system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How was Tymnet different from the Internet?
gpt
While there are many many technical differences the fundamental architectural difference is with how connections were routed.

Tymnet routing was managed centrally. A network supervisor would control how traffic was routed and had to know the entire path. You connected to a central server, and that server connected you directly to where you wanted.

Internet routing doesn't require centralized management. Any individual router from the IP address of a destination, and internal routing tables could tell what router it needed to forward traffic to next. Later on as networks got more complex protocols like BGP we're develope to allow routers to figure out better and alternate paths automatically.