I guess I'm too much of a pedant, but I don't consider the ARPAnet to have been the Internet in any significant way. The whole point of the "inter-" in Interne

I guess I'm too much of a pedant, but I don't consider the ARPAnet to have been the Internet in any significant way. The whole point of the "inter-" in Internet is that it's a network of networks. It also uses a different protocol from the ARPAnet. And there were computer networks before the ARPAnet. The real innovation of the ARPAnet was packet switching. In that sense, it is the precursor of the Internet, the proof of concept. Perhaps a better argument in favor of the ARPAnet as baby Internet is that the early Internet culture was largely carried over from the ARPAnet.