Matt Novak tells the story of the birth of the Arpanet, the precursor to today’s internet. He shares his text discussion with Bradley Fidler, a historian of computing at the Stevens Institute in New Jersey. Fidler told Novak about why the birth certificate is important and how it fits into the grand scheme of better understanding of networking history.
Source: Gizmodo, October 29, 2019. Link. A decade after the first connection, in 1979, the Arpanet was the Internet’s first and only backbone, a role it maintained until 1986. Even though the underlying structure of the Internet is supposed to be invisible, its design sets the conditions and limits on how we can connect, how we can be monitored, how it can be secured, etc.
INSIGHTS: The old Internet and Arpanet was a Defense Department project that tested its use scenarios in a place it didn’t matter to military operational readiness from where its funding originated. Today, the Internet is no longer a military project. It is a commercial entity and its new founding texts originate with Facebook, Google, Tencent and the like.