> In viewing some of the current published histories of "The Internet", the > ARPAnet was supposed to have ceased to exist in 1992, with "The Internet" > having been in existence and in widespread use from 1990 or before. > > When I commenced study at the WACAE in 1992, I encountered my first > experience of computer internetworking, and, as I previously described, the > access via dialix, via the AARnet, to the ARPAnet, which now is said to have > not existed at that time.
IIUC what was called "ARPAnet" and what is now called "Internet" are one and the same thing (or maybe a better way to describe it is that the Internet includes what was earlier called ARPAnet). So I suspect that was you describe above as ARPAnet was very much already part of the Internet, but people just kept using the old name. > At that time, in Australia, outside the AARnet and the ARPAnet, for which > access was only for academic institutions and students, access to > international internetworking did not exist. When I first got access to the Internet (sometime around late 1990, IIRC), access was indeed available only to academic institutions (with some notable exception like some computer companies, some research and military agencies, ...), but it was already "the Internet", using basically the same IPv4, DNS, etc... we know today. My alma mater was already `epfl.ch` and University of Michigan was already `umich.edu`. Wikipedia tells me "the web" had already been invented, but I can't remember seeing it or even hearing about it during my first year. It was probably 1991 or even 1992 before I heard of FTP, Netnews, and Gopher (and the [Alex](https://ludd.ltu.se/~kavli/alex.html) world-wide filesystem). > The telling of a history, is not producing the history - it is only > the telling of what an individual tells of the particular history, as > I have said above. Amen. === Stefan
