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 the late 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 Archives 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.
Marc AndreessenThe 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.
MICHAEL DERTOUZOS
1936-2001
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.
Read Tim Berners-Lee's tribute to Michael Dertouzos.
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.
Bill GatesMicrosoft'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.
A current trend with major implications for the future is the growth of high
speed connections. 56K modems and the providers who supported them spread widely
for a while, but this is the low end now. 56K is not fast enough to carry
multimedia, such as sound and video except in low quality. But new technologies
many times faster, such as cablemodems and digital subscriber lines (DSL) are
predominant now.
Wireless has grown rapidly in the past few years, and travellers search for the
wi-fi "hot spots" where they can connect while they are away from the home or
office. Many airports, coffee bars, hotels and motels now routinely provide
these services, some for a fee and some for free.
A next big growth area is the surge towards universal wireless access, where
almost everywhere is a "hot spot". Municipal wi-fi or city-wide access, wiMAX
offering broader ranges than wi-fi, EV-DO, 4g, and other formats will joust for
dominance in the USA in the years ahead. The battle is both economic and
political.
Another trend that is rapidly affecting web designers is the growth of smaller
devices to connect to the Internet. Small tablets, pocket PCs, smart phones,
ebooks, game machines, and even GPS devices are now capable of tapping into the
web on the go, and many web pages are not designed to work on that scale.