this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
643 points (96.1% liked)
Technology
73734 readers
4298 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I never claimed that other countries do not do valuable things, but these things are not the internet.
I'm talking about something very specific: the Internet. It was created by the US DOD in the 1960's. Without that happening what would have likely developed are a bunch of private networks like Compuserve, AOL, MSN etc that charge us by the hour.
Why is it important to you to revise history on this particular topic? Creating the internet was not even a collaborative effort within the USA. It was done entirely by one single government agency, the Department of Defense. Nobody is saying Europeans never invented anything. Just not the internet.
It has exactly one beginning. In 1969. It wasn't even connected over the Atlantic until 1973.
https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/arpanet-internet
That is an interesting point of view. Very USA exceptional. It's also dumbed down a lot. ARPANET is a computer network, but it's not internet, nor it was the first. It kickstarted popularity of computer networks in the USA and provided first FTP and (I think) first remote login.
Popularity of computer networks in USA definitely was a formative quality over the 20 years of international development of the Internet.
But saying ARPANET was the internet is like saying gramophone is Netflix.
First computer network to send packets to another computer was British NPL network. Then US government founded ARPANET, built upon that. Except that DARPA besides having own researchers outsourced to Stanford, BBN and University College of London ("How the Internet Came to Be", quoting I forgot whom from DARPA).
Then French Cyclades computer network built upon ARPANET and proposed that multiple networks should be able to communicate with each other.
Then USA non-profit IEEE looked at all that proposed TCP/IP for cross-network communication, and that is the thing that (after many iterations over a decade) led to the Internet not being separate networks like AOL or Computerverse or whatever.
Now we're getting closer to the internet and it's time for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_data_network
First was Spain with RETD , then France, then USA with Telenet. Then Canada. Then in 1978 we started connecting those separate networks. I think the first properly working project was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Packet_Switched_Service between British post office and USA post office.
On those public data networks the Internet's physical layer was built.
In USA U.S. National Science Foundation was founding more and more computer networks, including CSNET. That's still not internet. It's 1980 and it will take a decade of new inventions (Ethernet, LAN, DNS) and improvements & implementations (like to TCP/IP) before we will get the internet.
Here's a nifty source for that decade, because I spent 50 minutes writing this post before I noticed I'm arguing with a guy over the internet about the internet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet (there is a nice timeline list there).
TCP/IP is not "the Internet".
The Arpanet IS the Internet. THE ARPANET IS THE NETWORK THAT WAS LATER RENAMED "INTERNET". Did you really think that the internet just blinked into existence with millions of nodes? LMFAO. No, it had to start small and get big, as common sense dictates. UCLA, ARC, UCSB, and the University of Utah School of Computing are literally the very first 4 nodes of the internet. We know exactly how, where, and when the internet started because we know what the very first 4 internet nodes are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
[The first four nodes were designated as a testbed for developing and debugging the 1822 protocol, which was a major undertaking. While they were connected electronically in 1969, network applications were not possible until the Network Control Protocol was implemented in 1970 enabling the first two host-host protocols, remote login (Telnet) and file transfer (FTP) which were specified and implemented between 1969 and 1973.[10][11][65] The network was declared operational in 1971. Network traffic began to grow once email was established at the majority of sites by around 1973.[12] Initial four hosts First ARPANET IMP log: the first message ever sent via the ARPANET, 10:30 pm PST on 29 October 1969 (6:30 UTC on 30 October 1969). This IMP Log excerpt, kept at UCLA, describes setting up a message transmission from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer The initial ARPANET configuration linked UCLA, ARC, UCSB, and the University of Utah School of Computing. The first node was created at UCLA...]
Would you stop with the nonsense? Gramophones were never renamed "netflix". LOL........
Would you again stop with the nonsense? Everyone with common sense knows that the internet did not just blink into existence with a million domains. Obviously it had to start small and grow from there. The internet was created in 1969, not 1980. The very first internet connection occurred on 30 October 1969. The first 4 internet nodes were: UCLA, ARC, UCSB, and the University of Utah. Just because the internet originally had a different name does not change in the slightest exactly when, how, and where it began.