新华网8月7日电 据美国科技博客Gizmodo报道，早些年，广播技术通常被叫做“无线电话”，Xbox最初也差点被命名为MEGA。但是你知道么，Internet这个名字也和早期的叫法不一样。最早，Internet本来被叫做Catenet。

图片：ARPANET映射图。选自1990年10月出版的《电脑社区评论》，原载于1971年4月撰写的《精选ARPANET映射图集》。

就像Internet这个词源自internetworked这个词一样，Catenet也是来源于Catenated，这个词的意思是“通过一系列方式连接在一起”。考虑到这个因素，Catenet的发音应该是"cat-en-et"而不是"cate-net"。世界各国名叫“凯特”的人们庆幸吧，这个名字最终没有被采纳，你们也就不用在办公室里被指指点点了。

1974年因特网先锋人物路易斯·普赞(Louis Pouzin)写了一篇题为《互连包交换技术网络建议》（A Proposal for Interconnecting Packet Switching Networks）的报告，并提交给了伦敦的布鲁内尔大学。在这份报告中，他创造了Catenet这个词来描述一个连接网络的网络，并希望建议被采纳。当然，这是在ARPANET迁移到TCP/IP协议之前，而正是这个协议支持了Internet这个名词。另一位网络领军人物文顿·瑟夫(Vinton Cerf)在1978年给DARPA写了一份报告，题为《交互网络上的Catenet模型》（The Catenet Model for Internetworking），试图精确地定义Catenet是什么。

到上世纪80年代，研究领域内还有很多人把Internet叫做Catenet。但到80年代后期（ICP/IP协议的重要纪念日是1983年1月1日），几乎所有人都已经使用最广为接受的Internet了。

每次讨论Internet这个词的时候都是一次语言学的挑战，因为很多出版商已经不把Internet大写了，即便是当做名词来用的时候。使用World Wide Web这个词（很多人都把WWW作为Internet的同义词，但是它们之间有区别）或ARPANET（现代因特网的先驱，不过IEEE等机构认为它基本上就是最早的因特网）的时候就更复杂了。

每次有新的技术出现，就需要有新的词语来描述。但具体使用什么词都没有一定之规。也许在多重宇宙的某个地方，Catenet用户正在讨论相似的事情，而且讨论的思路可能和你想的不太一样。

译者：林杉

百度新闻与新华网国际频道合作稿件，转载请注明出处。

The Internet Was Almost Called the Catenet

In its early days, radio technology was often called wireless telephone. The Xbox was almost called the MEGA. But did you know that the internet nearly wound up with a different name too? Indeed, the internet was almost called the catenet.

Just as the internet derived its name from the word internetworked, the term catenet came from the word catenated, which means to link together in a connected series. Given these origins it's probably safe to say that it was pronounced "cat-en-et" rather than "cate-net." But thankfully for Cates and Kates everywhere — who would probably still be suffering through a daily barrage of cringe-worthy puns from "that guy" at the office — the name didn't stick.

In 1974 internet pioneer Louis Pouzin wrote a paper called "A Proposal for Interconnecting Packet Switching Networks" and presented it at Brunel University in London. In that presentation, he coined the term catenet to describe a network of networks that he expected to be adopted. This, of course, was before the ARPANET would begin its migration to TCP/IP, the protocols underpinning our modern internet. Vint Cerf, another internet pioneer, would write a paper for DARPA in 1978 titled "The Catenet Model for Internetworking" that would try to define precisely what this catenet was.

People within the research community still sometimes referred to the internet as the catenet well into the early 1980s. But by the late 1980s (TCP/IP's flag day was on January 1, 1983) virtually everyone was using the more broadly accept term internet.

Anytime you discuss "the internet" it can become a linguistic challenge, as many publications (Gizmodo included) have dropped the capitalization of Internet even when used as a noun. Things are further complicated when you introduce terms like the world wide web (a perfectly acceptable synonym for internet in everyday parlance, but actually distinct from the internet) or the ARPANET (the precursor to our modern internet, but still discussed by organizations like the IEEE as something akin to the birth of the internet).

New technologies require new words that allow us to talk about them. But there's nothing obvious about what any given tech's name should be. Somewhere in the multiverse, a catenet user is BackRubbing something — and probably not in the way you think.

Image: Map of the ARPANET in April of 1971 from the paper "Selected ARPANET Maps" published in the October 1990 issue of Computer Communications Review.

(原标题：颤抖吧！Internet最早被叫做Catenet)