[e2e] Nature mag, DARPA, and the Internet

[Dave Crocker]

Hilarie,

TPSHO> mentions "many credit the agency with developing the Internet" and an
TPSHO> editorial "In Defence of DARPA", mentioning that among its payoffs are
TPSHO> "a host of critical Internet technologies."  I assume the magazine
TPSHO> means well, but this lukewarm referral to DARPA's role seems to show
TPSHO> that those who do not know history are designated to rewrite it.


Not that the press has a very good track-record of getting technical
matters (or history) very accurate, there is a reasonable basis for
giving Darpa less than 100% of the credit:

NSFNet forced a multi-backbone core and created a set of pre-ISP
organizations -- the real-world importance of both these enhancements
was massive.

Search engines and the Web came from non-Arpa work. In fact, after the
initial burst of apps work in the early 70s, I believe there were no
successful, new applications that came out of the Darpa community.

So, Darpa did the packet-related work and one or two of the core
applications. But taken on their own, they are not sufficient for the
phenomenon most folks think of, when they say "Internet".



d/
--
 Dave Crocker <mailto:dcrocker at brandenburg.com>
 Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
 Sunnyvale, CA  USA <tel:+1.408.246.8253>, <fax:+1.866.358.5301>