I.e., there were Freenets other than the one based on Ian Clarke's design?

Yes, I think the domain name "freenetproject.org" was chosen by the Freenet developers because they wanted a domain name containing "freenet".

(I.e., "freenetproject.org" appears to be the domain name for the Freenet Project; it's not just a bunch of people who liked Freenet and decided to have a domain name with "freenet" in it.)

OK, I guess I didn't make it clear enough.

If you can send IP packets over your dialup connection and have them routed onto the Internet, and have IP packets from the Internet routed to your machine over the dialup connection, you're dialed into an ISP.

If you have to dial up a host and log in to getty over that dialup connection, then you're dialed up to a UNIX shell service provider, not an ISP, even if the UNIX host you've logged into happens to be connected to the Internet.

If a UUCP program on your machine has to dial up a host and log into a UUCP account over that dialup connection, then you're dialed up to a UUCP service provider, not an ISP, even if the host you're connecting to via UUCP can route emails to the Internet.

So unless you were using Archie and Gopher and IRC clients running on your machine at home, with those clients sending IP packets out over a SLIP connection and receiving IP packets from that SLIP connection, you were not dialing into an ISP.

If you can route packets from clients to the Internet, you're an ISP.

If you can only route mail messages and Usenet mail postings to the Internet, with your clients using UUCP to send them and receive them, and perhaps provide the ability to download and upload files using UUCP and maybe other uux-based services, you're a UUCP service provider, not an ISP.

OK, so there wasn't much of a market for ISPs back then, and most organizations offering dialup services weren't ISPs, they provided UUCP access or UNIX shell access or a BBS or....

So, if neither agora nor PDxs nor Teleport offered your machine the ability to directly transmit IP packets to and receive IP packets from hosts on the Internet, they may have offered very useful services, but they weren't ISPs, and thus do not count as evidence that The World wasn't the first dialup ISP.

If you want to prove that The World wasn't the first dialup ISP - not "the first dialup service provider", Barry's smart enough not to claim that The World was that - you're going to have to find an organization providing dialup direct Internet access before they did.

The Internet, with a capital "I", as in "Internet Service Provider", uses the Internet protocol suite (IP, UDP, TCP, etc.), not UUCP, although UUCP can run over TCP. I don't care what you mean by "internet", with a lower-case "i"; as we're talking about who was the first Internet-with-a-capital-I service provider, what you mean by "internet" is completely irrelevant.

Here, let me help you out. You may recognize a name that appears several times on that page; why giving me the URL of a page that I have edited several times doesn't "help me out", if by that you mean "informing me of something I didn't know". I'm quite familiar with UUCP, having used it in the 1980's and early 1990's, and having managed it at some of the companies at which I worked.

With all three of them routing packets between a host on the other end of a dialup SLIP connection (not PPP, the first RFCs for that came out in 1989) and the Internet? If not, they weren't ISPs, they were providers of other dialup services.

The ability to connect to an arbitrary Internet-based service with a client program that connects using TCP?

Perhaps what you describe was adequate for the vast majority of users, but somebody who wanted direct access to the Internet, including, for example, the ability to (perhaps slooooowly) FTP to an available Internet FTP site would welcome it.

RFC 882 and RFC 883 were published as early as 1983, so I really doubt that DNS wasn't at use at all in 1987.

That's a UUCP convention, not used on the real Internet. Perhaps the service that you used required bang paths and didn't use DNS, but DNS was most definitely in use by people connected to the Internet (as opposed to people connected to a dialup service that gatewayed email onto the Internet).

That says

07/89 415-753-5265^ wet San Francisco CA 3/12/24 24
386 SYS V.3. Wetware Diversions. $15 registration, $0.01/minute.
Public Access UNIX System: uucp, PicoSpan bbs, full Usenet News,
multiple lines, shell access. Newusers get initial credit!
contact:{ucsfcca|claris|hoptoad}!wet!cc (Christopher Cilley)

I see nothing about "Internet" there. I see "uucp", "bbs", "Usenet", and "shell access", all of which can be provided as dialup services, and none of which necessarily imply that they support something such as SLIP or PPP over dialup lines and route packets between the host on the other end of the dialup line and the Internet, that being what being an Internet Service Provider indicates that you do.

UUCP (including UUCP mail and USENET), BBS access, and dialup shell access were certainly very useful services at the time, but they aren't sufficient to make you an ISP.

If you're going to quibble that Barry wasn't the first dialup ISP - not the first provider of dialup UUCP or the first provider of dialup BBS access or the first provider of dialup shell services - then talk about earlier ISPs, not earlier providers of dialup UUCP or dialup BBS access or dialup shell services.

Only if you could send IP packets directly onto the Internet and receive IP packets directly from the Internet, which would seem to imply that they were Freenets in a sense other than this sense of Freenet ("Freenet is a self-contained network, while Tor allows accessing the web anonymously, as well as using "hidden services" (anonymous web servers). Freenet is not a proxy: You cannot connect to services like Google or Facebook using Freenet." And, no, "Google and Facebook didn't exist at the time" is not a counterargument; replace them with whatever Internet services existed at the time, and if the resulting "You cannot connect to service such as ... using Freenet." remains true, it wasn't an ISP.).

BITNET routed IP packets onto the Internet in 1984?

(Remember, unless you Provide a Service that routes packets onto the Internet, you're not an ISP. You may be a UUCP service provider, you may be a BITNET service provider, you may be a BBS service provider, and that all may be very important, but you're not an Internet service provider, as per the "ISP" in the title of this article, unless you let your customers send IP datagrams onto the Internet; relaying mail onto the Internet, while an extremely useful service, is not sufficient to qualify you as an ISP.)

If you follow the "Alan Batie" link from RainDrop's home page, and then follow his "agora" link from "I work at Peak Internet, a local ISP in Corvallis, Oregon. I also run a small ISP in Portland, Oregon, called RainDrop Laboratories. It started in 1985 as a public access system called Agora, while I was working at Intel.", it speaks of agora's RainNet Internet access starting in 1990 - "Now that our subject had SVR4, with TCP/IP and all, and there being several other hacker sorts around town who'd been eyeing the Internet with envy for sometime, it was time to see if something could be done locally. RAINet was thus born in the fall of 1990, and its first connection was a 2400 bps SLIP link between agora and parsely (another local public access system, owned by Tod Oace at the time)."

(Remember, unless you actually Provide a Service that lets you send IP packets onto the Internet, you're not an Internet Service Provider. Dialup BBSes don't count, UUCP doesn't count, only SLIP/PPP/bridged Ethernet/PPPoEoAoDSL/PPPoAoDSL/DOCSIS/etc. so that you can splat out one of these things - or one of these things - onto the Internet counts.)

It's a bad thing for documentation writers who think "{the only XXX tool on your system} is like {traditional UNIX XXX tool} but with these extra options" is adequate documentation for the XXX tool in question.

And it's an unfortunate thing for Linux users (or users of any other UN*X on which the XXX tool documented in that question is the XXX tool) who want complete documentation for the XXX tool in question.

And the same applies to StatCounter, which I also cited?

If you seriously think I was suggesting that they were better names, you really need to go get your sarcasm detector re-calibrated.

Presumably by "nobody uses them" you mean "nobody uses those browsers", and by "nobody uses" you mean "most people don't use".

However, you have not demonstrated that there is any connection between the lower market share for those browsers and their choice of name.

Much of Safari's lower market share may be due to its low market share on Windows, an OS to which it was a latecomer and may never have had a chance to be a contender.

You've just demonstrated that you don't even understand the argument by everything you've said here.

According to NetMarketShare, but not according to StatCounter or W3Counter.

(And the statistics for mobile browsers are a bit different.)

Yeah, "Safari" and "Opera" are such more functional names for a Web browser than "Konqueror".

(And "Windows Explorer" is such a functional name for a file manager; it doesn't at all sound as if somebody tried to give it a name reminiscent of their Web browser.)