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Hi, I second Andrew's observation here -- "internet" was a generic
term in the computing community denoting a network-of-networks long
before computers were popularly perceived as media by the general
public or the market, with the introduction of browsers in the early
90s. Janet Abbate's book <i>Inventing the Internet</i> has quite a
bit to say about the economics and politics of X.25 vs. TCP/IP in
the U.S. (as Andrew rightly points out, Minitel in France and other
"information utilities" like videotex in the 1970s-80s really
prefigured the information-retrieval/delivery-driven internet of the
1990s and early 2000s). Early "internet" (aka non-defense-secret
Arpanet) accounts were available in American research universities
in the late 70s (I had one at a University of Texas medical campus
that was linked to the UT arpanet node in Dallas). Indeed many of
the early architects of the Arpanet were astonished that
person-to-person messaging quickly became the bulk of the network's
traffic by the later 70s, even just among research and military
users. And similar "intranets" for intra-organizational messaging
were common in tech and telecoms companies like AT&T, DEC, IBM,
and so on.<br>
<br>
my two bits! Leah<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/7/13 5:13 PM, Andrew Feenberg
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote
cite="mid:1352145266.14889901.1357607611344.JavaMail.root@jaguar10.sfu.ca"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">The Internet is very important today but historically it evolved in isolation from society as a whole until long after communication by computer developed in the public domain on the basis of the very different X.25 protocol with support primarily from telephone companies. There was widespread communication on computer networks in the 1980s, although of course nothing like what we see today since it was almost entirely professional. The big exception was France where the Minitel system attracted millions of users in the 1980s. I think the argument over the origins of the study of the Internet is not very interesting since the substantive issue is communication by computer and the study of that subject matter goes back well before the emergence of the Internet as a public system.
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Leah A. Lievrouw, Professor
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
216 GSE&IS Building | Box 951520
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520
Tel +1 310 825 1840 Fax +1 310 206 4460
Email <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:llievrou@ucla.edu">llievrou@ucla.edu</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/llievrou/LeahLievrouw/Welcome.html">http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/llievrou/LeahLievrouw/Welcome.html</a></pre>
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