Turning off NCP was a significant step, but not that big a deal in terms of its actual effects, really. For those of us already on the Internet before that date (since as the number of ARPANet ports was severely limited, for many non-ARPANet-connected machines - which were almost all time-sharing systems, at that point in time, so lots of actual users - there was a lot of value in an Internet connection, so there were quite a few), it didn't produce any significant change - the universe of machines we could talk to didn't change (since we could only talk to ARPANet-connected machines with TCP), etc. And for ARPANET-connected machines, there too, things didn't change much - the services available (remote login, email, etc) remained the same - it was just carried over TCP, not NCP. I guess in some sense it marked 'coming of age' for TCP/IP, but I'd analogize it to that, rather than a 'birth' date. Noel