[Air-L] ARPANET resurrection update and possible significances?

[Peter Gloviczki]

Thanks Charles for sharing all this.

It reminded me of Licklider & Taylor's seminal paper:
https://internetat50.com/references/Licklider_Taylor_The-Computer-As-A-Communications-Device.pdf

Fondly, Peter
[image: email graphic] <http://www.wiu.edu/>
*Peter Joseph Gloviczki, Ph.D.*Professor
School of Communication and Media
Western Illinois University
1 University Circle, Macomb, IL 61455
Schedule a meeting via Calendly:
https://calendly.com/pj-gloviczki/30min


On Sun, Apr 26, 2026 at 4:52 AM Charles Melvin Ess via Air-L <
air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:

> Hi AoIRists,
>
> As I mentioned in an earlier note to Morten Bay, there is an active
> project to recreate the ARPANET from ca. 1972. You can see the update here:
>
> <https://obsolescence.dev/arpanet_home>
>
> Including the chance to log in yourself to one of the now 35 working nodes.
>
> One of the documents referenced here is titled
>
> SCENARIOS for using the ARPANET at the INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
> COMPUTER COMMUNICATION, Washington, D.C., October 24-26, 1972
>
> and is in fact reproduced in the pages giving further instructions on
> logging in - along with 2026 scenarios that might also be fun to play with.
>
> One of the available programs from the MIT.AI node is:
> ==
> DOCTOR is a LISP program written by Joseph Weizenbaum and described in
> "ELIZA - A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language
> Communication Between Man And Machine" in the Communications of the ACM,
> January 1966.
> DOCTOR simulates a psychiatric interview with a Rogerian psychotherapist.
> ==
> (I'll come back to this below.)
>
> I know that ARPANET is central to the work of e.g.,Janet Abbate's early
> history, _Inventing the Internet_ (1999).
> But what I'm asking here, especially of historians who know these
> domains far better than I:
> 1) how far did these early exchanges, so far as they could be followed
> and/or documented - and/or, as at least some study of primary aims,
> practices, affordances, etc. might have been possible - enter into early
> research on CMC?
> 2) Might this reconstruction project, insofar as it grants access to
> "the rest of us," be of possible use / interest for historical / current
> research on CMC and its descendants?
> E.g., I know a great deal has been written about ELIZA - but, to my
> knowledge at least, not with direct access to the working program
> itself. I suspect the working program would give researchers a chance to
> not only become much more familiar with how the program works and
> "behaves," but also to try out hypotheses as to how different sorts of
> engagements, expectations, etc. might be dis/confirmed through actually
> using it?
>
> In any case, to quote the welcome message from the first terminal I
> tried: Happy Hacking!
>
> - charles
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.aoir.org/pipermail/air-l-aoir.org/attachments/20260426/9b60a73f/attachment.htm>