18 Jul
2008
18 Jul
'08
11:59 a.m.
But I think the _I_nternet was being referred to with
the big _I_ well
into the 1980s.
It was. The distinction between Internet and internet
was used by Comer in his classic TCP/IP book, the first
edition of which is from 1988. How long that distinction
had been in place, I don't know. That was also the year
of the Morris worm. Public popularity (or lack thereof)
doesn't change the fact that the worm transported itself
across the Internet and exploited a debugging backdoor
of sendmail, also establishing email as a very pre-90s
thing. At the time the public was added to the Internet,
none of us thought of it as a new or different network:
just that it was now "perpetual September."
BLS