Researching my book on the history of the Internet, I asked Len Kleinrock three key questions yesterday. I asked him at what point it was clear that the early ARPANET – the forerunner to the Internet – became dominated by informal chatter between researchers. The answer was interesting.
The point at which it became abundantly clear to me that people-to-people communication was the dominant form of traffic carried by the internet was in mid-1972 shortly after email was introduced to the internet (network email was introduced in April 1972). Email traffic took over the traffic very quickly. Continue reading
