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The concept of an internet free world now seems unimaginable and to a certain degree, frightening. You may be surprised to know that LOLCats and Rick Rolls weren’t on the minds of two California universities when they began tests 40 years ago, successfully sending data between two computers in 1969. These were the humble beginnings of ARPANET…what is now, the internet.
What better time to recap on the last 40 years and provide a brief history of how a technology that has changed our lives, came to be. Before you begin reading however, if you’d like a more visual representation, you may want to sit back and watch this wonderful video that will take you through the decades to today.
Not in the mood to read, sit back and enjoy this:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4[/youtube]
A History
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.
Arpanet was created by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Darpa. The first connection in 1969 was between The University of California Los Angeles and The Stanford Research Institute. By the end of the year connections had also been added to The University of California Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.
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 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.
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.
In 1973, the first international network connection links the US with University College London University College London.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since the Internet was initially funded by the government, it was originally limited to research, education, and government uses.
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.
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.
In 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes a check for $100,000 to an entity that doesn’t exist yet: a company called Google Inc. By June 2000, Google becomes the world’s largest search engine.
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.
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.
As the Internet has become ubiquitous, faster, and increasingly accessible to non-technical communities, social networking and collaborative services have grown rapidly, enabling people to communicate and share interests in many more ways.
This brings us to today where sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, YouTube, Flickr, Second Life, delicious, blogs, wikis, and many more let people of all ages rapidly share their interests of the moment with others everywhere.
Summarised via Walthowe
No mention of Leonard Kleinrock? ;) (who sent the first internet message, which was “LO” )
http://phz.in/11sr
charles kline was the researcher at UCLA who actually tested the connection between UCLA and the SRI International computers via the then two-node ARPANET in late October, 1969.
vint
Nice little round up, I remember having to go over all this in university a few years ago.
Was the first APRANET system using the IP protocol and addressing?
jebus bless it
@ds
January 1st, 1983 was the required due date for all IMPs to switch to TCP/IP or be kicked off the network. This replaced NCP.
I can’t help but notice several blatant factual errors. I am citing the book Where the Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, required reading for those who want to know who did what, when, and why in the early years of the Internet with a focus on BB&N and the ARPANET
“Arpanet was created by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Darpa.”
Partially True
1) The organization now known as Darpa was called ARPA back then. It became Darpa around 1972 after the ARPANET was in full swing. (pg. 219)
–and–
2) Bolt Beranek and Newman were given the contract for designing the code and creating the interfaces for the IMPs to connect to Ma Bell and the host site’s computer of choice. BB&N also maintained the networked IMPs and monitored the links between host sites for congestion to the level of detail that they could tell with certainty when a phone circuit was near failure even before ATT knew it. They gave their sweat and tears to make the original network, built from the ground up in old school programming languages. They get the credit for building it and ARPA gets the credit for coming up with the general idea and footing the bill. (Whole book…read it)
“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.”
FALSE
3) Okay. Tomlinson did in fact choose the @ sign off of his Model 33 Teletype, but he did not adapt it for ARPANET (pg 192). Here’s the skinny. He was infact the first person to use electronic mail delivery between two PDP-10s using CPYNET, his home rolled file transfer protocol (pg 191), but they were in the same Cambridge office of BB&N. He may have had the original idea, but the problem of transfering files over the ARPANET was originally solved by Abhay Bhusan in July 1972. At the time he was drafting a RFC for a ARPANET file transfer program which he modified to include e-mail transfer using the original ARPANET email programs MAIL and MLFL. (Ibid).
“The ftp protocol, enabling file transfers between Internet sites, was published as an RFC in 1973 …”
FALSE…
4) Abhay Bhusan released RFC 354 in 1972, not 1973, which I assume is the RFC Zee is referring to. Check out ieft.org
In addition there is a prevailing notion that the internet was built with nuclear survivability in mind. This was not at on the minds of the original
engineers at BB&N according to the book’s authors.
“To be effective, a data network would have to send packets reliably… there were circuit outages to anticipate… A spot of bad weather somewhere would knock out service on a long-distance phone line carrying network data traffic.”
Paul Baran was the one interested in network survivability, but there is little mention to it in relation the the ARPANET. Perhaps someone else has a better source on this?