dude, I sold services for ARPANET back in the days when only universities and
defense contractor's cared.

JAXAshby wrote:

"steve", ARPANET is long since gone.

That's arguably true, but irrelevant. ARPANET and UUCPNET were completely
different networks. ARPANET came long before UUCPNET but was significantly
more advanced. ARPANET was an inter-network from the very beginning, using
packet switching and automated routing, whereas UUCPNET was a
point-to-point network with multi-hop routing being done manually (with
bang paths). The underlying communications were different as well:
UUCPNET was primarily a loose collection of computers tied together with
dialup whereas ARPANET was on leased lines, from the very beginning.
Protocols were also different: ARPANET originally used NCP and then
switched to TCP/IP in the early 80s. UUCPNET used the UUCP protocol (it's
actually more accurate to say that the collection of computers using UUCP
was called UUCPNET). Eventually, UUCPNET merged into
ARPANET/NSFNet/Internet by transporting UUCP data streams in TCP, but that
was a fairly quick-n-dirty way to combine the networks, and UUCP was pretty
much phased out. It's still occasionally used for transferring files, by
people who don't care about security or performance.

Basically, UUCPNET was a poor solution (though one remembered with
fondness), and was quickly replaced by the TCP/IP-based ARPANET, which
eventually grew into what we now call the Internet. The morphing of
ARPANET into Internet was less a technological change and more of an
administration and funding change, so people can and do disagree about
whether or not ARPANET really is gone, or if it's just been renamed.

Shawn.