> You are wrong on this, the private part indicates the privacy it provides not the destination.
In your own recollection, what do you think "Virtual Private Network" stood for? Connecting private networks together, or privacy?
I might have been influenced by the product we were selling though. These were dial up users on workstations looking to access their company's LAN so the idea of connecting two discrete private networks wouldn't have fit as well. There was also a lot of focus on the insecurity of passing traffic (even encrypted traffic) over the internet. We had companies paying us a premium to sign up for the service and host their gateway on our network so that the traffic between the users who dialed in and the company's own network never left the ISPs network (never reached the internet at large). I knew at the time it was marketing and that with a well encrypted connection it shouldn't matter if the traffic ever left our "cloud", but it could have helped to shape my view of the technology.
Clients ate that up too. The internet was scary to them. Being able to say that their employee will dial directly into our equipment, and that no packet would pass through a device we didn't operate until the moment it hits your company's gateway made a lot of companies feel better about letting workers remote in.
At this point it just seems like arguing for arguing's sake, but I was rejecting the notion that VPNs were always intended for privacy (along with saying others are wrong for suggesting otherwise). It still seems to me that VPNs did not always imply "privacy", and I think in my sibling comment to this, an RFC from 1999 seems to support that (focusing on "intranets" and "extranets" in the definition of a VPN, and only mentioning encryption once as an optional component, with possibly only authentication instead, or even none).
Let's say you have an IPSec tunnel between a branch location and HQ site. The typical solution was GRE where you encapsulate it inside another IP packet that has public IPs only for the destination to decapsulate it. When VPNs came along they added privacy hence the name.
In networking you are not connecting two networks. You are interconnecting three networks! the branch would have its own subnet so would HQ but the VPN also would have its subnet all routed as separate networks. The tunnel network getting privacy because it traverses untrusted networks (back in the day it wasn't typically the interent but ATM, frame relay,T1,etc... "directly" between sites), that's where term cloud comes from FYI the untrusted magic ISP network in the sky.
The earliest reference to VPN I can find in the RFCs, RFC2547, seems to call the "destination" (the network spanned by the tunnel) the VPN, not the tunnel itself:
"If all the sites in a VPN are owned by the same enterprise, the VPN
is a corporate "intranet". If the various sites in a VPN are owned
by different enterprises, the VPN is an "extranet". A site can be in
more than one VPN; e.g., in an intranet and several extranets. We
regard both intranets and extranets as VPNs."
A security-conscious VPN user might want to ensure that some or all
of the packets which traverse the backbone are authenticated and/or
encrypted.
I still think that VPNs were invented to connect smaller private networks to a larger private network together, where private != privacy. (But rather related to authorities, such as using "private IP addresses" in e.g. 10.0.0.0/8, instead of publicly routable ones.)
Privacy was a (good, likely popular) option, but just not part of the strict definition of what a VPN is (much unlike today).
This is basically the same thing people do with VPNs now, only instead of hiding their internet activity from IT, they hide it from their ISP.
VPNs were always used for things other than connecting someone to a corporate network, it's just that most of the general internet population at that time (and I'm guessing you're old enough to remember this) were not aware of the technology and not tech savvy enough to set it up. This is true even for the employees of the companies we had as customers. We had to build entire software products that did nothing but hand hold people through setting up a dial up networking connection. It's not surprising that corporations were the majority users of VPN technology until the rest of the public (who don't have IT staff) caught up, at which point it became increasingly more common for people to use it to hide their internet traffic.