[ih] ARPANet anniversary

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

    > From: Dave CROCKER <dhc2 at dcrocker.net>

    > the live birth of the world we now call the Internet

Call me picky, but I do like to differentiate between 'the Internet' and 'the
global communcation/information catenetwork'. The birth of the ARPAnet is, I
think, the birth of the latter, but to me, not the Internet. (I.e. the entity
which speaks TCP/IP - although it's not clear that definition of 'the
Internet' is really the best definition, though).

Although the ARPAnet was clearly the forerunner, I think there are important
distinctions, in particular the Internet's express intent to incorporate a
wide range of disparate data communications subsystems into a tightly-coupled
integrated entity.

And speaking of the Internet as a distinct entity, whats it's birth-day
anyway? I would call it the first day on which a packet was sent from one
host, across a particular kind of network, through a router (or gateway as we
called them back then), across another network, into another host. (That would
have been a TCP packet, I guess - no IP back then!) So where and when was
that?

	Noel