On Wed, Sep 28, 2022, 08:36 John S. Quarterman <***@***> wrote: Thanks for the inquiry. And thanks for digging into Internet history; it's always interesting to see new material dug up. I'm not sure what you're getting at with your "stated without citation." I didn't see any reason to cite my own opinion which I previously also wrote. Most likely if you dig back in issues of Matrix News you'll find even earlier versions. After your question "Why didn't he just stick with that?" I had to reread several times to convince myself you weren't attributing the Japan Information Highway article to me. Could you please clarify by saying something like "text by others". To directly answer your question, The Matrix is a history and policy book. The other two you quote are, as their titles indicate, about technical aspects of how to use the stuff. History was not the main point of those books. As you say, "these statements are small buried passages in much larger, often dry technical works." These particular statements were not intended to be complete histories of the origins of the ARPANET. They are indeed a bit too condensed. I am puzzled by your characterization, "This ARPANET is one step removed from nuclear war planning narrative". First of all, that doesn't seem to be what you are objecting to. Earlier, you wrote: "was *designed from the start* to withstand a nuclear attack." Secondly, you documented the one step removed in your quotes from "Recommendation to the air staff" by RAND, from August 1965." See also below about Licklider: RAND is not the only connection between nuclear war planning and ARPA and the ARPANET.. Yes, I am and was well aware that the principal purpose of ARPANET and the Internet is resource sharing. There was no real need to spell that out of the readers of those two books, because they were reading them to learn how to implement that. But that is not the whole story, as you have started discovering. Why was resource sharing on peoples' minds back then? And where did the money come from? Bruce Sterling's writeup is not wrong. Sure, it's better than my shorthand blurb in those two books. My error is in the "ARPA was charged with". No, not exactly.. You may want to ask Bruce if he read "Recommendation to the air staff". I wouldn't be surprised if he did; he does pretty thorough research. Also, it's a bit unfair to characterize Bruce among "fabulists trying to tell compelling stories." That piece was history, not fiction. However, remember that ARPA funding was from Navy money. So while everybody working on ARPANET most likely was working on resource sharing, if you want to dig, it would be interesting to find out if in the ARPA funding allocation discussions what else was used for justification. It wouldn't be the first time researchers were busily working on a virtuous project that was being funded for different reasons. Let me know if you dig into that. You don't mention Licklider or his work at the Pentagon. See Sharon Weinberger , "Web of War," Aeon, extract from a 2017 book. https://aeon.co/essays/how-nuclear-fears-helped-inspire-creation-of-the-internet For example: "Licklider was well aware of the Pentagon's interest in command and control of nuclear weapons. One of his early descriptions for work on computer networking referenced the need to link computers that would be part of the nascent National Military Command System used to control nuclear weapons. His vision was for something much broader, however. When he met with Jack Ruina, the head of ARPA, and Eugene Fubini, one of Brown's deputies, Licklider pitched interactive computing to them. Rather than focusing strictly on technologies to improve command and control, he wanted to transform the way people worked with computers. "Who can direct a battle when he's got to write a program in the middle of that battle?" Licklider asked." You ask: "where did people like Gilster and Quarterman get this idea?" I have no idea about Gilster. As for me, I don't rightly recall, it was long common wisdom. Since I worked at BBN, which was full of MIT people who knew Licklider, I would guess it was some derivation of Licklider's Pentagon and ARPA work. Whose work shows that there were indeed Cold War nuclear bomb roots of the ARPANET, even though that network was not directly designed to survive a nuclear attack. Errata: You mention NIRPNET. Maybe you mean NIPRnet. In the same sentence, it's should be its. You note: "If you click through the above article you'll see a linguistic phenomena: It's called Internet without the word "the" preceding it. This was pretty common through about 1994. "I'm on Internet" sounds weird to us but say, "I'm on AOL" does not - and that was basically the logic. It gets deeper. For instance, it's called "The Usenet" in the article and we actually would drop the "the" on that word today just like we do with "ARPANET", or how it used to be stylized, "ARPAnet". This history needs its own atticle as well." (Typo: atticle should be article.) Yes, please write an article about Internet as a proper name. Including the neo-logism internet without a capital, which is irritating, because while there are indeed disconnected small-i internets, there is only one Internet with a capital I. Got to go prepare for a hurricane. Thanks again for your research. -jsq