Guys,
You guys were in grade school, some of us were there at the
beginning (well, in my case, 2 years after the beginning). I can
assure you that folks made a big deal about what was and wasn't
the Internet, and the distinction between "an internet" and "the
(capital I) Internet." Opinions varied then, and opinions vary
now.
But... by and large, as I understand the general zeitgeist:
- you're either on the Internet, or you're not - the key question
is whether you can send & receive IP packets from the public
address space (i.e., the classified segments are internets, but
not part of THE Internet). There are also disagreements on where
the Internet ends - at the demarc, or at the IP stack in your
machine (I argue the latter, but that's debatable)
- as to when the Internet was born... that's also debatable. The
ARPANET started passing it's first packets in Sept. 1969 - that's
a known point in time. One could probably find the date when the
first IP packet crossed transited a router between two networks.
Beyond that, the Flag Day is about as good a date as any - before
that there it all was a gaggle of networks, some routers (then
called gateways), supporting various internetworking protocols,
including IP. But the Flag Day made it all official - except for
a few special exceptions, that marks the date that every machine
on the net was reachable by IP, and NOT by NCP.
So... how about dropping all the pontification. It just makes you
look silly.
Miles Fidelman
Owen DeLong via NANOG wrote:
No, but you
are ignoring the point of my message…
The TCP/IP
internet existed _BEFORE_ the flag day you
mentioned. The flag day was the end of NCP, not
the beginning of TCP/IP. IIRC, at the time,
Owen,
But we’re not talking about the birth of
TCP/IP. We’re talking about the birth of the capital-I
Internet, which by definition runs exclusively on
TCP/IP, and that didn’t start until Jan 1, 1983.
Although there was experimentation
using IP during 1982, that was still ARPANET. It was
the guaranteed exclusive availability of
IP that made 1983 the Internet’s birth date.
IMHO, that’s an absurd definition. It was still ARPANET
after January 1, 1983 too. Prior to 1982, it was ARPANET on
NCP. During 1982, it was ARPANET running on NCP+TCP/IP, much
like the Internet runs dual stack today on IPv4 and IPv6.
In 1983, NCP was removed from most of the backbone, as I
hope will happen with IPv4 in the next few years.
And no, it’s not analogous to the eventual
IPv6 transition, because both IPv5 and IPv4 are
Capital-I Internet standard protocols.
You’re picking arbitrary definitions of Capital-I Internet
standards. NCP was every bit as standardized as TCP/IP in 1982.
Both were documented in the same IEN series of documents.
IEN later (well after TCP/IP) evoked to become RFC.
Don’t believe me? Look at the hosts.txt file from IPv4 days
which still referenced IEN116.
Owen
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why. ... unknown