38613InternetHist

LIS 386.13 Information Technologies and the Information ProfessionsAn Outline History of the Internet: 

LIS 386.13 Information Technologies and the Information Professions An Outline History of the Internet R. E. Wyllys Copyright © 2002 by R. E. Wyllys Last revised 2005 May 13

Lesson Objectives: 

Lesson Objectives You will Learn how the Internet grew from experiments on how to connect computers into a world-wide network of networks—an internetwork of networks—that supports the World-Wide Web but also provides for much other communication

The Years before 1970: 

The Years before 1970 1940s - 1960s Computers grew rapidly in the power of individual computers and in the number of computers in use in the world. But before 1960 few efforts were made to enable computers to talk directly to each other. Intermittent, switchable communications between computers, extremely common nowadays, were essentially non-existent. Certain computers were designed to be in communication with each other and had full-time, hard-wired connections. Special programming enabled such computers to communicate with each other.

The Years before 1970: 

The Years before 1970 1940s - 1960s Almost all the full-time, hardwired computer connections were those of military networks—notably, the SAGE Air Defense network—that used dedicated long-distance cabling to interconnect their computers and other equipment such as radar stations. In general, before 1960 if you wanted to use results from one computer in another computer, you would direct the first computer to produce a deck of punched cards (or a magnetic or punched-paper tape) containing the information to be used in the second computer. You would then carry the deck of cards (or the tape) to the reading device of the second computer and turn it on. Such a means of computer "interconnection" is sometimes called a "sneaker network."

The Years before 1970: 

The Years before 1970 Early 1960s The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), by now an experienced user of computers, had become increasingly concerned with the potential damage that could be caused to its long-distance cable networks by attacks Not only could conventional military attacks damage communications lines, but also nuclear explosions were known to produce extremely strong electromagnetic waves that could destroy electronic equipment over long distances

The Years before 1970: 

The Years before 1970 1962 DoD's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), formed in 1957 following Sputnik, created its Computer Research Division (CRD) and appointed as its head J. C. R. Licklider (1915-1990), a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). CRD tackled a variety of problems, including that of inter-computer communications. Shortly before being appointed to head CRD, Licklider had published a series of memos that expounded his "Galactic Network," the then theoretical idea of a world-wide network of computers.

The Years before 1970: 

The Years before 1970 1962 Licklider’s "Galactic Network“ (described in, inter alia, his memos “Man-Computer Symbiosis” and “The Computer as a Communication Device” [the latter co-authored with Robert W. Taylor]) embodied such principles as: Each network should be able to work on its own, developing its own applications as it wished, so long as it met the specifications for communicating with other networks. Each network would have a large 'gateway' computer through which it would link to other networks. Each gateway would have close connections to several other gateways.

The Years before 1970: 

The Years before 1970 Licklider's principles for a Galactic Network, continued A gateway's software would retain no information about the traffic it handled, either from or into its network. Licklider saw this as important not only for speed but also to prevent possible outside censorship and control. Messages between networks would be routed via the fastest available route through the various gateways. If one route was blocked or slow, messages would be rerouted through other parts of the interconnections among networks till the messages finally reached their destinations. The gateways would always be open, and they would route all messages on an equal basis.

The Years before 1970: 

The Years before 1970 1962 Leonard Kleinrock, a CRD staff member, Paul Baran, a scientist at the RAND Corporation (a non-profit "think-tank" in Santa Monica, CA), and Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury, of the National Physical Laboratory in the U.K., conceived the idea of communicating information by Breaking a message up into many small packages Sending the small packages individually over many possible communication paths to a desired destination, and At the destination, reassembling them to form the original message. This was the birth of the concept of "packet" communication and the idea of a packet network.

The Years before 1970: 

The Years before 1970 1962-1968 ARPA conducted and sponsored research into the many theoretical and practical details of just how packet networks could be set up and made to work. The first generation of packet network hardware and software was designed. Military communications networks were set up using packet communications.

The Years before 1970: 

The Years before 1970 1967 A plan for an ARPA-sponsored civilian packet network, ARPANET, was published. The plan's publication led to comments from groups at MIT, RAND, and the National Physical Laboratory in the U.K., all of which had been working independently in related areas of research on how to set up networks of computers over long distances, i.e., wide-area networks (WANs). A synthesis of these ideas contributed to improvements in the proposed ARPANET.

The Years before 1970: 

The Years before 1970 1969 The first stage of ARPANET was established, connecting computer centers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah. Initial experiments in October 1969 showed that packet communications could enable students at Stanford and UCLA to log in successfully on computers at the other campus, run programs on those computers, and receive results from them. In today's world it is hard to realize what a huge and difficult step forward these experiments represented Many people now call these experiments the "birth of the Internet."

The 1970s: 

The 1970s 1970-1979 ARPANET was an instant success, quickly growing to include many universities and Federal research centers (e.g., Atomic Energy Commission laboratories) around the U.S. and abroad. By 1979 ARPANET connected nearly 200 host sites, each of which in turn served many computers via local-area networks (LANs). 1971 The UT-Austin Computing Center (now ITS) became a host site of ARPANET.

The 1970s: 

The 1970s 1970-1971 ARPANET had been planned as a tool for enabling people to log in to and uutilize geographically remote computer resources. It certainly served this purpose; but to many people's surprise, email, which had been introduced as a minor aid to help with planning and handling remote-computer use, turned out to be the most used application.

The 1970s: 

The 1970s 1972 At the First International Conference on Computers and Communication, held in Washington, DC, ARPANET was demonstrated, bringing it for the first time to the attention of the general public. 1972 To guide the development of ARPANET and of the other large networks that could now be foreseen, the InterNetworking Working Group (INWG) was established to set standards. The INWG's chair, Vinton Cerf, later became known as the "Father of the Internet." 1972 The Ethernet protocol—the application of packet communications to local area networks (LANs)—was developed by Robert Metcalfe at the Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox (Xerox PARC).

The 1970s: 

The 1970s 1974 Researchers at ARPA and Stanford jointly developed the first version of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), to be used in implementing packet communications over the collection of networks that were now beginning to be interconnected with each other. TCP/IP was another major step in the development of what we now know as the Internet. 1979 Students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina established the first USENET newsgroups. (By 2000 the number of newsgroups had increased to over 40,000.) 1979 The first Multi-User Domain (MUD) was created by players of the computer game, Dungeon.

The 1980s: 

The 1980s 1981 The BITNET (Because It's Time Network) was established to connect academic computing centers. Listserv software was developed for BITNET. 1985 The first T1 lines went into service on the Internet at the speed of 1.544Mbps. 1986 The National Science Foundation established NSFNET to be the backbone of the Internet. 1986 Students at Case Western Reserve University and other residents of Cleveland developed the first Freenet, a community-based network for providing access to the Internet. 1988 One of the first major computer-worm attacks disrupted 60,000 Internet-linked computers.

The 1990s: 

The 1990s 1990 Tim Berners-Lee developed his version of hypertext at CERN (then called the "Centre Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire"), to facilitate communications among researchers there. 1990 The Internet had proven so successful that DoD ended ARPANET. (DoD had already shifted most of its own communications to MILNET, a separate and highly secure network that nevertheless was connected with the Internet.) 1991 The University of Minnesota released a text-based tool, Gopher, for locating information on the Internet. 1991 Construction began on a new backbone for the Internet usingT3 lines, which operate at 44.736Mbps.

The 1990s: 

The 1990s 1991 The National Science Foundation lifted its previously existing ban on commercial activity on NSFNET, which had become the backbone of the Internet. Commercial use surged. 1991 The High Performance Computing Act (HPCA) was signed by President George H. W. Bush. The HPCA included provision for the National Research and Education Network (NREN), to bring the benefits of the Internet to schools and libraries as well as to laboratories, universities, and businesses. The NREN began with five test networks, running at gigabit-per-second rates, which showed the feasibility of sending such materials as CAT scans and real-time video over the Internet. The HPCA was spearheaded through Congress by Senator Albert Gore, Jr., with the slogan of a "national superhighway for information." Though not an "inventor of the Internet" (a claim that, in fact, he never made), Gore deserves considerable credit for the HPCA/NREN. In 2005, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences honored Gore with a "Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of the pivotal role he [had] played in the development of the Internet over the past three decades." Vinton Cerf presented the award to Gore.

The 1990s: 

The 1990s 1993 In April, Marc Andreessen and other students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) offered the first release for general public use of an Internet browser, Mosaic. The explosively rapid and widespread adoption of Mosaic gave rise to the World-Wide Web. 1993 The U.S. Government set up the InterNIC Corporation to regulate the Domain Name System, the system by which Internet addresses are assigned and registered. 1993 On June 7, a computer named "Bongo" began running UT-Austin's first official Web server. 1994 Andreessen and some of his colleagues left UIUC to help start Netscape, making Andreessen a billionaire almost overnight. 1994 The Asynchronous Transmission Mode backbone of the Internet was established, at a speed of 145Mbps.

The 1990s: 

The 1990s 1995 The very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) commenced service, linking supercomputer centers. 1996 The National Science Foundation initiated the Next Generation Internet (NGI), aimed at developing a faster and higher-capacity Internet to assist in fields as diverse as health care, education, and scientific research. NGI is also known as Internet2. 1998 The first national optical internet, CA*net 3, was established in Canada. 1999 Conflicts in Serbia and Kosovo extended to the Internet arena and became the first large-scale "CyberWar", in which combatants attacked each other's computers.

The 2000s: 

The 2000s 2000 The estimated size of the World-Wide Web reached 1 billion pages. 2000 Registration of domain names in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean began on an experimental basis. 2000 The success of Napster, Gnutella, Freenet, and other databases of audio and video images, distributed widely and privately, became serious challenges to copyright laws. Furthermore, Erik Nilsson, a well known student of the Internet, has observed in an essay, “Napster: Popular Program Raises Devilish Issues,” that Napster and similar programs create a de facto separate domain-name space independent of the formal structure of the Internet. 2000+ Just watch and see what new developments occur!

Slide23: 

The Internet Is Bringing the World Closer Together than Ever Before

For Further Information: 

For Further Information The Internet Society maintains an excellent historical summary, entitled A Brief History of the Internet. This society also provides a Webpage, entitled "All About the Internet," which displays links to other histories of the Internet and to news about it. Hobbes' Internet Timeline is a useful chronology of the Internet, including quantitative data on its growth. A helpful source of information on Ethernet is Charles Spurgeon's Ethernet Web Site.