The article cites a different version of history than most.

Reader comment on: Who Really Invented the Internet?

Submitted by Lyle (United States), Jul 23, 2012 17:32

Most hold that arpanet was the predecessor of the internet as defined. The article focuses on the concept of interconnecting networks, which is a piece of the internet broadly defined. If you want to use the narrow definition of the internet as interconnected networks then yes. But the article neglects the battle between Ethernet and Token Ring which was backed by IBM which at the time was effectively the government for large enterprise IT. IBM had a different view of networking deploying slaves around a master mainframe. The word internet includes the TCP/IP protocol (Cerf) and the world wide web (Berners Lee which was funded by European Governments at CERN). Note that the concept of a router to interconnect networks was invented by a researcher at Stanford, so likely funded by government, led to the founding of Cisco Systems in 1984 for the first commercially successful multiprotocol router, (much more important while IBM was pushing SNA instead of TCP/IP)

At that time the battles were between Token Ring and 10 mbps ethernet, and TCP/IP vs SNA vs, Novell, etc. But at the time 1986 if you did not have a government linkage you could not get on the internet, and it had an acceptable usage policy of what was appropriate, which did not include anything commercial, or blogs except about scientific research.

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