[TUHS] Happy birthday, Internet!

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Sat Apr 7 22:50:41 AEST 2018


    > From: Dave Horsfall

    > The Internet ... was born on this day in 1969, when RFC-1 got published

I have this vague memory that the Internet-History list decided that the
appropriate day was actually the day the format of the v4 headers was set,
i.e. 16 June, 1978. (See IEN-68, pg. 12, top.)

Picking the date of RFC-1 seems a little odd. Why not the day the first packet
was send over a deployed IMP, or the day the RFP was sent out, or the contract
let? And the ARPANet was just one predecessor; one might equally have picked a
CYCLADES date...

    > (spelled with a capital "I", please, as it is a proper noun) ... As I
    > said at a club lecture once, there are many internets, but only one
    > Internet.

I myself prefer the formulation 'there are many white houses, but only one
White House'! :-)

      Noel



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