[governance] Internet blackout in Egypt

[Lee W McKnight]

DARPA or ARPA is indeed the funding source of the work Karl's talking about, though it may have been one step removed via contracts from  BBN to UCLA.

Anyway, in spite of some DARPA vets insisting that 'cold' or very hot/nuclear war was furthest thing from their mind, an innovation that received 40 years of 'seed funding' from - US DOD - well let's just say I always felt it strained credibility to say the net's survivability was not an attractive feature, to the funders.

And I could tell you more about what pushed Berners-Lee's innovations out of - a (Euro) government-funded lab - into the market but then I'd have to...well never mind ; )

Lee
________________________________________
From: governance-request at lists.cpsr.org [governance-request at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of Karl Auerbach [karl at cavebear.com]
Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 7:22 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] Internet blackout in Egypt

On 01/28/2011 07:35 AM, Nyangkwe Agien Aaron wrote:

> But Internet ws created by man not out of any said government policy
> (I hope Tim Lee will not disagree here)

TBL did his work 20 to 25 years after the net began moving packets.
Some might disagree, but I draw a continuous line from the ARPAnet of
the late 1960s to the internet of today.

I was there when the ARPAnet started - 1968 or '69 - 4th floor of
Boalter Hall, UCLA.

(I was working with the institute of traffic engineering - early car
crashing and stuff - on an IBM 7094.  The Sigma 7 with IMP #1 was in the
next room.  The Sigma ran the "Sigma EXecutive" - guess what was written
on the the spines of all the system manuals? ;-)

In any event I don't remember who funded that UCLA work, but a couple of
years later (1972) when I worked on net protocols and network security
at System Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica we were most definitely
funded by the US Gov't and we most definitely worked on the basis of
network nodes being vaporized in nuclear fireballs.  (It was ironic - we
were working in a building constructed several years earlier
specifically to house a US NORAD SAGE computer, the Q7, serious cold war
stuff.)

(When I was at SDC we all read and were greatly and positively
influenced by the technical papers of Louis Pouzin - who is present on
this list.  The folks in France seemed to grasp the commercial and
social potential of networking long before we did in the US.)

I believe that until around 1980 the majority of network development
funding came out of the US (and UK) gov'ts, largely the military parts.
  Even our beloved Unix came via the UC Berkeley release (BSD) that was
funded by the US Dep't of Energy.)

The world wide web - which really is merely one application of many
layered upon the internet - came along in the mid 1990's, a decade after
the switch of the net from NCP to IP.

> What is happening in Egypt is sure sign that the Oligarchy there is
> living its last moments...

Be careful - the events in France of 1789 led rather quickly to
Napoleon, the 1917 revolution in Russia soon led to Lenin.  The chaos of
a falling government opens the door to many influences, not all of which
are necessarily of a liberal or democratic spirit.

                --karl--


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