Abstract

Before the coherent internetworking protocol that enables the Internet today, machines called gateways ‘translated’ between dissimilar networks, at first in the early 1970s with great difficulty, and, by the early 1980s, comparatively seamlessly. This paper investigates some of the historical processes that drew multiple, formerly incompatible networks into a single logical network. Studying these processes can illustrate the Internet’s historical contingency -- and the labor that was required to overcome the social and technical differences governing the multiple, independent networks that came to, and now comprise, the Internet