Yeah, well, play WoW and get to 65 on Telnet. Then I’ll be impressed.
I think it’s just a result of the very common belief that the World Wide Web and the Internet are the same thing. And since the Internet doesn’t have a single easily identifiable inventor (other than Al Gore, who doesn’t count), Tim Berners-Lee gets identified as the one.
I used to do this frequently when debugging web applications, until more convenient tools came along.
I’ve also sent lots of email by telnetting to SMTP servers.
You noob, telnet wow preceded your fancy-pants 3d wow by decades. I was leveling on telnet before you even had a video card.
Yeah, it’s a really insiduous belief. I think it goes pretty high up. Like all the excitement about “Web” applications. Omg. They’re like real applications that connect to the internet, but three times crappier! Time to invest a few hundred million…
Saying Tim Berners-Lee created the internet is like saying Bill Gates invented the computer.
National Geographic (warning: video with sound will play automatically) is saying that today (2 September 2009) marks the 40th anniversary of the birth of the internet.
Except the Internet Protocol came (much) later, actual gateways came later (A gateway moves data from one physical network to another, even if those networks have different low-level protocols. This is fundamental to the Internet.), and, in general, the early ARPANET was very different, in every respect, from even the Internet of the late 1980s.
This kitchen-sink history is distressing. It muddies the view of reality for the sake of a simple narrative.
(Oh, and the idea that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet is entirely wrong and more than a little amusing. The Web was never intended to be very important: It was a mangled implementation of Project Xanadu, which never got off the ground, and it was going up against the established Gopher protocol, a darling of academia in those days. By all rational measures it should have died on the vine.)
Gopher was awesome.
Gopher was easy to implement well on very small systems. It was (and is) a very simple protocol.
Here is a post of mine with cites that expounds further on when the Internet was invented. You can take your pick from 1969 (ARPANET founded), 1977 (first gateway between dissimilar networks), or 1983 (invention of the actual Internet Protocol). I think 1977 was the most important date out of the three, myself.
The point of subdomains for a national registrar is that is can be used to drive competition or manage DNS registration policy. So it is possible for different organisations to provide management for (say) .org.uk and .net.uk, and these also compete with .org and .net. This has driven registration costs down. And the registrars for .gov.uk, .sch.uk and .ac.uk require validation when registering, so that domain squatting and the like do not occur in these domains - there is a higher level of confidence for people using these sites that they are getting to where they want to be.
Also, the size of the expected space is an issue, too. .dk may be considered too small to split up, whereas .uk is a pretty big space.
It is is also interesting to realise that the UK internet initially used the JANET name resolution system, which reversed the name components (UK.AC.OXFORD vs oxford.ac.uk). I quite like the BigEndian approach, and it would be somewhat easier to parse and process from a software point of view.
Si
I had an interesting correspondence with the guy who registered sex.com in the early days… (I’d emailed him complimenting him on his foresight). He had a rough time for a while, somebody else spirited it away somehow and it took him years of court actions to retrieve it. All ended well though, he got it back and made a bundle from it, still does as far as I know.
For a while, public school websites ended in k12.xx.us, where xx was the state abbreviation. For a while, I thought .ca was in California, not Canada.
My private high school also had a k12.me.us domain, until they got a .edu somehow.
(Also, I find “me dot us” hilarious.)
Australia follows a similar protocol. (.com.au) In addition to educational, governmental and organisation domains etc, there are also state domains, such as .vic.au (For Victoria).
Each country controls its own country code and can decide to do whatever they want with it. For example, Tuvala, whose domain suffix is “tv” decided to use its domain to sell to television stations.
For a while, the people who controlled the .us domain insisted you had to have a state code and sometimes the city area or county like mydomain.houston.tx.us. The idea was to allow local businesses with the same name to have more or less the same domain like flowergarden.memphis.tn.us vs. flowergarden.berkeley.ca.us. However, the .us domain controlled by a for-profit business and they no longer have this requirement. This forces businesses to purchase not only a .com domain, but a .biz, .info, and .us domain.
The .uk domain is controlled by a non-profit company called Nominet, and Nominet decided this extended the .uk domain naming scheme because it allowed universities and schools a way of using the “uk” domain while at the same time letting the world know they’re a university. For example oxford.ac.uk (The “ac” means academic institution).
The .co.uk domain suffix is actually the fourth most popular in the world. It has the paunch of both saying you’re a commercial establishment (like the .com domain), but you are not just some vulgar American firm but a blue-blooded British concern. Of course, anyone is allowed to buy a .co.uk domain name – even vulgar Americans.
The internet and domain names are older than the web.
For a while, JANET’s big-endian scheme vied with the rest of the world’s little-endian scheme, with conversion done on the machines that saw both networks, leading to the old joke that British email was getting routed to Czechoslovakia (.cs). Why? Because the mail intended for a Computer Science department would have ‘cs’ in the least-significant part of the domain name, making little-endian systems think that was the TLD.
(Hey, I said the joke was old, not funny. ;))
Why no love for Vinton Cerf or Robert Kahn? Where would be without TCP/IP??
As for “who” invented the internet, I think the “best” answer to that question would be “DARPA” … no?
Donald Davies independently invented packet switching in 1965 and coined the term while working for the National Physical Laboratory. This concept was eventually used in the fledgling ARPANET which developed into the Internet.
I don’t know if I would call him the inventor of the Internet, but the Internet couldn’t have happened without packet switching.