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What I found curious about all histories of the Internet is a scarcity of information on when the name 'Internet' originated. Most narratives just talk about va
by Rerarom 7y ago
What I found curious about all histories of the Internet is a scarcity of information on when the name 'Internet' originated. Most narratives just talk about various networks and then suddenly start using the name Internet with no introduction. Others point to its appearance in the name of TCP/IP but not explain its use to denote the network as a whole. Others say that the Internet came into being when arpanet and nsfnet merged, but that feels to much like a post hoc story to me.
Does anyone know when the one single network came to be called Internet and why?
- kgran 7y agoI've read in some TCP/IP basics book (may have been W. Richard Stevens' "TCP/IP Illustrated, vol. 1", I don't know) that it may have derived from catenet (concatenated network) [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenet
- Lammy 7y agoI wasn’t around for it, but I always noticed how you could date someone based on whether they call it “Internet” (like “interstate”) or “The Internet” like everyone my age and younger does.
- maire 7y agoThe name internet came from a protocol allowing LANs to cross communicate. At the time were multiple proprietary local area networks (LANs). Xerox had Ethernet which is why they were one of the earliest contributor to the Internet. The funny thing is if you look at a map of early Arpanet, there were a bunch of military installations, universities, and Xerox. http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html. Xerox was on the arpanet in 1974 but didn't release ethernet until 1980. Xerox took a long time to productize their technology back in the day. The internet spun out from arpanet in the early 1980s because the military was worried about college students without security clearance being on their network. I joined Xerox 2 years after it spun out and it was called internet back then.
- godelmachine 7y agoDidn’t Marvin Minsky name it as the “Intergalactic Network”?
- dsr_ 7y agoAround 1990-92, people stopped saying "we have a connection to the internet backbone" and started saying "we have a connection to the internet". By 1994 we had the concept of a "regional ISP" versus a "Tier 1 ISP", where the difference was economic and political: a Tier 1 had settlement-free interconnections at major exchanges, because a sufficient percentage of connectors considered them valuable enough as traffic sources/sinks as to be "peers" rather than clients.
- karmakaze 7y agoWe also stopped calling it the Internet and to just internet somewhere along the line.
- ghaff 7y agoWe still say "the internet" a lot of the time. The capitalization thing is pretty common with new technologies at least in English. See e.g. Big Data, Open Source, etc. We treat them like proper nouns at first and then, once they become commonplace, we drop the caps because it looks a bit silly to have random capital letters all over the place. Mostly, it's a reminder that we should use caps in this way judiciously for new stuff.
- ghaff 7y agoA lot of the bigger/commercial BBSs became ISPs when the internet started to get more prominent. Of course, this changed when broadband arrived.