[email protected] (Joel C. Ewing) writes: > How many of the web sites you visit on a daily basis are something > other than a university or a government research facility? How many > of the people that you regularly communicate with on the Internet are > not at one of those facilities, and for that matter, are you in the > set of people not at those facilities? That's how much of the > Internet would be missing (99.99% +) if legislation in 1992 had not > opened up this government military/research network to commercial use. > > The government ARPA-net became the Internet we know today because Al > Gore recognized its potential and pushed legislation, first in 1988 to > help link universities and libraries, and additional legislation in > 1992 which opened it to commercial traffic. Probably someone else > would have eventually done so if he hadn't, but maybe not for another > decade or more; or maybe enough of Congress would have been bought by > a major TelCom for them to have been granted an exclusive monopoly on > the Internet, totally changing its character. No one else in Congress > was pushing for expanded information access at the time. That's why > Vint Cerf gives Al Gore credit.
re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012j.html#83 Gordon Crovitz: Who Really Invented the Internet? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012j.html#84 Gordon Crovitz: Who Really Invented the Internet? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012j.html#87 Gordon Crovitz: Who Really Invented the Internet? regarding the $20M ... the original was coming out of the supercomputing center funding to link together the centers. then things changed when that budget got cut. old email about getting $20M (before the cut) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#email860915b for "HSDT" ... name I had given collection of "high-speed" activities I was doing internally (and maybe not so internally) ... some old hsdt posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt more mention that I was going to get $20M from NSF http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#email860915 reference to director of NSF sending letter to corporation http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#email860417 The original program announcement was announced 28Mar1986, reproduced in this post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#12 this old email has 3Dec1986 announcement about NSF budget getting cut http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#email861208 the RFP was finally awarded 24Nov1987 for $11.2M (but as previously referenced, I was prevented from bidding ... even over objections of director of NSF). I've mentioned several times there were additional reasons for the non-commercial AUPs (acceptable use policies). At the time telcos had huge fixed cost covered by use tarriffs (including bytes transferred). There was enormous amount of (unused) dark fiber ... but there was big chicken&egg situation. Without drastic reduction in use charges, there weren't going to be the appearance of the big bandwidth hungry applications. Straight significant reduction in the use charges, it might be a decade before the use reached a level that covered fixed operating costs (i.e. large deficit operating in the red). Estimate was that actually closer to $50M was provided in various bandwidth for the NSFNET backbone ... for closed technology incubator (spurring growth of bandwidth hungry applications) ... w/o the non-commercial AUP eliminating any commerical paying traffic moving over. -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
