From: eugene@wilbur.nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya)
Subject: Re: Input Need for Talk on "Usenet News:The Poor Man's Arpanet"
Organization: NAS, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 93 00:04:34 GMT

In article <1k2a98INNhgf@srvr1.engin.umich.edu> ronda@ais.org
(Ronda Hauben) writes:
>ronda@ais.org responding: 
>   But weren't those who had been excluded from the ARPANET both
>aware of that exclusion and also interested in having access to
>a similar valuable network?

No, they had no concept, and to this day, many people don't fully see
what something like the ARPAnet meant back then, even the term internet.
Your environment tends to color the way you tend look to at computing.
Our site decided to drop payment in 1975.  It was a stupid decision,
but then I was an undergrad.  The management could not see the value.

Attempts to duplicate the ARPAnet either commercially or in other countries
have failed to live up to the same degree as the net.  It was really
something to see a person's net address in a business card in 1975, say,
but people had them.  Very few universities had net access, also the
fact that ARPA was part of the DoD and U's wanted to diverse themselves
of the is not appreciated.  Sign of the times.

The ARPAnet was funded, designed, and built by truly visionary men (mostly).

Exclusion is not the right word.  Most people were still using punch cards
in those days.  Computers were expensive.  Networks were even more expensive.
An interesting metric are jobs ads with email addresses.  The elite
institutions of the net used them at first: work for us, and you get ARPAnet
addresses: MIT, PARC, etc. then came a phase of UUCP and CSnet and BITNET
in the lesser case.  Now the hottest institutions DON'T print their
email addresses.

It's like trying to describe Berkeley job control to a VMS user or an
MS/DOS user (why would you want the thing?) or the first mice and windowing
systems to people with vt100s and IBM 3270s.  FTP and telnet are two
programs which changed my life (as did Alto Star Trek).

>And it seems sometimes that the Internet still doesn't pay as much
>attention to NetNews as they might :)

Depends on your use.

>Usenet seems rarely mentioned in public accounts of the Internet
>for example the article "Building the Electronic Superhighway"
>in the Sunday, Jan. 24, 1993, issue of the New York Times in the
>Business section, leaves out NetNews and the interactive nature of
>Usenet is ignored -- what is proposed is basically a computer
>version of current U.S. t.v. (i.e. all top down). 

Interactive?  A little.  It's not clear you want popularity.
The masses can use Prodigy(tm) and Compuserve (tm).

>Do you have any idea why newsgroups first occurred as part of 
>Usenet and NOT as part of Arpanet?

Sure, the ARPAnet had mailing lists which people felt were adequate.
No news software existed.  Software had a lesser role back then.

>I wasn't suggesting that Usenet was intended as "competition" which
>would have been impossible because Arpanet wasn't open to lots
>of folks because they didn't have the DOD contracts that made
>it possible for one to have the money to pay for being part of 
>the ARPANET -(i.e. the funding for ARPANET was supposedly a part of ones 
>DOD grant).

1) NCP address limitations.
2) A lot of people didn't want DoD contracts.

>: 	The folks who developed NetNews certainly had a great deal of
>: vision and inspiration, but I don't think that any of the real early
>: folks involved had quite so grand a vision as that.  The early evolution 
>: had a totally different "feel" to it.

Geez, the guys were just more young hacker punks.

>Can you explain then why they used the phrase in the 1980 invitation 
>to join Usenet?

I suggest not reading too much into the phrase.  One could find a dozen
other period phrases which were not as farsighted.

My opinions of course.  Just passing thru.  Don't expect me to read a
follow up (baby sitting a TeraByte transfer at the moment so I can
scan news).

--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@orville.nas.nasa.gov
  Associate Editor, Software and Publication Reviews
  Scientific Programming
  {uunet,mailrus,other gateways}!ames!eugene
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