[PEN-L:6933] Re: I'm afraid to say this...

[Nathan Newman <newman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 25 Oct 1996, bill mitchell wrote:

>
> there is a fallacy in this argument Doug. you assume there is a uniqueness to
> phenomena. but path dependency can be non-unique and depends vitally on
> starting values.
>
> in this case we communicate via email b/c of the beginnings of the net in
> military intelligence in the usa. but if that hadn't have happened it still
> might have happened via another path.

Unlikely.  I'm actually finishing a chapter I'm writing about the
government role in building the Internet.  THe more I've read, the more I
am amazed at how contingent the existence of the Internet really is.
There were so many places along the way where the system could have ended
up as just one of many proprietary systems that would have been extremely
hard to integrate.  Hell, Microsoft was betting against compatible systems
as late as last summer.

Continual government intervention was needed to push the system towards
uniform standards.

I don't know if folks know that AT&T had two chances to own the original
Internet, but they turned it down both when RAND/Air Force asked them to
build it and later in the 1970s when ARPA offered to sell them the system
lock-stock-and-barrel.

A key reason we ended up with widespread IP standards was when UC-Berkeley
was developing their version of UNIX, DARPA intervened to fund the
integration of IP protocols into the final version of their UNIX.  The
person funded to do that work for DARPA, Bill Joy, became one of the
founders of Sun Microsystems who promoted the standards all over the
workstation world.  Bob Taylor, a key ARPA employee when the ARPANET was
created, was working at Xerox PARC around that time when the Ethernet was
invented.  He got Xerox to donate a few million dollars worth of
networking equipment to universities to help get the standard further
distributed.

In fact, the ARPA-created computer elite network was probably one of the
more amazing economic engines you can imagine.  It puts MITI to shame in
its dedication.

--Nathan Newman