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

[Bram Dov Abramson]

> --- Sue Cranmer <sue at jcranmer.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>> Interesting discussion. How do aiorlisters then see
>> the comparison between
>> the the 'Internet' or 'internet' and the
>> 'telephone'?

The Internet, it seems to me, is a particular thing: it's the network that
runs IP and uses the ICANN-administered addressing system and all the rest
of it.

The telephone is a class of things: it's a kind of device that we plug
into the wall, because we want connectivity to a particular network.  To
the extent a mobile phone or cell phone gets to be a "telephone", I guess
that telephone is a broader class of devices than that.

Either way. many of us have several telephones.  Few of us have several
internets.  Noone has more than one of the Internet.

> The point is that there is a significant difference in
> the evolution of telephone and the Internet.  There
> were always multiple telephone (and telegraph)
> networks; there was no time where there was one
> telephone network named The Telephone network.

I don't know.

Isn't the PSTN, The Telephone Network?  Its one-ness federates a
heterogeneity much in the way the Internet does: a single network because
end-to-end (voice) connectivity bound by a common addressing system (ITU
E.164, rather than ICANN DNS).  In that sense agreement to coordinate to
CCIT/CCITT/ITU-T has played a similar role in maintaining The Telephone
Network (i.e. PSTN) as coordinating to IAB&IETF&Postel/ICANN has helped
maintain an Internet.

Sometimes the PSTN and the Internet overlap, as when E.164-numbered phone
calls are terminated to Voice-over-Internet connection.  They're not
mirror images of one another: the Internet disaggregates some of the
layers that the PSTN binds tightly together.  But they're each a network,
for remarkably similar meanings of "network".

cheers
Bram