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What really started the Internet?
In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the
first man-made satellite. The Pentagon reasoned that if the Russian's could
launch a satellite into space they could launch a nuclear missile at
America.
In response to Sputnik's launch,
in 1958 President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the
Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA). ARPA's purpose was to give the
United States a technological edge over other countries. One important part
of ARPA's mission was computer science.
ARPA enlisted the
help of the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) to create a computer
network. The network had to connect four computers running on four different
operating systems.
They called the network
ARPANET
or ARPAnet.
In the 1967 film "Billion Dollar
Brain" Michael Caine plays the spy Harry Palmer who stops a mad American
colonel starting WW3. The film features a Honeywell computer, like the one
the
University of California, Los
Angeles
team used to connect to the infant ARPAnet.
In 1968, ARPA sent out a Request for Quotation (RFQ) to several
institutions, asking for bids on creating the first wide area network. The
team that designed, built and installed ARPAnet was diverse, consisting of
electrical engineers, computer scientists, applied mathematicians and
graduate students. They recorded their discoveries and processes in a series
of documents called Request for Comments (RFCs), which you can find archived
along with Internet standards and user information at the Internet
RFC/STD/FYI/BCP
Archives.
Interface Message
Processor (IMP),
an essential
component of ARPANET...
Len Kleinrock,
right, realised a network would need smaller interface machines to process
the streams of data passing between large computers from different
manufacturers.
Although other groups were working on ways to network
computers, ARPAnet established the protocols (rules) used on the Internet today.
Without ARPAnet, it may have taken many more years before anyone tried to
find ways to join regional networks together into a larger system.
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Paul
Baran. RAND Corporation
Baran became part of
the "Rand Thinktank".
Baran developed the fundamental concept behind today's advanced communications
networking systems known as digital packet switching.
P. Baran. Packetized
Ensemble Modem Patent #: 4,438,511
Baran was born in
Grodno, Poland.
He arrived in America in 1928 aged two. In 1949, he earned his B.S. in
electrical engineering from Drexel University and his M.S. from the
University of California at Los Angeles in 1959.
Following his graduation
from UCLA, Baran was at the RAND Corporation when he designed a
communication network to survive a first strike from the Soviet Union during
the Cold War.
He based his network on a mesh network able to reconfigure
itself to bypass non-working areas. To create this totally
decentralized network, Baran divided the communications stream into “packets,” sent along various paths to eventually be rejoined
into a whole message at their destination. Baran holds 31 patents for his work on several new
communications technologies in part based upon the concept of packets.
Donald Watts Davies
National Physical
Laboratory
Unaware of Paul Baran's
work, Welshman Donald Watts Davies
played a major part in laying the
groundwork for the Internet. In the 1960s Davies devised a more
efficient method of computer communications known as "packet switching",
a term coined by Davies.
Packet switching
breaks each
data stream into
small blocks, or "packets", that can be electronically
transmitted between remote computers and then reassembled into a
coherent message. D. W. Davies, Apparatus and Methods for Granting Access to Computers.
Patent #: 4,799,258
Davies studied physics at Imperial London. During WW2 he
worked briefly at Birmingham university under Klas Fuchs on the Alloy Tube
project (Atom Bomb). After the war he returned to Imperial to
study mathematics. Most of his career was spent at the National Physical
Laboratory, Teddington, near London. In 1965, Davies designed and
implemented the first operational packet switching network.
After proving its feasibility in the United Kingdom, Davies worked with the
Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. to create a larger, universal
network.
Davies’ concept of breaking up packets of information was quickly
implemented in ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
Digital packet switching enabled the construction of data
networks with greater flexibility and throughput while laying the technical
foundation for the eventual development of Transmission Control Protocol and
the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP).
_____________________
Packet
Switching
The Internet Moves At The Speed Of Light!
All
tables were started completely blank to simulate a worst-case starting
condition where no station knew the location of any other station. Within
1/2 a second the network had learned the locations of all connected stations
and was routing traffic in an efficient manner.
Paul Baran,
On Distributed Communications, Vol. I,
1964.
_____________________
How The Net Got Started
 Information
Processing Tecqniques Office (IPTO).
Joseph Carl Robnett "Lick" Licklider.
"Lick" developed the idea of a universal network, spread his vision
throughout the Information Processing Tecqniques Office and inspired his
successors to realize his dream by creation of the ARPAnet, which then led
to the Internet.
Licklider started his scientific career as an experimental psychologist and
professor at the
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
(MIT) interested in psychoacoustics.
At MIT he also worked on the
SAGE early
warning project as a human factors expert, which helped convince him of the
great potential for human / computer interfaces.
____________________________
Advanced Reseach Projects Agency
(ARPA). Bob Taylor.
In1966, Bob
Taylors’ office in the Pentagon had a terminal connected to time-sharing
community at MIT, another terminal connected to a different kind of
computer at the University of California at Berkeley, and a third
terminal connected to the Systems Development Corp. in Santa Monica.
"To talk
to MIT I had to sit at the MIT terminal. To bring in someone from Berkeley,
I had to change chairs to another terminal," he says. "I wished I could
connect someone at MIT directly with someone at Berkeley. Out of that came
the idea of one terminal that connects with all of them."
Taylor
had a word with
his boss, Charles Herzfeld, who gave him
one-million-dollars for ARPA to start funding projects to make the world's
first interactive computer network... During the Vietnam War Bob Taylor was
given the rank of brigadier general and sent to Saigon where he set up a
program to build a computer Centre. Congress began pushing ARPA's work - which was totally unclassified - toward
secret military projects. Taylor, whose personal mission was to make the new computer technology
available to all Americans, decided to move on...
After a year at the University of Utah, he took on his most famous job -
managing the Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL) at the new Xerox
Palo Alto Research Centre
(PARC).
In 1970 he moved to
Palo Alto where for 13 years he was nursemaid-in-chief to the extraordinary
group of geniuses who have transformed the world through computers and local
computer networks.
 Charles
Herzfeld. ARPA Director.
According to Charles Herzfeld.
"The ARPAnet was not started to create a Command and
Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim.
Rather, the ARPAnet came out of our frustration that there were only a
limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and
that many research investigators who should access them were geographically
separated from them".
 Lawrence
(Larry) Roberts was the ARPAnet program manager, and led the overall system
design.
Roberts obtained his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from MIT, and then joined
the Lincoln Laboratory, where he carried out research into computer
networks.
In a pivotal meeting in November, 1964, Roberts met with "Lick" Licklider,
who inspired Roberts with his dream to build a wide area communications
network.
 Vinton
Cerf worked on several interesting networking projects including the Packet
Radio Net (PRNET), and the Packet Satellite Network (SATNET). In the spring of 1973, he joined Robert Kahn on
a project to design the next generation networking protocol for the ARPAnet.
Kahn had experience with the
Interface Message Processor, and Cerf had
experience with the
Network Control Protocol, making them the
perfect team to create what became TCP/IP.
(TCP/IP explained on Video)
Robert (Bob) Kahn,
co-designer of the Internet network protocol. Kahn laid the open
architecture foundations for the TCP/IP protocol, providing the
Internet with one of its most
distinctive features and what has proven to be a
key advantage.
____________________________
 Douglas Engelbart.
Invented the "mouse". Englebart has always been ahead of his time,
having ideas that seemed far-fetched at the time but later were taken for
granted. As far back as the 1960s he was touting the use of
computers for online conferencing.
Engelbart's most famous invention the computer mouse, was also developed in the 1960s, but not used
commercially until the 1980s. Like
Vannevar Bush and
J.C.R. Licklider,
Engelbart wanted to use technology to augment human intellect. He saw
technology, especially computers, as the answers to the problem of dealing
with the ever more complex modern world.
____________________________
 In
1960, filmmaker
Ted Nelson
studied computer programming
at
Harvard.
He applied his experience of complex motion picture effects, moving
from one shot to another,
to index and organize his vast
collection of notes. In the process he conceived of the idea
of hypertext.
In his book Literary Machines. His vision involved
implementation of a "docuverse". Where all data was stored for all
time; there would be no deletions and all information would by
accessible by a link from anywhere else. Navigation through the
information would be non-linear, depending on each individual's
choice of links. This was more than text. It was hypertext!
http://web.archive.org/web/20001202050700/www.sensemedia.net/993
The word "hypertext" was first
coined by Ted Nelson in 1963, and is first found in print in a
college newspaper article about a lecture he gave called "Computers,
Creativity, and the Nature of the Written Word" in January,
1965.
British scientist Tim Berners-Lee
Director
of the World Wide Web Consortium
- which oversees the
web’s
continued development.
Tim Berners-Lee graduated from Queen's
College, Oxford in 1976 with a degree in physics. He invented the world wide web with
help from Robert Cailliau and others at the nuclear physics laboratory
Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN). Berners-Lee's parents were mathematicians who were part of the team that
programmed Manchester University's Mark I, the world's first commercial,
stored program computer, sold by Ferranti Ltd.
Berners-Lee's
WorldWideWeb was the world's
first web browser and What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)
Hyper Text Markup Language editor (HTML).
It was introduced on February 26, 1991, by Berners-Lee. It was later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with
the World Wide Web.
WorldWideWeb (WWW) was the first program which used not only the
common File Transfer Protocol
(FTP) but also the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, invented by
Berners-Lee in 1989. At the time it was written WorldWideWeb
was the only way to view the Web.
The source code was released into the public domain in 1993.
Some of the code still resides on Berners-Lee's computer at
CERN, the European Organisation
for Nuclear Research,
and has not been recovered due to
the computer's status as a historical artifact.
Internet
Statistics
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"An elegantly
organized tour of the Internet, both fun and informative, a rare
combination!"
Steve Crocker -
who invented the Internet Request For Comments system.
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This site
provides an in-depth reference about the Internet. It was first
published on the Web January 7, 2000 and was last updated November 2nd,
2009. The material has greatly benefited from the help of many of the
people
that helped build the Internet. Enjoy!
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