[IP] more on Setting history straight: So, who really did invent the Internet?

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

My memory re pricing says there were several notable events prior to  
NSFNet days. The first was an agreement between CSNet http:// 
livinginternet.com/i/ii_csnet.htm , and Darpa that traffic that would  
flow between CSNet and Darpa would assume equal flow and thus there  
would be a net zero cost for each side. Without that there would have  
been possibly insurmountable problems connecting the ArpaNet and the  
new evolving CSNet. The other two was a decision again within CSNet  
that the new requesting clones of CSNet in the international arena --  
like Japan and others, would pay for their connection to the USA  
CSNet and that there would be only ONE national CSNet that we would  
negotiate with. Finer site ally the use of the CSNet mail replay  
(running MMDF) would be open to any member site for the price pf  
membership (not load) and we would carry all the offered load.



Begin forwarded message:

From: Brad Templeton <btm@templetons.com>
Date: May 2, 2005 5:15:20 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>
Cc: mo@ccr.org
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Setting history straight: So, who really  
did invent the Internet?


> No, any comprehensive theory for "how the Internet came to be" must  
> take
> into account this very fundamental decentralization and the innovative
> forces it unleashes.

Mike's right in that the invention of the internet should not  
necessarily
be dated to the invention of packet switching or IP and TCP.

I personally suggest that one of the magic ingredients which made the
internet is what I call its cost contract.  In other words, a billing
invention rather than a technological one.

The internet cost contract is "I pay for my line to the midpoint, you
pay for yours, and we don't account for the individual packets."

I pay my half, you pay yours.

This remarkable billing arrangement gave the illusion that the internet
was free.  People were paying for it but you could treat it like it was
largely free.   Other systems, including the X.25 network, and of course
the PSTN, tended to have usage based accounting.

The internet grew because a flourish of people built strange and  
interesting
applications, and left them open to access by the outside world.  The
early days involved everything from fishtank webcams to FTP  
repositories of
software to online communities talking about the technical and the  
trivial.

On a network where you paid for traffic, as soon as an application got
popular, there would be a bill.   And a beancounter would get the bill
and somebody would be called into an office to be asked, "Why do we have
a huge bill for people looking at camera images of our fishtank?"
And it would have been shut down.   Likewise software repositories and
much more.  Only what could be demonstrably financially justified could
have a good chance of thriving.

It is from this that msggroup, and FTP, and USENET, and archie, and  
gopher
and eventually the WWW that people come to think of as "the internet"  
grew.

The ability to innovate at the edges is important, but the ability to
play without accounting may have been even more important.

Who invented this?  Well, some of it arose just as a product of being
a research project where accounting wasn't the main concern.  Many
research projects foster innovation with this formula.

Who made it so that the model remained as the network grew to be a going
concern?   Possibly NSFNet and guys like Steve Wolfe, probably other
decisions even earlier than that.







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