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History Of The
Internet
The Internet was
the result of some visionary thinking by
people in the early 1960s who saw great
potential value in allowing computers to
share information on research and
development in scientific and military
fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first
proposed a global network of computers
in 1962, and moved over to the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
in late 1962 to head the work to develop
it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later
UCLA developed the theory of packet
switching, which was to form the basis
of Internet connections. Lawrence
Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts
computer with a California computer in
1965 over dial-up telephone lines. It
showed the feasibility of wide area
networking, but also showed that the
telephone line's circuit switching was
inadequate. Kleinrock's packet switching
theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over
to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan
for ARPANET. These visionaries and many
more left unnamed here are the real
founders of the Internet.
When Senator Ted Kennedy heard in 1968
that the pioneering Massachusetts
company BBN had won the ARPA contract
for an "interface message processor
(IMP)," he sent a congratulatory
telegram to BBN for their ecumenical
spirit in winning the "interfaith
message processor" contract.
The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was
brought online in 1969 under a contract
let by the renamed Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially
connected four major computers at
universities in the southwestern US
(UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB,
and the University of Utah). The
contract was carried out by BBN of
Cambridge, MA under Bob Kahn and went
online in December 1969. By June 1970,
MIT, Harvard, BBN, and Systems
Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica,
Cal. were added. By January 1971,
Stanford, MIT's Lincoln Labs,
Carnegie-Mellon, and Case-Western
Reserve U were added. In months to come,
NASA/Ames, Mitre, Burroughs, RAND, and
the U of Illinois plugged in. After
that, there were far too many to keep
listing here.
Who was the first to use the Internet?
Charley Kline at UCLA sent the first
packets on ARPANet as he tried to
connect to Stanford Research Institute
on Oct 29, 1969. The system crashed as
he reached the G in LOGIN!
The Internet was designed in part to
provide a communications network that
would work even if some of the sites
were destroyed by nuclear attack. If the
most direct route was not available,
routers would direct traffic around the
network via alternate routes.
The early Internet was used by computer
experts, engineers, scientists, and
librarians. There was nothing friendly
about it. There were no home or office
personal computers in those days, and
anyone who used it, whether a computer
professional or an engineer or scientist
or librarian, had to learn to use a very
complex system.
Did Al Gore invent the Internet?
According to a CNN transcript of an
interview with Wolf Blitzer, Al Gore
said,"During my service in the United
States Congress, I took the initiative
in creating the Internet." Al Gore was
not yet in Congress in 1969 when ARPANET
started or in 1974 when the term
Internet first came into use. Gore was
elected to Congress in 1976. In
fairness, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf
acknowledge in a paper titled Al Gore
and the Internet that Gore has probably
done more than any other elected
official to support the growth and
development of the Internet from the
1970's to the present .
E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray
Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. He picked the
@ symbol from the available symbols on
his teletype to link the username and
address. The telnet protocol, enabling
logging on to a remote computer, was
published as a Request for Comments (RFC)
in 1972. RFC's are a means of sharing
developmental work throughout community.
The ftp protocol, enabling file
transfers between Internet sites, was
published as an RFC in 1973, and from
then on RFC's were available
electronically to anyone who had use of
the ftp protocol.
Libraries began automating and
networking their catalogs in the late
1960s independent from ARPA. The
visionary Frederick G. Kilgour of the
Ohio College Library Center (now OCLC,
Inc.) led networking of Ohio libraries
during the '60s and '70s. In the mid
1970s more regional consortia from New
England, the Southwest states, and the
Middle Atlantic states, etc., joined
with Ohio to form a national, later
international, network. Automated
catalogs, not very user-friendly at
first, became available to the world,
first through telnet or the awkward IBM
variant TN3270 and only many years
later, through the web. See The History
of OCLC
Ethernet, a protocol for many local
networks, appeared in 1974, an outgrowth
of Harvard student Bob Metcalfe's
dissertation on "Packet Networks." The
dissertation was initially rejected by
the University for not being analytical
enough. It later won acceptance when he
added some more equations to it.
The Internet matured in the 70's as a
result of the TCP/IP architecture first
proposed by Bob Kahn at BBN and further
developed by Kahn and Vint Cerf at
Stanford and others throughout the 70's.
It was adopted by the Defense Department
in 1980 replacing the earlier Network
Control Protocol (NCP) and universally
adopted by 1983.
The Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP)
was invented in 1978 at Bell Labs.
Usenet was started in 1979 based on
UUCP. Newsgroups, which are discussion
groups focusing on a topic, followed,
providing a means of exchanging
information throughout the world . While
Usenet is not considered as part of the
Internet, since it does not share the
use of TCP/IP, it linked unix systems
around the world, and many Internet
sites took advantage of the availability
of newsgroups. It was a significant part
of the community building that took
place on the networks.
Similarly, BITNET (Because It's Time
Network) connected IBM mainframes around
the educational community and the world
to provide mail services beginning in
1981. Listserv software was developed
for this network and later others.
Gateways were developed to connect
BITNET with the Internet and allowed
exchange of e-mail, particularly for
e-mail discussion lists. These listservs
and other forms of e-mail discussion
lists formed another major element in
the community building that was taking
place.
In 1986, the National Science Foundation
funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps
backbone for the Internet. They
maintained their sponsorship for nearly
a decade, setting rules for its
non-commercial government and research
uses.
As the commands for e-mail, FTP, and
telnet were standardized, it became a
lot easier for non-technical people to
learn to use the nets. It was not easy
by today's standards by any means, but
it did open up use of the Internet to
many more people in universities in
particular. Other departments besides
the libraries, computer, physics, and
engineering departments found ways to
make good use of the nets--to
communicate with colleagues around the
world and to share files and resources.
While the number of sites on the
Internet was small, it was fairly easy
to keep track of the resources of
interest that were available. But as
more and more universities and
organizations--and their libraries--
connected, the Internet became harder
and harder to track. There was more and
more need for tools to index the
resources that were available.
The first effort, other than library
catalogs, to index the Internet was
created in 1989, as Peter Deutsch and
his crew at McGill University in
Montreal, created an archiver for ftp
sites, which they named Archie. This
software would periodically reach out to
all known openly available ftp sites,
list their files, and build a searchable
index of the software. The commands to
search Archie were unix commands, and it
took some knowledge of unix to use it to
its full capability.
McGill University, which hosted the
first Archie, found out one day that
half the Internet traffic going into
Canada from the United States was
accessing Archie. Administrators were
concerned that the University was
subsidizing such a volume of traffic,
and closed down Archie to outside
access. Fortunately, by that time, there
were many more Archies available.
At about the same time, Brewster Kahle,
then at Thinking Machines, Corp.
developed his Wide Area Information
Server (WAIS), which would index the
full text of files in a database and
allow searches of the files. There were
several versions with varying degrees of
complexity and capability developed, but
the simplest of these were made
available to everyone on the nets. At
its peak, Thinking Machines maintained
pointers to over 600 databases around
the world which had been indexed by
WAIS. They included such things as the
full set of Usenet Frequently Asked
Questions files, the full documentation
of working papers such as RFC's by those
developing the Internet's standards, and
much more. Like Archie, its interface
was far from intuitive, and it took some
effort to learn to use it well.
Peter Scott of the University of
Saskatchewan, recognizing the need to
bring together information about all the
telnet-accessible library catalogs on
the web, as well as other telnet
resources, brought out his Hytelnet
catalog in 1990. It gave a single place
to get information about library
catalogs and other telnet resources and
how to use them. He maintained it for
years, and added HyWebCat in 1997 to
provide information on web-based
catalogs.
In 1991, the first really friendly
interface to the Internet was developed
at the University of Minnesota. The
University wanted to develop a simple
menu system to access files and
information on campus through their
local network. A debate followed between
mainframe adherents and those who
believed in smaller systems with
client-server architecture. The
mainframe adherents "won" the debate
initially, but since the client-server
advocates said they could put up a
prototype very quickly, they were given
the go-ahead to do a demonstration
system. The demonstration system was
called a gopher after the U of Minnesota
mascot--the golden gopher. The gopher
proved to be very prolific, and within a
few years there were over 10,000 gophers
around the world. It takes no knowledge
of unix or computer architecture to use.
In a gopher system, you type or click on
a number to select the menu selection
you want.
Gopher's usability was enhanced much
more when the University of Nevada at
Reno developed the VERONICA searchable
index of gopher menus. It was purported
to be an acronym for Very Easy
Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to
Computerized Archives. A spider crawled
gopher menus around the world,
collecting links and retrieving them for
the index. It was so popular that it was
very hard to connect to, even though a
number of other VERONICA sites were
developed to ease the load. Similar
indexing software was developed for
single sites, called JUGHEAD (Jonzy's
Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation
And Display).
Peter Deutsch, who developed Archie,
always insisted that Archie was short
for Archiver, and had nothing to do with
the comic strip. He was disgusted when
VERONICA and JUGHEAD appeared.
In 1989 another significant event took
place in making the nets easier to use.
Tim Berners-Lee and others at the
European Laboratory for Particle
Physics, more popularly known as CERN,
proposed a new protocol for information
distribution. This protocol, which
became the World Wide Web in 1991, was
based on hypertext--a system of
embedding links in text to link to other
text, which you have been using every
time you selected a text link while
reading these pages. Although started
before gopher, it was slower to develop.
The development in 1993 of the graphical
browser Mosaic by Marc Andreessen and
his team at the National Center For
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave
the protocol its big boost. Later,
Andreessen moved to become the brains
behind Netscape Corp., which produced
the most successful graphical type of
browser and server until Microsoft
declared war and developed its MicroSoft
Internet Explorer.
The early days of the web was a confused
period as many developers tried to put
their personal stamp on ways the web
should develop. The web was threatened
with becoming a mass of unrelated
protocols that would require different
software for different applications. The
visionary Michael Dertouzos of MIT's
Laboratory for Computer Sciences
persuaded Tim Berners-Lee and others to
form the World Wide Web Consortium in
1994 to promote and develop standards
for the Web. Proprietary plug-ins still
abound for the web, but the Consortium
has ensured that there are common
standards present in every browser.
Since the Internet was initially funded
by the government, it was originally
limited to research, education, and
government uses. Commercial uses were
prohibited unless they directly served
the goals of research and education.
This policy continued until the early
90's, when independent commercial
networks began to grow. It then became
possible to route traffic across the
country from one commercial site to
another without passing through the
government funded NSFNet Internet
backbone.
Delphi was the first national commercial
online service to offer Internet access
to its subscribers. It opened up an
email connection in July 1992 and full
Internet service in November 1992. All
pretenses of limitations on commercial
use disappeared in May 1995 when the
National Science Foundation ended its
sponsorship of the Internet backbone,
and all traffic relied on commercial
networks. AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe
came online. Since commercial usage was
so widespread by this time and
educational institutions had been paying
their own way for some time, the loss of
NSF funding had no appreciable effect on
costs.
Today, NSF funding has moved beyond
supporting the backbone and higher
educational institutions to building the
K-12 and local public library accesses
on the one hand, and the research on the
massive high volume connections on the
other.
Microsoft's full scale entry into the
browser, server, and Internet Service
Provider market completed the major
shift over to a commercially based
Internet. The release of Windows 98 in
June 1998 with the Microsoft browser
well integrated into the desktop shows
Bill Gates' determination to capitalize
on the enormous growth of the Internet.
Microsoft's success over the past few
years has brought court challenges to
their dominance. We'll leave it up to
you whether you think these battles
should be played out in the courts or
the marketplace.
During this period of enormous growth,
businesses entering the Internet arena
scrambled to find economic models that
work. Free services supported by
advertising shifted some of the direct
costs away from the
consumer--temporarily. Services such as
Delphi offered free web pages, chat
rooms, and message boards for community
building. Online sales have grown
rapidly for such products as books and
music CDs and computers, but the profit
margins are slim when price comparisons
are so easy, and public trust in online
security is still shaky. Business models
that have worked well are portal sites,
that try to provide everything for
everybody, and live auctions. AOL's
acquisition of Time-Warner was the
largest merger in history when it took
place and shows the enormous growth of
Internet business! The stock market has
had a rocky ride, swooping up and down
as the new technology companies, the
dot.com's encountered good news and bad.
The decline in advertising income
spelled doom for many dot.coms, and a
major shakeout and search for better
business models took place by the
survivors.
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