shelf hardware and software. The Research world focused on things like faster and bigger networks. At BBN, the focus shifted to X.25, SNA, and such stuff that promised a big marketplace. TCP had gone through 5 releases from TCP2 through TCP4 in just a few years, so remaining items on the To-Do list, like address space, were expected to be addressed shortly. I'm not sure if anyone ever conveyed this architecture to the IETF or all the vendors that were popping up with products to build Internet(s). I think changes like NAT came about to solve pragmatic problems. But that of course broke the "end-to-end" architecture, which would view NAT actions as those of an intruder or equipment failure. So TCP became no longer end-to-end. The Internet is typically viewed as a way to interconnect networks. But I think it's evolved operationally to become the way to interconnect across administrative boundaries, where Autonomous Systems have become associated with different ISPs, other mechanisms are used by vendors to create their own walled gardens of services (e.g., "clouds" or "messaging"), and NAT is used at the edges to connect to users' internets. The end-to-end nature is gone. But that's just based on my observations from the outside. I don't have a clue as to what today's actual Internet Architecture is, other than a collection of RFCs and product manuals that may or may not reflect reality, or if there is anyone actually able to manage the architecture. From my user's perspective, it's a Wild West out there..... And the definition of The Internet is still elusive. I agree that the users' definition is the best working one -- The Internet is the thing I'm connected to to do what I do when I get "on the Net." Noel