That's neither here, nor there. The narrow vision many/most tools were created with is laughable compared to the actual creative uses people put them into.
Heck, the internet wasn't created for collaborating, socializing, shopping, reading, listening to music, etc., anyway, it was created to have a war-proof network for army use, yet here we are...
ARPANET, the direct predecessor for the internet, was created for collaborating, including socializing and reading. It was NOT created to "have a war-proof network for army use". The latter is a pernicious falsehood.
> 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, but was an aspect of the earlier RAND study of secure communication. The later work on internetworking did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.[51]
> You will not send a letter or a telegram; you will simply identify the people whose files should be linked to yours and the parts to which they should be linked-and perhaps specify a coefficient of urgency. You will seldom make a telephone call; you will ask the network to link your consoles together,You will seldom make a purely business trip, because linking consoles will be so much more efficient. When you do visit another person with the object of intellectual communication, you and he will sit at a two-place console and interact as much through it as face to face. If our extrapolation from Doug Engelbart’s meeting proves correct, you will spend much more time in computer-facilitated teleconferences and much less en route to meetings.
and has a section titled "On-line interactive communities":
> Available within the network will be functions and services to which you subscribe on a regular basis and others that you call for when you need them.In the former group will be investment guidance, tax counseling, selective dissemination of information in your field of specialization, announcement of cultural, sport, and entertainment events that fit your interests, etc. In the latter group will be dictionaries, encyclopedias, indexes, catalogues, edit-ing programs, teaching programs, testing programs, programming systems, data bases, and—most important—communication, display, and modeling programs.
Collaboration and reading were surely some of the main goals in the vision that became ARPANET.
Nonetheless, according to Stephen J. Lukasik, who as Deputy Director and Director of DARPA (1967–1974) was "the person who signed most of the checks for Arpanet's development:
"The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making."
That quote was immediately after a quote from Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director:
> "The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried."
History's complicated, isn't it?
So, we look at other things: Licklider became Program Director at ARPA in 1962 and ARPANET started in 1966 (which is when Lukasik joined as Director of Nuclear Test Detection before becoming A.D. the next year, then Director in 1971). And as Lukasik writes in his paper, the late 1960s were a different funding era than the early 1960s when Herzfeld's "foundling" started.
Recall that the 1968 Mansfield Amendment prohibited military funding of research that lacked "a direct or apparent relationship to specific military function" - far different than the Ruina years where office directors and program managers had significant autonomy and funding authority. An effective ARPA director after the Mansfield Amendment was passed is going to be someone who is good at viewing ARPA projects through that military support lens, yes? Which might be different than the lens used earlier?
> Taylor hoped to build a computer network to connect the ARPA-sponsored projects together, if nothing else, to let him communicate to all of them through one terminal. By June 1966, Taylor had been named director of IPTO; in this capacity, he shepherded the ARPANET project until 1969.[11] Taylor had convinced ARPA director Charles M. Herzfeld to fund a network project earlier in February 1966, and Herzfeld transferred a million dollars from a ballistic missile defense program to Taylor's budget.
It therefore seems very much like collaboration, at the very least, was indeed part of ARPANET's goals when it started in 1966.
> ARPANET network was one among a myriad of (commercial and non-commercial) networks that developed over that period of time – the integration of these networks into an internet was likely to happen, whether ARPANET existed or not.
They further consider it "Whig history" to think ARPANET plays a critical role in the modern day internet.
Herzfeld paid the initial bills. Herzfeld said "ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack".
Lukasik came in later, and had no signing authority or supervisory position on the initial ARPANET work.
Following your guideline, the ARPANET therefore wasn't "created to have a war-proof network for army use"; that was a design goal which came later, after the collaboration goal.
Would you consider your use of fire (e.g. for cooking) "illegitimate" if the creator of fire said so? ("No, must eat food raw! Fire is meant for heating only! Ugh!").
That's neither here, nor there. The narrow vision many/most tools were created with is laughable compared to the actual creative uses people put them into.
Heck, the internet wasn't created for collaborating, socializing, shopping, reading, listening to music, etc., anyway, it was created to have a war-proof network for army use, yet here we are...