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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that there is a generation of developers now who seem to believe that the Internet is an achievement of pure commercial, market dynamics and are surprised to learn about ARPANET and its early development within academia (we were taught this history in the first year of university). If the foundations of the Internet (particularly the protocol suites) had not been open, government-funded and not-for-profit, we would probably have a number of competing closed platforms instead of a single Internet, with paid services to perform protocol translations between them.

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> we would probably have a number of competing closed platforms instead of a single Internet, with paid services to perform protocol translations between them.

That did exist with the likes of Tymnet and the various Online Services (AOL, CompuServe, etc). The Internet won out over those because it was open, as you alluded to. Internet adoption really exploded with unlimited services rather than ISPs that billed hourly.

Even among the open protocols there was healthy competition like Gopher and BBS networks

It was truly a time to be alive, the 1980s and 1990s, if you were into technology. The change was interesting and quite rapid, lot of variety and experiments

Yep, services like AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and so on, would absolutely be separate. As it was, each of these services basically had to allow access to the greater Internet.

So true. I find another prove that altruist collaboration wins any other model although users may not perceived as such or there is no interest spreading these facts.

Altruist? DARPA is a military agency, ARPANET was a prototype network designed to survive a nuclear strike. I think the grandparent comment's point is that the innovation was government-funded and made available openly; none of which depends on the slightest on its being altruist.

The resilience of ARPANET was influenced by CYCLADES, which was developed in French Academia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES

> The CYCLADES network was the first to make the hosts responsible for the reliable delivery of data, rather than this being a centralized service of the network itself. Datagrams were exchanged on the network using transport protocols that do not guarantee reliable delivery, but only attempt best-effort [..] The experience with these concepts led to the design of key features of the Internet Protocol in the ARPANET project

Keeping with the theme of the thread, CYCLADES was destroyed because of greed:

> Data transmission was a state monopoly in France at the time, and IRIA needed a special dispensation to run the CYCLADES network. The PTT did not agree to funding by the government of a competitor to their Transpac network, and insisted that the permission and funding be rescinded. By 1981, Cyclades was forced to shut down.

https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/

> Rumors had persisted for years that the ARPANET had been built to protect national security in the face of a nuclear attack. It was a myth that had gone unchallenged long enough to become widely accepted as fact.

No, the Internet (inclusive of ARPANET, NSFNet, and so on) was not designed to survive a nuclear war. It's the worst kind of myth: One you can cite legitimate sources for, because it's been repeated long enough even semi-experts believe it.

The ARPANET was made to help researchers and to justify the cost of a mainframe computer:

> It's understandable how it could spread. Military communications during Nuclear War makes a more memorable story than designing a way to remote access what would become the first massively parallel computer, the ILLIAC IV. The funding and motivation for building ARPANET was partially to get this computer, once built, to be "online" in order to justify the cost of building it. This way more scientists could use the expensive machine.

That's a valiant attempt at myth-fighting, but it doesn't fully convince me. For example, one hop to Wikipedia gives this:

> Later, in the 1970s, ARPA did emphasize the goal of "command and control". According to Stephen J. Lukasik, who was deputy director (1967–1970) and Director of DARPA (1970–1975):

> "The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making."

> That's a valiant attempt at myth-fighting, but it doesn't fully convince me. For example, one hop to Wikipedia gives this:

And in that same Wikipedia section there are 3-4 other people, including Herzfeld, who was the guy/director who authorized the actual starting of the project, who say otherwise:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Creation

Meanwhile you cherrypick 1-2 paragraphs at the end, while there are over a dozen that say the opposite. Note that Kukasik was later the director of DARPA, which had a completely different mandate that (no-D) ARPA.

Why do you lie?

Any technology that is developed to be federated and resilient in the face of apocalyptic events is definitionaly altruistic toward humanity.

We would have had telcos (or satellite TVs) creating and competing on siloed services and eventually some big company would buy a telco to have access to their customers. Some multinational telcos would provide the same services around the world but most countries would have a wall at the border.

The thing is, we did have telcos and others provide siloed services. AOL being the big one, but also things like Prodigy, Compuserve, French Minitel, etc. What I wonder about is, would an Internet-like system have arisen anyway just because it's such a better ux? You saw a development like that with Fidonet for example but I think the Internet stole its oxygen.

We did have that well into Internet years because some services where not there yet. I give you an example: I worked for one of the early 3G providers (2003-). YouTube is from 2005. We developed and run streaming video services because our customers did not have any meaningful source of videos to watch, so we had to build that and other services to drive the sales of our phone contracts. Mobile web sites were not a thing for a few more years so we had news and meteo and many other things. Our little private internet. Then YouTube became big, other services were born and became big too, all phone companies basically became internet providers.

Without IP protocols we probably would not even be born as a company. BBSes on analog modems or GSM data would be all we had.

Minitel was offered by France Télécom, then a government-operated service, under what was originally the Ministry of Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones. (The name "Minitel" is not short for "ministry of telecommunications", but rather Médium interactif par numérisation d'information téléphonique. Though I suspect some advantageous ambiguity was exploited.

France Telecom was privatised during the 1990s with the aquisition of the Orange Group, its current (commercial) branding.

The protocols were made open by necessity, not by design. The motive was to connect academic , government, and commercial institutions across the country, all of which operated on incompatible operating systems and data networks. However, the common man would not have benefited from this before 1993, as the government effectively operated as a semi-competent firewall against commercial content and the broader public. They even sued ISPs that permitted legitimate accounts from remotely accessing the net through PPP or SLIP protocols. Not even commercial news feeds were permitted until the late 80s.

The only Internet the common man interacted with is the one that began to flourish as the government relinquished control. The Internet since the mid-90s is and has been a purely commercial achievement.

There were some early ISPs, like The World (Boston), that had IP access around 1991 or so. I believe they were connected through UUNet. I don't know if they were routeable on the NSFNet? "Commercial" traffic was supposedly prohibited.

I remember a few BBSs that offered email (done via nightly UUCP so slower than people today are used to) to the common person.

Because it was new there weren't really thought out mechanism for people connecting early on, but some did.

http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/deepthought.html

I had a UUCP feed, by either late 1992 or early '93. Several other local BBSes had one, as well.

Open source and hacker culture is basically a massive ethical triumph that has catapulted humanity forward.

There isn't a single person living on the planet that isn't touched and benefitted by this in some way, even remote island tribes we consider untouched, there is hardly a single ounce of space payload that doesn't have open source in it's causal chain.

There is no more pragmatically altruistic culture that has ever existed or impacted more people.

In the U.S. no culture has helped lift the impoverished out of poverty into the upper middle class through empowerment (ask any of us adults who were once kids going to bed hungry.)

People have their pet beliefs and metaphysics and ideological communities but "information deserves to be free" is the goat.

> There isn't a single person living on the planet that isn't touched and benefitted by this in some way, even remote island tribes we consider untouched...

That seems a bit over the top. I'd love to see your causal chain for that claim.

The Sentinelese monitoring program run by the government in India the works to enforce no contact rules relies on open source in it's causal chain.

My mother did remote tribal work in the brasilian interior, she grew up on the Amazon, I personally know well off Ruby devs who grew up unable to even read.

Whether you are against intervention or pro intervention, all across that spectrum, whatever your luxury belief may be, everyone is impacted by open-source.

Open source is an insane force multiplier, not just for production but for the entire training and r&d pipeline as well.

Thanks for pointing this out. We're so surrounded by the dystopian tech future, it's nice to see some positivity to tech, it's been a while.

Not really surprising when you have political parties and large tech companies both either outright minimizing the role public institutions had in developing anything or outright lying that the public sector can't possibly do anything at all.

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