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I mean, even the sub-heading feels wrong to me. Arpanet and BBSs are both a key part of the history of the internet. I'm 35 and both have been discussed, in a historical context, ad nauseam my entire life.
There are other aspects of the origin story that seem to be myth. For instance, the idea that the Internet was designed to route around damage, and could also treat censorship as a form of damage, and therefore it was resistant to censorship. I once spent a long weekend reading through the early RFCs. What I found was the obvious recognition of the fact that AT&T, which at the time had a monopoly on telephone service…
You won’t find anyone saying that censorship is the type of damage to be routed around, in a serious engineering way, because that’s more of a colloquialism than a true design principle. Asserting that it was almost seems like a straw man. The concept of routing around censorship is more of a behavior by people using the applications that the Internet has enabled. There’s no RFC for that.
In its most literal sense, it refers to the fact that Usenet tried to achieve reliability by replicating a complete set of recent articles by a flood fill-like algorithm, regardless of the specific path that they took to reach an individual node. Therefore, if you deleted an individual article in one place, it would still propagate elsewhere, even if it took a longer route to reach a given destination.
It also has a more figurative interpretation in which net users try to maintain connectivity and the free flow of information, and try to find workarounds when either is disrupted.
Kind of depends on what we mean when we use the word "Internet". If we mean internet as a social/economic revolution, then sure, BBSs were relevant. If we mean Internet as a set of protocols, software that implements them, and hardware to run them on, then I don't see that BBSs had a lot of relevance (though they used sliding window protocols for file transfer such as ZMODEM/YMODEM).
On a larger scale, when AOL started offering internet services through their network is sort of the same thing until they eventually just become an ISP.
There are other aspects of the origin story that seem to be myth. For instance, the idea that the Internet was designed to route around damage, and could also treat censorship as a form of damage, and therefore it was resistant to censorship. I once spent a long weekend reading through the early RFCs. What I found was the obvious recognition of the fact that AT&T, which at the time had a monopoly on telephone service…
See, e.g. Baran's writings from 1964, about decentralization, fault tolerance, and survivability of packet switched networks and directly lead to the ARPANet and internet: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html
> shred of evidence I could find in favor of something like an ideology of decentralization
As to decentralization among many providers-- this only really comes into play in 1989, when BGP emerged, and the NSFNet began to connect regional networks and ISPs and internet exchanges began to flourish-- though you can find Baran writing in the late 1970's about the connection of multiple networks and ensuring that single providers or colluding groups of providers are not too powerful.
But it was a goal from the beginning. E.g. Pouzin, 1973:
"Actually, this last approach boils down to the construction of another network, and ultimate at that. ... This is not to say that a general internetwork agreement will never happen, but that it will happen gradually... This study attempts to put forward a realistic scheme allowing point to point message transfer across several independent packet switching networks. This requires a common agreement in formatting messages, but constraints are minimized while preserving implementation freedom and efficiency."
Of course, many questions remained-- protocol translation vs. common protocol? How to do this all, without dynamic routing? What about the regulatory landscape, etc. We lucked out into a pretty good outcome, overall.
> could also treat censorship as a form of damage
This is a feature of the culture of the 'net it existed in the 80's and 90's based on experience with Usenet (which indeed does kind of route-around-censorship in many cases, but also engendered a group of users who culturally subverted attempts at censorship), and not a feature of the internet protocols themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You won’t find anyone saying that censorship is the type of damage to be routed around, in a serious engineering way, because that’s more of a colloquialism than a true design principle. Asserting that it was almost seems like a straw man. The concept of routing around censorship is more of a behavior by people using the applications that the Internet has enabled. There’s no RFC for that.
Specifically, "the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" is a statement of John Gilmore and originally referred to Usenet (not the Internet). In its most literal sense, it refers to the fact that Usenet tried to achieve reliability by replicating a complete set of recent articles by a flood fill-like algorithm, regardless of the specific path that they took to reach an individual node. Therefore,…
Thanks
There are other aspects of the origin story that seem to be myth. For instance, the idea that the Internet was designed to route around damage, and could also treat censorship as a form of damage, and therefore it was resistant to censorship. I once spent a long weekend reading through the early RFCs. What I found was the obvious recognition of the fact that AT&T, which at the time had a monopoly on telephone service…
My impression from my professor is that these academic precursors to the Internet were really intended to be centrally controlled by their various committees (as academic efforts usually are). The notion that these packet switched networks would eventually just sort of be run in a mostly decentralized way didn't seem to have occurred to anybody.
The story I learned from Where Wizards Stay Up Late and The Dream Machine is wrong?
The story I learned from Where Wizards Stay Up Late and The Dream Machine is wrong?
>The history of the internet is repeatedly reduced to the story of the singular Arpanet. But BBSs were just as important—if not more. I mean, even the sub-heading feels wrong to me. Arpanet and BBSs are both a key part of the history of the internet. I'm 35 and both have been discussed, in a historical context, ad nauseam my entire life.