History of the Internet
The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications
world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone,
radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration
of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting
capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a
medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals
and their computers without regard for geographic location.
The Internet represents one of the most successful examples
of the benefits of sustained investment and commitment to research
and development of information infrastructure. Beginning with
the early research in packet switching, the government, industry
and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying this
exciting new technology. Today, terms like "bleiner@computer.org"
and "http://www.acm.org" trip lightly off the tongue
of the random person on the street.
This is intended to be a brief, necessarily cursory and incomplete
history. Much material currently exists about the Internet,
covering history, technology, and usage. A trip to almost any
bookstore will find shelves of material written about the Internet.
In this paper, several of us involved in the development and
evolution of the Internet share our views of its origins and
history. This history revolves around four distinct aspects.
There is the technological evolution that began with early research
on packet switching and the ARPANET (and related technologies),
and where current research continues to expand the horizons
of the infrastructure along several dimensions, such as scale,
performance, and higher level functionality.
There is the operations and management aspect of a global and
complex operational infrastructure. There is the social aspect,
which resulted in a broad community of Internauts working together
to create and evolve the technology. And there is the commercialization
aspect, resulting in an extremely effective transition of research
results into a broadly deployed and available information infrastructure.
The Internet today is a widespread information infrastructure,
the initial prototype of what is often called the National (or
Global or Galactic) Information Infrastructure. Its history
is complex and involves many aspects - technological, organizational,
and community. And its influence reaches not only to the technical
fields of computer communications but throughout society as
we move toward increasing use of online tools to accomplish
electronic commerce, information acquisition, and community
operations.
Origins
of the Internet
The first recorded description of the social interactions that
could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written
by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his "Galactic
Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected
set of computers through which everyone could quickly access
data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was
very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first
head of the computer research program at DARPA, starting in
October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at
DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence
G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.
Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published the first paper on packet
switching theory in July 1961 and the first book on the subject
in 1964. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility
of communications using packets rather than circuits, which
was a major step along the path towards computer networking.
The other key step was to make the computers talk together.
To explore this, in 1965 working with Thomas Merrill, Roberts
connected the TX-2 computer in Mass.
The Q-32 in California with a low speed dial-up telephone line
creating the first (however small) wide-area computer network
ever built. The result of this experiment was the realization
that the time-shared computers could work well together, running
programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine,
but that the circuit switched telephone system was totally inadequate
for the job. Kleinrock's conviction of the need for packet switching
was confirmed.
In late 1966 Roberts went to DARPA to develop the computer
network concept and quickly put together his plan for the "ARPANET",
publishing it in 1967. At the conference where he presented
the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept
from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL. Scantlebury
told Roberts about the NPL work as well as that of Paul Baran
and others at RAND. The RAND group had written a paper on packet
switching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964.
It happened that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965),
and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without
any of the researchers knowing about the other work. The word
"packet" was adopted from the work at NPL and the
proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design was upgraded
from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps.
In August 1968, after Roberts and the DARPA funded community
had refined the overall structure and specifications for the
ARPANET, an RFQ was released by DARPA for the development of
one of the key components, the packet switches called Interface
Message Processors (IMP's). The RFQ was won in December 1968
by a group headed by Frank Heart at Bolt Beranek and Newman
(BBN). As the BBN team worked on the IMP's with Bob Kahn playing
a major role in the overall ARPANET architectural design, the
network topology and economics were designed and optimized by
Roberts working with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis
Corporation, and the network measurement system was prepared
by Kleinrock's team at UCLA.
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