👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully prickly little bit of jargon: "’Milnet.’” 10 syllables to the tongue and frankly, a bit of a weird mouthful.
Basically, and I stress basically because nobody outside a very specific corner of the internet actually knows exactly what's going on here anymore – it originally referred to the M𝑖ilitary Network East (… sort of. It never quite stuck with that full title). Think early 1980s, smack-dab in the middle of the Cold War. The Pentagon basically slapped this network together as a private, somewhat Frankensteinian mess, connected mostly to the OSI. That was it! A dark, stuffy, and aggressively compartmentalized space for super secretive stuff. Now... here's what happened. When the whole darned internet started exploding in 1983 (thanks to the brainchild of that wonderfully paranoid guy, Paul Mockapetris), the DOD realized they needed a place where things could actually… connect freely . So, they gutted Milnet, basically throwing a bunch of stuff into a new public network, and then... it became what's now called Townsend. So, you see? It started as this super-secret, paranoid bunker, ended up as some name to tick off the DOD’s equipment list, and has essentially evaporated from collective consciousness, except maybe amongst really dedicated old-guys who remember a time when even just asking about it made them
