Remember when it was just “Internet,” successor to “ARPAnet?” It’s a capitalized word, a proper noun. You drive on “the street” in general, but you use “Main Street” in particular. You go to “the store” in general, but you visit “Joe’s Food Store” in particular.
It’s as if the media (in general, you see, no capitals!) had to change it slightly to make it theirs, like all the other buzzwords and catchphrases.
It’s not black helicopter conspiracy, but it’s still annoying.
Sure, I’m all for moderation – as long as it’s not excessive.
Isn’t it to distinguish it from other internets? For example, if a university has several intranets in different buildings connected together, the network connecting them can be called an “internet”, but not THE Internet. Just like any star can be called a “sun” (usually in the context of a star with planets around it), but when you talk about OUR star, it’s “the sun”.
I think I remember “internet” being used as a regular noun. An intranet is a network internal to one company or smaller, so maybe an internet is the same thing as a WAN (wide area network)? Just like ‘galaxy’ is a regular noun but “the Galaxy” refers to our own.
Then again, there are, as BobT said, many proper nouns which is always used with “the,” e.g. “the U.S.”
Have you also noticed that “the world” and “the Universe” both have “the”? Maybe the Internet is closer to those two words than anything else.
What I want to know, though, is when you should capitalize ‘Earth’ and when it is simply ‘earth’ or ‘the earth’. This distinction does not fall between dirt and an orb, but somewhere between ‘on the earth’ and ‘Earth and the other planets’.
Ray (Back there when the earth were flat they di’n’t planet all right.)
Sorry if it was discussed before, but just try searching for “the Internet” and see what you get.
It’s obvious I was way off base anyway: I should’ve blamed The Al Gore instead of The Media for renaming it The Internet.
ARPAnet was an acronym, but Internet was just a name coined to describe the way that it connected numerous networks, including ARPAnet itself. The generic term intranet didn’t exist until after Internet, IIRC, because prior to that there was no need to distinguish. They were ALL intranets till then.
If, as dhanson states, ARPAnet users called it “The ARPAnet” then I suppose I’m cool with it. Perhaps only my peers and I back in the late 80’s (sheesh!) called it Internet, and everyone else tacked a “The” on it routinely.
Sure, I’m all for moderation – as long as it’s not excessive.
NanoByte: What I want to know, though, is when you should capitalize ‘Earth’ and when it is simply ‘earth’ or ‘the earth’. This distinction does not fall between dirt and an orb, but somewhere between ‘on the earth’ and ‘Earth and the other planets’.
I’ve noticed that there is no consistancy in capitalizing “earth”, when used as the name of our planet. Also, the Moon is often referred to in lower case.
Wrong thinking is punished, right thinking is just as swiftly rewarded. You’ll find it an effective combination.
In the techie world, an intranet (one network in one building) is usually referred to as a LAN (Local Area Network). An internet (one network over several buildings as well as several geographically separate LANs tied together) is usually called a WAN. However, LANs and WANs are almost always private networks. The Internet is an enormous public WAN, a superWAN, a WAN’s WAN, and as such deserves its own nomenclature to separate it out.
As soon as the Internet became big enough to warrant treating it as an entity, it became proper to call it “The Internet”. If there are more than one of them of equal stature, then you have to use something else to describe them. But if there is only one, then “The” is the appropriate prefix.
For example, there are many cars in the world, but I only have one. So if I wife goes out, she’ll say “I’m taking the car”. If we had two, she can either say, “I’m taking a car, or I’m taking the red car”. As soon as the sentence is descriptive enough to clearly refer to a single entity, it becomes ‘the’.
I have Internet access. It lets me download things from the Internet. Do eother of those sentences confuse anyone?
As to the evolution of names:
The Internet grew out of the ARPAnet and presently refers to the conglomeration of networks which connect to commercial US backbones and use TCP/IP as a networking protocal.
An internet is any network made up of smaller networks using identical protocols. An internet may or may not be connected to the Internet.
An intranet is an internet that uses TCP/IP as a networking protocol.
An extranet is an internet that connects more than one company.
WAN/LAN are separate terms which delineate the geographic scope of a particular network. Often an internet and its subnets can be referred to as a WAN and its LANs.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
My company’s intranet is global, the only difference between an intranet and the Internet is that intranets are restricted by IP address or user. For that matter, DISA’s SIPRNET and NIPRNET have gateways to the Internet. LANs can cover multiple buildings with the right hardware, but the distance for most LANs is restricted by signal speed considerations. Ethernet, for example, can’t operate over long distances.
My first internet experience was in 1988, we downloaded news/usenet items to a Sun2 machine with a 24Kbaud modem at night. Not a lot of traffic back then.