Who Really Invented the Internet?

jaymzter writes "The Wall Street Journal is running an article that it claims seeks to dispel an urban legend about the internet: 'The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet.' The position of the piece is that it was Xerox's contribution of Ethernet that enabled the global series of tubes we know and love today, and what's interesting is that the former head of DARPA supports this claim."

Comments

Re:twisted pair, twisted logic

[houstonbofh]

Perhaps because prior to Ethernet, most communications were either serial, or proprietary. They were the first standard and widely adopted interconnect protocol.

Re:twisted pair, twisted logic

[TheRaven64]

That's true now, but I'd invite you to go back and read the original Ethernet papers from PARC. They describe, among other things, a single (coax) wiring model, with support for up to 256 computers on a single broadcast domain sharing a 3Mb/s channel. Numerous parts of the specification are based on limits of the technology at the time, such as the number of RAM chips it was possible to fit on the board and the I/O speed of the Alto.

The evaluation paper on the Alto, published in 1979, points out that it's possible to imagine a network of thousands of personal computers.

Re:twisted pair, twisted logic

[thomst]

The poster has it wrong.

Surprise!

Robert W. Taylor was never the head of DARPA. He was, however, the guy who proposed and ran the ARPAnet for DARPA, under Director Charles Herzfeld, until he left to become head of Xerox PARC. (Although he got the idea while J.C.R. Licklider was head of DARPA, Taylor didn't pitch it as an actual, fundable project until Herzfeld took over.)

Taylor absolutely does NOT credit Robert Metcalfe (developer of Ethernet) for the invention of the Internet. Instead, he reserves the lion's share of the credit for himself. I know this, because he called me in 1994 to lecture me about what he felt were inaccuracies in a column I wrote for LAN Times about the origins of the Internet. (Specifically, he objected to my statement that the earlier RAND thought experiment on a nuclear-war-survivable, peer-based, packet-switched network was the basis for the development of the Internet.)

You can read more about Licklider, Taylor, and others who were responsible for the devleopment of the Internet in my December 2000 Boardwatch cover story "They Might Be Giants", if you're interested in the real story, as opposed to the WSJ's warm, stinky piece of journalistic shit.