[TUHS] Happy birthday, Internet!

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Clem Cole

    > first of Jan 83 was the day the Arpanet was supposed to be turned off

Err, NCP, not the ARPANet. The latter kept running for quite some time,
serving as the Internet's wide-area backbone, and was only slowly turned off
(IMP by IMP) in the late 80's, with the very last remnants finally being
turned off in 1990.

    > The truth is, it did not happen, there were a few exceptions granted for
    > some sites that were not quite ready (I've forgotten now).

A few, yes, but NCP was indeed turned off for most hosts on January 1, 1983.


    > From: "Erik E. Fair"

    > as of the advent of TCP/IP, all those Ethernet and Chaosnet connected
    > workstations became first class hosts on the Internet, which they
    > could not be before.

Huh? As I just pointed out, TCP/IP (and the Internet) was a going concern well
_before_ January 1, 1983 - and one can confidently say that even had NCP _not_
been turned off, history would have proceeded much as it actually did, since
all the machines not on the ARPANET would have wanted to be connected to the
Internet.

(Also, to be technical, I'm not sure if TCP/IP ever really ran on CHAOSNet
hardware - I know I did a spec for it, and the C Gateway implemented it, and
there was a Unix machine at EECS that tried to use it, but it was not a great
success. Workstations connected to the CHAOSNet as of that date - AFAIK, just
LISP Machines - could only get access to the Internet via service gateways,
since at that point they all only implemented the CHAOS protocols; Symbolics
did TCP/IP somewhat later, IIRC, although I don't know the exact date.)

	Noel