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Oh that internet, created by the wonders of the free market. We'll just forget about that whole DARPA thing.
by ojbyrne 14y ago
Oh that internet, created by the wonders of the free market. We'll just forget about that whole DARPA thing.
- hollerith 14y agoDARPA, NSF and to a lesser extent, CERN and the governments of Britain and France. It is hard to identify significant influences on the Internet by entrepreneurs or private firms (excepting work done on government contracts) before 1992. The most influential one I can think of is the decision by Sun Microsystems in the mid-1980s to include a TCP/IP stack and basic internet client software with every workstation at no extra charge -- which was probably responsible for the biggest increase in the number of people with access to email in the 1980s -- but even there, doing so would not have occurred to Sun if the US government had not contracted with UC Berkeley to add those things to BSD. Summary: although entrepreneurs and the market had dramatic effects on the internet after 1992, the internet of 1992 was the result mainly of substantial spending by the US government every year for thirty years leading up to 1992. And the internet of 1992 was already very compelling and useful to those willing to master the "text-mode" (no graphical UIs) software used to access it.