[nathan_long]

Yes. I was fascinated to learn recently that, as Cerf says, Ethernet was based on a broadcast network in Hawaii. Two interesting things about that:

1) Networking between local machines came after larger, more distributed networks. This seems odd to us who might walk around with 3 computers on our person, but in those days, you might have 1 computer per institution, and networking's goal was to allow better sharing of those scarce resources. 2) The Ethernet method of "broadcasting" every message to everyone on the network (absent a switch to filter traffic for individual hosts) seemed odd to me when I first heard it, but there's no other way to do it in a radio network, which is what Ethernet was based on.