Points well made. Perhaps I should clarify that my initial goal was more to track the evolution of commercial services. There's no question that individual academic and government networks preceded commercialization. For that matter, the evolution of regionals from a cooperative to a commercial model also isn't simple. Thanks to all from whom I'm getting responses. Several people have pointed out that various key events in this history haven't really been written down, and I hope I can pull some of these together and make them available to the community.
On Fri, 23 Feb 2001, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:
In the beginning, of course, there was the ARPANET.
Then there was the NSFNET. The NAPs were the first recognizable exchange points, with AUPs. NAPs were linked by VBNS.
I think you left out a few intermediate steps like:
- MILNET and the ARPANET-MILNET Mailbridge gateways.
- The Wideband Net
- CSnet
- The NASA Science Internet
- The various supercomputer-center centric networks (e.g. JVNCnet)
Miles Fidelman
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