Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 23:55:26 -0400
From: "Mike B." <yahoo at omniphile.com>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Birthplace of the internet!
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

On 4/12/2011 9:42 PM, Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> "Michael Walsh"<mjw at press.jhu.edu>  wrote:
>> http://www.boingboing.net/2011/04/12/internet-birthplace.html
>
> That's rather silly, for two reasons:
>
> * Nobody called it the Internet until many years later.  It was
>    called the ARPAnet, and it had little in common with the Internet
>    except that both were packet-switched, and the one network grew
>    out of the other.
>
> * Any network obviously had to have started at at least *two* places.
>    It wasn't a network when there was only one node on it.

Yes, a network needs at least two nodes....and an Internet needs at
least two networks.

I doubt I was first at anything, but I did do internetworking back about
1989 or so.  I ran a Fidonet node at my house...part of net 109 (the
D.C. area net).  I worked at Goddard SFC  at the NSSDC (National Space
Science Data Center), which housed one of the four main routing nodes of
SPAN, the Space Physics Analysis Network.  One afternoon I decided to
see if I could get a message between the two.  I sent an e-mail over
DECnet, through the IO node at JPL to the Fidonet/Arpanet gateway
machine (The Black Cat's Shack), which then relayed the message to my
machine at home, where I read it when I got home.  The address required
was seriously hideous as it contained the routing information to get the
message where it needed to go.  This was pre-DNS, and involved two
networks that weren't TCP/IP-based anyway.

There was certainly an Internet at the time...I proved that much to
myself.  I'm pretty sure that similar inernetworking capabilities
existed with other networks several years earlier.

-- Mike B.