h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Or is the Arpanet mentioned in my "history of computing" textbooks a completely seperate thing?

This is a common myth, genrally occuring i badly written A-Level and GCSE textbooks by people who don't know what they're on about... although there are rumours that, (and sometimes this ws the case)it was refered to as ARPA NET, the agency that created it was called DARPA (www.darpa.mil) and therefore it was in fact called DARPANet.

- Njan

I wish I had seen this when it first came out. The agency is *now* called DARPA, but when it was first created in the late 50s the agency was called ARPA, and the network that spawned the Internet was indeed called ARPANet. The agency didn't become DARPA until I believe sometime in the early 70s, I'm not sure exactly when.

The description in this entry of what the "DARPANet" connected is also incorrect, if it's meant to mean the ARPANet and forerunner to the Internet. The first four connections to the network were at universities, or at least three of the four were. I only remember two of them at the moment: University of Utah and UC Berkeley.

When it's not 5am I'll dig up some links info that indicates all this correctly.