RFC 1935 (rfc1935) - Page 2 of 11

What is the Internet, Anyway?

RFC 1935             What is the Internet, Anyway?            April 1996


   heart of much confusion and contention about sizes: what is the
   Internet, anyway?

Starting at the Center

   For real confusion, start trying to get agreement on what is part of
   the Internet:  NSFNET?  CIX?  Your company's internal network?
   Prodigy?  FidoNet?  The mainframe in accounting?  Some people would
   include all of the above, and perhaps even consider excluding
   anything politically incorrect.  Others have cast doubts on each of
   the above.

   Let's start some place almost everyone would agree is on the
   Internet.  Take RIPE, for example.  The acronym stands for European
   IP Networks.  RIPE is a coordinating group for IP networking in
   Europe.  (IP is the Internet protocol, which is the basis of the
   Internet.  IP has a suite of associated protocols, including the
   Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, and the name IP, or sometimes
   TCP/IP, is often used to refer to the whole protocol suite.) RIPE's
   computers are physically located in Amsterdam.  The important feature
   of RIPE for our purposes is that you can reach RIPE (usually by using
   its domain, ripe.net) from just about anywhere anyone would agree is
   on the Internet.

   Reach it with what?  Well, just about any service anyone would agree
   is related to the Internet.  RIPE has a WWW (World Wide Web) server,
   a Gopher server, and an anonymous FTP server.  So they provide
   documents and other resources by hypertext, menu browsing, and file
   retrieval.  Their personnel use client programs such as Mosaic and
   Lynx to access other people's servers, too, so RIPE is a both
   distributor and a consumer of resources via WWW, Gopher, and FTP.
   They support TELNET interfaces to some of their services, and of
   course they can TELNET out and log in remotely anywhere they have
   personal login accounts or someone else has an anonymous TELNET
   service such a library catalog available.  They also have electronic
   mail, they run some mailing lists, and some of their people read and
   post news articles to USENET newsgroups.

   WWW, Gopher, FTP, TELNET, mail, lists, and news:  that's a pretty
   characteristic set of major Internet services.  There are many more
   obscure Internet services, but it's pretty safe to say that an
   organization like RIPE that is reachable with all these services is
   on the Internet.

   Reachable from where?  Russia first connected to the Internet in
   1992.  For a while it was reachable from networks in the Commercial
   Internet Exchange (CIX) and from various other networks, but not from
   NSFNET, the U.S. National Science Foundation network.  At the time,



Quarterman & Carl-Mitchell   Informational