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by T-hawk
5071 days ago
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> I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US government pushed a piddly amount of funding into Arpanet or not. Indeed. How about Fidonet? Fidonet developed as a network of interconnected BBSes, starting from 1984 and widely accessible by about 1994, without government stimulus. Fidonet had a backbone and a hierarchical structure for routing messages. It's not hard to envision a world where telecommunications companies got into that business, providing dedicated high-speed connections and lines for Fidonet (becoming an FSP rather than ISP), so that it evolved from an asynchronous modem-based network into real-time connectivity. So what we call a website could have developed from the BBS rather than from gopher servers, and what we call a browser could have evolved from Telix rather than Mosaic. There are many alternative ways a global network could and would have developed without US government initiation. But it's also possible that the US government stimulus made it happen sooner and more centralized to the US (some of Fidonet's development came from Russia.) |
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But none of those became what we use today. That's the key point here. You can argue that it would have happened anyway, or that some other network protocol or technology was superior and should have been used instead of what we use today, but that's not what the article is saying.
The research that was funded by ARPA became the baseline for what would become the Internet. That's what happened.