[Air-l] Origin of the term "Internet" ?

[James Whyte]

The capitaliztion is because it is treated as a proper noun - "a specific person, place or thing." Harbrace College Handbook

Joseph Reagle <reagle at mit.edu> wrote:  On Wednesday 28 March 2007, Tamara Paradis wrote:
> Been poking around trying to find what organization or individual coined 
the
> term "Internet" and also trying to find out why the term is always
> capitalized. I keep coming up with a lot of information on the origin
> stories of the network and technology (i.e. ARPAnet) but nothing that
> pinpoints the dawn of the umbrella term "Internet". 

Not sure if this is what you were after, but Vint Cerf is fond of talking 
about how the merging of ARPANET, PRNET, and SATNET were known as 
the "'inter-net' problem" [1]. However, I've not found much documentation 
of that. 

[1] http://legalminds.lp.findlaw.com/list/cyberia-l/msg27462.html

What I have found is that the terms international, internet, and 
internetwork were used rather throughout the 1970s, they (Cerf) couldn't 
even settle on what to call it, or what ITP stood for:

Vinton Cerf
+ ~ A partial specification of an International Transmission
Protocol
o y=1973
o Specifies a International Transmission Protocol (ITP)
implemented via TCP
Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, Carl Sunshine
+ ~ Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program
o n=RFC 675, NIC 2 INWG 72 m=December y=1974
Vinton Cerf
+ ~ IEN #5: Specification of Internet Transmission Control
Program: TCP (Version 2)
o m=March y=1977
o Uses the term Internet, but otherwise speaks about
Internetwork
Vinton G. Cerf, Jonathan B. Postel
+ ~ Specification of Internetwork Transmission Control Program:
TCP, Version 3
o m=January y=1978
o Version 3 simplifies TCP by breaking out IP into a separate
spec, goes back to using Internetwork

In version 3 (1978) because IP was split out of TCP, and was unambiguously 
referred to as Internet Protocol, I think that's when the term began to 
stick. However, there's more ambiguity on the details and versioning of 
these specs [2], so it's not as easy as that!

[2] 
http://www.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/2006-October/000644.html

My theory as to why Internet remains capitalized whereas the Web doesn't is: 
language usage evolves in odd ways, and Internet seems more like an acronym 
which perhaps innoculates it from change.
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