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A Brief History of the Internet
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-11-28 13:58:19
Over the last fifty years the world has seen the creation of an amazing network of computing power. Once dominated by university students and researchers in the defense department, this network, dubbed the Internet, now has over one billion users around the world ("Worldwide Internet Users"). Although the creation of this network has a long history, dating back before the space race in the 1960s, this paper will consider the space race the starting point of the Internet (Naughton 51). The roots of the Internet start with the creation of ARPAnet, a network named after the organization which created it: the Advanced Research Project Agency. Soon after ARPAnet was started, many other computer networks were created throughout the world. These networks were eventually connected together with ARPAnet, creating the foundation for the present Internet. The combined work of many peoples helped create the Internet we know today, but without the push from the Soviet launch of Sputnik it may have never happened (Sherman 8). On October 4, 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first man made satellite, Sputnik, into orbit (Sherman 9). The United States was shocked by the advancements made by the Soviet Union. As a response to the launch, President Eisenhower called for the creation of ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Sherman 10). Soon after, NASA was organized specifically for space research, leaving ARPA with a small budget to "carry out open ended research" (Moschovitis 34). In 1966, Bob Taylor was appointed Director of ARPA's Information Processing Technique Office (IPTO) (Moschovitis 54). In his new office he found three terminals, one for each the ARPA funded time-share systems at various universities. Considering the lack of interoperability between the systems a waste of tax payers’ dollars, Taylor proposed creating a link between them (Moschovitis 57). His proposition was quickly approved a one million dollar budget and he hired Larry Roberts, the creator of the first long distance computer link, to supervise his project (Moschovitis 57). Four years earlier, Paul Baran, a computer engineer at RAND, wrote a paper proposing a distributed packet switching network designed to survive a nuclear attack (Moschovitis 45). While Baran's network was never built, the designers of ARPAnet adopted his concept. At the time, all communication was done over telephone channels that were established between both parties. Once the channel was established, no one else could use the line. If any part of the line failed, the communication was over. Baran's theory proposed splitting the data into pieces, which would then be sent individually over a number of different routes. This allowed one section to fail, perhaps by nuclear attack, without the communication being interrupted. In 1968, Taylor's project and Baran's proposal began to come together. Larry Roberts outlined a network relying on machines he christened IMPs (Moschovitis 61). IMPs, or interface message processors, were devices designed to manage communication on the network. Creating a separate device to handle communication helped in three ways. First, it saved precious resources on the host mainframes. Second, it allowed the entire network to speak the same language, making designing and managing easier. And finally, it gave ARPA full control over the network. Construction of the IMPs was contracted to a small company in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). On September 2, 1969, BBN's first IMP arrived in Los Angeles (Moschovitis 61-62). Stanford's IMP arrived October 1, and was soon followed by University of Santa Barbra's and University of Utah's in early December (Moschovitis 62). The connection of ARPA's first four nodes was a success. By the following spring, nineteen other nodes were connected (Moschovitis 62). At the same time other networks were forming in Hawaii and Europe, and some, like Bob Kahn, wanted to see the creation of an international network of networks (Naughton 158). As computer networks began to form in Europe and Hawaii, ARPA began looking at ways of connecting them together with combinations of satellite, radio, and wired communications. With the success of ARPAnet, Taylor decided to test the feasibility of using radio to network computers (Moschovitis 69). He found Norman Abramson from the University of Hawaii to design the network (Moschovitis 71). ALOHAnet, as Abramson called it, used seven radios on the same frequency to allow their host computers to communicate (Moschovitis 71). When Larry Roberts replaced Taylor as head of IPTO, he and his assistant, Bob Kahn, began to envision a mobile computer network combining radio and satellite (Moschovitis 71). In the following years, Kahn began to organize SATnet, a satellite network linking the US and Europe (Moschovitis 71). In July 1977 Roberts and Kahn's vision became a reality. A TCP (transmission control protocol) message was sent from a van on a San Francisco freeway over radio to BBN's ARPAnet node (Moschovitis 90). The message then traveled over satellite to Norway, radio and wires to University College, London, then back to California by satellite (Moschovitis 90). After a ninety-four thousand mile journey, the message arrived undamaged in Marina del Rey (Moschovitis 90). By January 1983, TCP replaced ARPA's current transmission protocol, NCP, and the Internet was defined as any network using TCP (Moschovitis 109). The 1970s also began to bring average people into networking. The public learned of ARPAnet in 1975 when a rumor was started suggesting that the army used ARPAnet to hide files they were ordered to destroy (Moschovitis 88). Before the press published the rumor, involved students and scientists were the only people who knew of ARPAnet (Moschovitis 88). Following the release of the first personal computers in 1975, people began to create their own primitive networks. The first civilian network was Ward Christensen and Randy Suess's Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS) in 1978 (Moschovitis 93). Similar Bulletin Board Systems began to spring up all over the country (Moschovitis 93). The following year, Duke University and University of North Carolina created their own network called Usenet (Moschovitis 102). Usenet, unlike ARPAnet, welcomed others into their network, resulting in links to Europe and Australia in the 1980s (Naughton 179). City University of New York and Yale University soon followed with the creation of BITnet in 1981 (Moschovitis 105). As with Usenet, other universities wanted to join BITnet (Moschovitis 105). By the late 1990s over three thousand were connected (Moschovitis 105). The private creation of large networks, along with the first online games in the 1970s, laid the foundation for the Internet we have today. However, we must wait until the 1990s to see the true roots of the Internet we now have. While many parts of the Internet’s history, like the switch to TCP/IP in 1983, and the creation of NFSnet in 1986 were important, Tim Berners-Lee's hypertext system called the World Wide Web was the most revolutionary. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee and a team of programmers from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, created the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, abbreviated HTTP; the Hyper Text Markup Language, or HTML; and the Universal Resource Locator (URL) (Moschovitis 150). The next year, Berners-Lee's protocols and language, dubbed the World Wide Web, were released onto the Internet and into public domain where programmers everywhere began to improve the system (Moschovitis 150). To access the World Wide Web, you need a program called a browser. Although many browsers existed already, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina were inspired in 1993 to create an easy to use graphical browser (Moschovitis 172). A month after Andreessen released his browser, Mosaic, to Microsoft Windows and Apple users, one percent of the Internet's traffic became Web traffic (Moschovitis 173). Before Mosaic, few outside of computer science groups knew of the web (Moschovitis 173). Soon everyone was going online. Organizations and individuals began to create their own homepages, including the United Nations and the White House (Moschovitis 175). In 1994, shopping malls followed, along with banks, radio stations, and Pizza Hut (Moschovitis 179). As more and more corporations went online, lawsuits began to occur over trademarks (Moschovitis 195). To prevent issues, InterNIC, the organization created by Network Solutions, Inc. to manage domain names, created a policy to hand over trademarked domains to the trademark holder (Moschovitis 195). The creation of the World Wide Web gives us the basis of the Internet we know today. Although ARPAnet, decommissioned in 1990, and Mosaic are gone, replaced by improved networks and browsers, much of the design is still the same (Moschovitis 127). Great changes have been made in the last twenty years. A scientist's research tool has become a place where billions buy, sell, converse, study, and advocate viewpoints every day ("Worldwide Internet Users"). However, without the launch of Sputnik in 1957, we may have never gotten the push we needed to create these computer networks (Sherman 8). The subsequent creation of ARPAnet in the early 1970s lead the way for other networks to be created, and the visions of many helped connect these rapidly forming networks, creating the global network we now call the Internet. Once the various networks were interconnected, all we needed was the World Wide Web to bring the Internet into the daily lives of people everywhere. Three points can be remembered from the history of the Internet. First, While some researchers envisioned a global computer network, few of ARPAnet's creators would have imagined their small four computer network escalating to billions of hosts. Secondly, when normal people began to find their way online, commerce followed, almost completely changing the purpose of the Internet. Finally, Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, combined with Mosaic and the browsers that followed, completely transformed the face of the Internet; taking what was essentially a geek's toy into a place where billions go every day (United States 54; "Worldwide Internet Users") The Internet, amazing as it is today, is still only in its infancy. Every day the work of people around the world cause it to evolve further. As of 2005, less than one fifth of the world was connected to the Internet, but IPv4 is already close to using all of its approximately 4 billion addresses (Kopecki). Over the next decade we will see IPv6, the next version of the Internet protocol replace IPv4, along with many other new innovations yet to be imagined (Kopecki).
Works Cited and Bibliography
- Kopecki, Dawn. "More Elbow Room on the Net." Business Week November 6, 2006: 84-87
- Moschovitis, Christos J. P, et al. History of the Internet: a chronology, 1843 to the present. Santa Barbra: ABC-CLIO, 1999.
- Naughton, John. A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime. Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2000.
- Sherman, Josepha. The History of the Internet. New York: Scholastic, 2003.
- United States. House of Representatives. Committee on the Judiciary. Network Neutrality: Competition, Innovation, and Nondiscriminatory Access. Hearing, 25 Apr. 2006. 109th Cong., 2nd sess. Washington: Government Printing Office, 2006.
- "Worldwide Internet Users Top 1 Billion in 2005." 4 Jan. 2006. Computer Industry Almanac. 17 Nov. 2006 <http://www.c-i-a.com/pr0106.htm>.
