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The Jargon File, version 4.4.8 (jargon)

Internet: n. The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as
the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has
been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture
for military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and
including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from
the start as a way to get most economical use out of then-scarce
large-computer resources. Robert Herzfeld, who was director of ARPA at
the time, has been at some pains to debunk the
“survive-a-nuclear-war” myth, but it seems unkillable.As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to
support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of
distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic mail quickly
grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research labs and defense
contractors early discovered the Internet's potential as a medium of
communication between humans and linked up in steadily
increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics, techies,
hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this lexicon lie
in those early years.Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The
typical machine/OS combination moved from DEC
PDP-10s and PDP-20s, running
TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, to
PDP-11s and VAXen and Suns running
Unix, and in the 1990s to Unix on Intel
microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable, most notably
in the move from NCP/IP to TCP/IP in 1982 and the
implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983. It was around this time
that people began referring to the collection of interconnected networks
with ARPANET at its core as “the Internet”.The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation guidelines --
connected institutions had to be involved with a DOD-related research
project. By the mid-80s, many of the organizations clamoring to join
didn't fit this profile. In 1986, the National Science Foundation built
NSFnet to open up access to its five regional supercomputing centers;
NSFnet became the backbone of the Internet, replacing the original ARPANET
pipes (which were formally shut down in 1990). Between 1990 and late 1994
the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major telecommunications companies until
the Internet backbone had gone completely commercial.That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture discovered
the Internet. Once again, the killer app was not
the anticipated one — rather, what caught the public imagination was
the hypertext and multimedia features of the World Wide Web. Subsequently
the Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol
stack favored by European telecoms monopolies) and is in the process of
absorbing into itself many of the proprietary networks built during the
second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. By 1996 it had become a
commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a globally-extended
Internet would become the key unifying communications technology of the
next century. See also the network.