Talk:ARPANET

Use of the definite article

Please, it's always 'the' ARPANET. See e.g. the DARPA report "A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade", which always uses the definite article; it never uses the bare term "ARPANET" as a subject, object, etc. I'm not sure how the use of bare "ARPANET" got started (perhaps by someone who wasn't a native English speaker), but it's wrong. Noel (talk)

interesting. Remembering my starstruck High school andcollege days (early to mid 1970s)when friends were introducing me to the magic of networks via modem, at school, I don't ever remember "the ARPANET" or "the USEnet." I remember them as without "the", as in, how do I connect to [Some specific magical location], The answer would be the name without "the". Like, "here's info on how to connect to USENET". i'd have to do digging to find common usage during that era. Which I'm just not up to at this point. It's also interesting because we don't omit "the" with "Internet". Also note that official literature might well vary significantly from common usage and less formal documents. Elf | Talk 16:26, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Yes, some people may have referred to it as just "ARPANET", and that usage may have become somewhat common, but it wasn't official.

As for Usenet or CSNET or BITNET or UUCPNET, there wasn't a consistent pattern for all such networks; those, as I remember, didn't include the definite article. Guy Harris (talk) 03:09, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

"By 1973, e-mail constituted 75% of the ARPANET traffic" as a dubious claim

Hey all, Even though it is undoubted and actually referenced that e-mail has grown very quickly in ARPANET traffic since its inception, this actual figure seems unreferenced and even considered as dubious in a recent discussion of the History of computing "SIGCIS" mailing list. References 9 and 84 do not actually state that figure at all and should refer to the previous sentence. I am thus witching the references to the previous sentence,removing the dubious claim, replacing it with a similar, but unquantified, phrasing, adding a valid reference to it. Feel free to discuss it here. Alexandre Hocquet (talk) 23:57, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Quite right. I handled a node and I wouldn't be surprised at the stat. But, I've never seen any actual published stats. O3000 (talk) 00:03, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

Done. Here is a link to the discussion on the SIGCIS mailing list as a ref Alexandre Hocquet (talk) 00:08, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

It seems there is a source for 75%, which has been referenced in Hafner (1996) and reused elsewhere:

• "By 1973, a study “found that three quarters of all traffic on the ARPANET was email”" (Hafner 1996, p. 194). https://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/isis_review.pdf
• "An ARPA study in 1973, a year after network email was introduced to the ARPANET community, found that three-quarters of the traffic over the ARPANET consisted of email messages." https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2015/01/02/a-very-short-history-of-the-internet-and-the-web-2/?sh=3fad22937a4e
• "The report was commissioned by then ARPA director, Stephen Lukasik, who himself was a big fan of email." https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~almeroth/classes/F04.176A/homework1_good_papers/jay-akkad.html
• "By the early 1970's, three-quarters of all traffic on the Arpanet was e-mail." https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20011207friday.html

Looks like this can be restored in the article. Whizz40 (talk) 20:38, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

Two new sources for ARPANET history

For editors looking to improve or update this article and seeking reliable sources for ARPANET history, I've recently learned of two historical documents from or about DARPA that have been made available online:

• A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade - published in April 1981 and prepared for DARPA by BBN.
• DARPA Technical Accomplishments - A Historical Review of Selected DARPA Projects, Volume 1 - published in February 1990 by the Institute for Defense Analyses. The ARPANET text begins on page 20-1 which is page 243 of the PDF. (Note that this document covers a wide range of other DARPA projects and so may be useful for improving the history of those Wikipedia articles, too.)

I don't currently have time myself to see if these sources can help improve this article, but I thought I would leave them here in case other editors do have the time. - Dyork (talk) 12:09, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Cachiman

Who is Cachiman? Punkieduckie (talk) 07:16, 1 June 2025 (UTC)

Cachiman appears, from a Google search, to be a plant. It's not the name of any person mentioned in ARPANET, so this isn't relevant to the article. Guy Harris (talk) 20:57, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

This article is hard to read on mobile.

Is there a way to make the "Internet History Timeline" section collapsable? It makes it difficult to read on my device. Chuqqal (talk) 04:24, 9 December 2025 (UTC)

Or, better yet, turn it into a Wikipedia page, Timeline of the history of the Internet, and link to that in the "See also" section, which has been done. The template was problematic, especially on mobilemachines with really small screens, but not only on those machines, and not just on this page, so they got rid of it in favor of using a regular page. Guy Harris (talk) 09:25, 2 January 2026 (UTC)