Introduction
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,4 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. to 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.
Due to Kleinrock's early development of packet switching
theory and his focus on analysis, design and measurement, his Network
Measurement Center at UCLA was selected to be the first node on the ARPANET.
All this came together in September 1969 when BBN installed the first IMP at
UCLA and the first host computer was connected. Doug Engelbart's project on
"Augmentation of Human Intellect" (which included NLS, an early
hypertext system) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) provided a second node.
SRI supported the Network Information Center, led by Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler
and including functions such as maintaining tables of host name to address
mapping as well as a directory of the RFC's.
One month later, when SRI was connected to the ARPANET, the
first host-to-host message was sent from Kleinrock's laboratory to SRI. Two
more nodes were added at UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah. These last
two nodes incorporated application visualization projects, with Glen Culler and
Burton Fried at UCSB investigating methods for display of mathematical
functions using storage displays to deal with the problem of refresh over the
net, and Robert Taylor and Ivan Sutherland at Utah investigating methods of 3-D
representations over the net. Thus, by the end of 1969, four host computers
were connected together into the initial ARPANET, and the budding Internet was off
the ground. Even at this early stage, it should be noted that the networking
research incorporated both work on the underlying network and work on how to
utilize the network. This tradition continues to this day.
Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the
following years, and work proceeded on completing a functionally complete
Host-to-Host protocol and other network software. In December 1970 the Network
Working Group (NWG) working under S. Crocker finished the initial ARPANET
Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP). As the
ARPANET sites completed implementing NCP during the period 1971-1972, the
network users finally could begin to develop applications.
In October 1972, Kahn organized a large, very successful
demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication
Conference (ICCC). This was the first public demonstration of this new network
technology to the public. It was also in 1972 that the initial "hot"
application, electronic mail, was introduced. In March Ray Tomlinson at BBN
wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of
the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination mechanism. In July, Roberts
expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list,
selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. From there email took
off as the largest network application for over a decade. This was a harbinger
of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the
enormous growth of all kinds of "people-to-people" traffic.
References:
http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4
