The Internet emerged from US defense and NSF supercomputing infrastructure.

Evidence

Its origins go back to 1969 when the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), a United States defense department, developed a method of exchanging military research information between researchers based at different sites. By the mid-1980s, these computer networks were expanded by another US government agency, the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF established supercomputer centers whose resources were required to be accessible to any educational facility who wanted them. The NSF network was gradually refined and evolved into what we know as the Internet. Evidence first appeared in the 1980s that electronic mail and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) which lie outside of the Internet were being used by neofascists. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2548

Categorization

• XREF: A digital-age echo of the theme that new communication technologies arise from state/military contexts, paralleling the Radio Free Europe and propaganda material in earlier chapters. — connects to: The internet’s military-industrial origins enabled a new economic and social order.; The internet originated as state-built defense infrastructure outside market logic — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 285; Ray Tomlinson invented email in 1971 to make the Internet useful. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 639 (+3 more)