It's pretty interesting that our archetypal wired network, Ethernet, was actually inspired by a wireless network. When I first learned about ALOHAnet, at least it was a surprise to me. Specifically, the main idea of "send at a random time, retry if there's a collision" in Ethernet's CSMA/CD was originally employed in the ALOHA protocol (which makes sense, as both networks operated on a shared medium, unlike today's Ethernet).
My father was on the DARPA side of the AlohaNet development and eventually moved out of network engineeing into software engineering within DoD. I had a discussion with him (probably 15-20 years ago?) about switched ethernet (years after he moved out of the networking space, so was no longer an area he kept up with), and he was said something along the lines of "what do you mean there are no collisions? the whole point of ethernet is dealing with collisions! if we didn't have to deal with collisions, LANs would have been easy!".
Consider that thicknet (and thinnet) looks alot more like wifi than TP ethernet does, the only thing missing is on thicknet all stations can hear each other. But it is fundamentally RF, and a shared medium.
Computer History Museum recently published a series of videos from UC Santa Cruz organized symposium titled "Celebrating 50 Years of the ALOHA System and the Future of Networking". Both Norm Abramson and Frank Kuo did one of the presentations. Norman was super sharp and on the ball, hard to believe he was 88. Great loss. :(
Thank you professor for everything you did. We might not of had Myspace, or anything else that we have today if it wasn't for Dr. Abramson's contributions. https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-the-teen...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Anderson Myspace tom hanged out with Bill Landreth while he was in middle/high school. Landreth of course was a popular member of 'the inner circle', which they hacked in to ARPAnet, and mainframes to get access to compilers etc. Zuckerberg also grew up hacking AIM/AOL, and started a social media site (Facebook). Steve Case confirmed it in a Reddit AMA (https://www.reddit.com/r/socialcitizens/comments/23oddi/im_s...).
It is probably not accurate to say that he was the creator of ARPAnet, but the methodologies his team came up with for ALOHAnet played a huge role in the development of ARPAnet.
He says in the Computer History Museum talk that (paraphrasing) ALOHANet was eventually connected to ARPANet, making in effect the first connection of the Internet.
“We had done no patenting, and ALOHA was published in scientific papers,” putting their work in the public domain, Professor Abramson said in the oral history, adding: “And that was fine with me. I was too busy surfing to worry about that sort of thing.”
This is the ideal situation. Groundbreaking progress made by people with no profit motive funded by the government. As we've seen with the Covid vaccines good things happen when governments fund basic science.
