50 yrs. ago today

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 30 Oct 2019 at 03:34, allison via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

>
> The whole story of what was going on was far more complex and interesting.

Conceded.

> Funny thing was DECnet was in 1983 the largest world wide network
> period.  By then is was well over 300 nodes and climbing fast.
> And none of it used IP or NCP

That's the _point_ here though, isn't it?

Yes, old hands like list members here know that there were
inter-computer networks before the ARPAnet.

Yes, there were big WANs of DEC kit and IBM kit using DEC proprietary
protocols and IBM proprietary protocols. There were also long-distance
dial-up connections of all sorts but just carrying terminal traffic.
They weren't network connections, computer-to-computer. They were
terminal connections. All they carried was a single datastream.

That is not the significance being discussed here, even if it's being
discussed with the wrong terms.

And yes, granted:

> The network wars were warming up about then (1982ish) and it
> would take till the late 80s early 90s for IP to win that war.
> The big explosion was WWW.

But the core point here is that the WWW does not equal the Internet,
and the Internet does not equal the WWW.

The WWW is a 1990s thing, mid-1990s for most people outside academia,
post-turn-of-the-century for public broadband.

And to 99% of the world, even where I work in a technical company, the
WWW *is the Internet*. My colleagues are all in their 20s and 30s and
they do not distinguish the 2. The thought that there is a distinction
is quite confusing to them.

So they honestly believe that the Internet did not exist until the
mid-1990s and it's about 25 years old. Their age.

But the real Internet is twice as old as that, and it dates to the end
of the 1960s. The internet is roughly contemporaneous with people
walking on the Moon.

Bickering about there being WANs before that, or larger proprietary
networks, or how to define "the Internet" is counter-productive.

It's not about networks. It's about one particular network, the first
one that wasn't a proprietary single-vendor effort.

> Other names or routable networks, Banyan vines, and IPX come
> to mind besides DECNET Phase III and IV.

Absolutely yes. I deployed or worked with all of these and I prefer at
least 1 of them to TCP/IP even now, working for a company that until
very recently owned one of the 3 technologies in that list and owned
my employers too.

But it's not germane. We're not talking about corporate proprietary
stuff, or we shouldn't be.


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