Re: <nettime> In an Internetworked World No One Is "Foreign"

[Newmedia@aol.com]

Eugen:
 
> It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming
> that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant
> to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET . . .
 
Correct!  However, based on my recent conversations with Bob Taylor,  you 
are leaving out the most important part of the story!
 
The reason that was uppermost in his mind for the ARPANET proposal (and for 
 its subsequent approval) wasn't access to "supercomputers" but rather to  
*interconnect* those far-flung researchers.
 
This came about because the routine practice of getting everyone together  
for "brainstorming" in the 1940s/50s had atrophied as they scattered and got 
 their own labs.
 
Restaging an updated version of the Macy Foundation sponsored "Cybernetics  
Group," which met from 1946-53 and involved, Norbert Wiener, Gregory 
Bateson,  Warren McCulloch, Julian Bigelow, Lawrence Frank, Heinrich Kluver, Paul  
Lazarsfeld, Kurt Lewin, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, John von Neumann,  
Walter Pitts et al was among those cited as a crucial ARPANET goal.
 
Thus the early emphasis on email and eventually usegroups and so on . . . 
 
Mark Stahlman
Brooklyn NY







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