Interesting Snippets

once standalone computers started getting hooked together into networks around 1970, there was a problem. Those networks couldn’t talk to each other. They were like little islands. There was the well-known ARPANET, and also the NPL network in the UK, and soon several others, and they were all isolated. The solution was to create standards that could translate data between them and tie them into networks of networks. This process is called “internetworking” or “internetting”, and the result is called an “internet”. Who invented internetting? Many people, and most knew each other as members of the small but global networking community of the time. The first experimental internetting connection to get off the ground may have been the European Informatics Network in ’73, which among others connected Louis Pouzin’s Cyclades network in France and Donald Davies’ NPL Mark I network in the UK. But at nearly the same time Xerox PARC began experimenting in-house with the proprietary internetting protocol called PUP (PARC Universal Packet).