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The Novelty of the Arpanet
The ARPANET made its splashy public debut in 1972. Why exactly was it such a big deal?
The lawyers, policy-makers, and economists at the ICCC might have been enamored with the clever chess program and the chat bots, but the networking experts would have been more interested in two other scenarios that did a better job of demonstrating what the ARPANET project had achieved. Rankin argues that by ignoring these early time-sharing networks we impoverish our understanding of how American digital culture developed over the last 50 years, leaving room for a “Silicon Valley mythology” that credits everything to the individual genius of a select few founding fathers. In my view, the Network Working Group was able to get everything together in time and just generally excel at its task because it adopted an open and informal approach to standardization, as exemplified by the famous Request for Comments (RFC) series of documents.
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