Capitalization of Internet (versus internet) refers to the orthographic conventions for when the word should be capitalized. When referring to the global system of interconnected computer networks, the conventions have varied over time, and vary by publishers, authors, and regional preferences. The Internet versus generic internets The Internet standards community historically differentiated between an internet, as a short-form of an internetwork, and the Internet: treating the latter as a proper noun with a capital letter, and the former as a common noun with a lower-case first letter. An internet is any set of interconnected Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The distinction is evident in Request for Comments documents from the early 1980s, when the transition from the ARPANET, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, to the Internet, with broad commercial support, was in progress, although it was not applied with complete uniformity. Another example from that period is IBM's TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview from 1989 (updated in 1998), which stated that: In the Request for Comments documents that define the evolving Internet Protocol standards, the term was introduced as a noun adjunct, apparently a shortening of "internetworking" and is mostly used in this way. As the impetus behind IP grew, it became more common to regard the results of internetworking as entities of their own, and internet became a noun, used both in a generic sense (any collection of computer networks connected through internetworking) and in a specific sense (the collection of computer networks that internetworked with ARPANET, and later NSFNET, using the IP standards, and that grew into the connectivity service we know today). In its generic sense, "internet" is a common noun, a synonym for internetwork; therefore, it has a plural form (first appearing in the RFC series RFC 870, RFC 871 and RFC 872) and is not capitalized. In a 1991 court case, Judge Jon O. Newman used it as a mass noun: "Morris released the worm into INTERNET, which is a group of national networks that connect university, governmental, and military computers around the country." Evolution of the word Conventions for the capitalization of Internet have varied over time. The term Internet was originally coined as a shorthand for internetwork in the first specification of the Transmission Control Program, , by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine in 1974. Because of the widespread deployment of the Internet protocol suite in the 1980s by educational