Barry Shein <bzs(_at_)world(_dot_)std(_dot_)com> wrote:
Well, by nfsnet I assume you mean NSFNET, as in the US National
Science Foundation, came into being in 1988, JANET first started IP
service in 1991, and the rest of your note is just about as reliable
for facts (which is to say, not at all.)
JANET startd internal use of IP in 1991, having used a variety of other
protocols (mostly X25 over wide area, ECMA transport and various home-growns
over local area) for a long time before that. But the "internet" didn't
refer to the use of IP, but to the interconnection of the various networks,
and connections between the Joint Academic Network and various other
networks (including academic netwrorks in the US and elsewhere in Europe)
was achieved using gateways which converted between different local network
standards long before that date. If you mean "networks using the IP defined
in RFC0791" then fine, your dates are right. If you mean the network which
grew from the interconnection of a large collection of individual networks
in various parts of the world your dates are completely wrong. When you
said "internet" I assumed you meant the latter (the internet still has many
subnets which are gatewayed with protocol converters, although it's now much
more common to use IP over the top of the local network layer).
But, fwiw, I probably should have said "internet via DARPAnet" rather
than just internet although, as with the assertion above, you seem to
have created a lot more interconnections than existed (the "very end
of that era" was a reference to the 1988 NSFNET.)
OK, NSFNET is 1988; there were plenty of Universities with access to
Darpanet before then, and there were several inter-university networks
before then, and there were various interconnections between those various
inter-university netwroks before then.
Whatever the dates, the main point remains: there was no "free resource" and
none of the people who were paying for the (very) expensive network
infrastructures that formed the internet (whether by that we mean the
interconnecting network that had joined up all those individual networks, or
the network pervaded by IP which it subsequently eveolved into) were
interested in providing a free ride for non-contributors.
Tom
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