A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE NET
"The Internet is a way for all the things that call themselves networks to coexist and work together. It's an inter-network. Literally. What makes the Net inter is the fact that it's just a protocol — the Internet Protocol, to be exact. A protocol is an agreement about how things work together." [SOURCE]
STARTING WITH COMPUTERS <>
THE INTERNET <>
THE COMMERCIAL INTERNET
COMPUTERS
ENIAC a Computer was Built In WWII leading to the creation of The Internet
(Notice Robert Kahn in the Video and more on him below)
History of ENIAC - There were 6 Women Programmers of the ENIAC Kathleen Mauchly Antonelli (ne. McNulty), died Thursday, April 20, 2006. Kathleen was one of the 6 women programmers of the ENIAC, a resident of the Philadelphia area and lecturer at Chestnut Hill College Philadelphia, PA and was an inspiration to many. Computer Wonder Women - 'WOMEN WANTED!' The Army wanted women with mathematics degrees to HAND CALCULATE the firing trajectories of artillery for the war effort.
Snyder, Holberton, punchcard, mainframe, Eniac, Univac, Edvac, Ordvac, Brlesc-1, Cobal, Fortran Technology advances in the 1950's
ABOUT ENIAC, Personal Memories
ENIAC FEB. 13 2006 ENIAC DEBUTS 60 YEARS AGO - LISTEN
What Was Stretch? RetroComputing
In 1954 IBM initiated a project "Datatron", with the intent of taking a "giant step" to secure their position as the preeminent vendor of high-performance computers. Later renamed Stretch, the project's primary objective was to produce a computer with 100 times the speed of the IBM 704 scientific computer. This goal was perhaps even more aggressive than it sounds, given that the performance of the logic circuits increased by only a factor of ten to twenty, and memory performance by only a factor of six. Architectural improvements such as extensive use of parallelism were required to meet (or even approach) the goal.
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and set off the space race. See Timeline of Computer History
This timeline explores the history of computing from 1945 to 1990. Each year features illustrated descriptions of significant innovations in hardware and software technology, as well as milestones in areas such as commercial applications and artificial intelligence. When appropriate, biographical sketches of the pioneers responsible for the advances are included. Find Dan
You may also enjoy PICTURES Timeline starting in 1937.
The Oldest Computer
Were Greeks 1,400 years ahead of their time?
Lean about the intricate bronze mechanism of wheels and dials created 80 years before the birth of Christ. The "Antikythera Mechanism" was discovered damaged and fragmented on the wreck of a cargo ship off the tiny Greek island of Antikythera in 1900. Now, a joint British-Greek research team has found a hidden ancient Greek inscription on the device, which it thinks could unlock the mystery.
The team believes the Antikythera Mechanism may be the world's oldest computer, used by the Greeks to predict the motion of the planets.
The researchers say the device indicates a technical sophistication that would not be replicated for millennia and may also be based on principles of a heliocentric, or sun-centred, universe - a view of the cosmos that was not accepted by astronomers until the Renaissance.
"Ancient Electronic History" Found buried deep in the catacombs, or basement, of the University of Kansas campus is an ancient technology artifact -- the university's first computer. The institution purchased the computer, an IBM 650, in 1957, according to The University Daily Kansan. It was one of only 2,000 made and is considered to be the first mass-produced computer. Unlike today's hand-held computers, this one was 6 feet tall and 5 feet deep, and that was considered small at the time compared with models that took up an entire floor. The university was fixing to trash the computer when a professor there realized the historical significance of the find. He has begun moving the machine and its multitude of vacuum tubes to his house for restoration. The university won't
get much processing power from the machine, though. The
computer's memory was only capable of holding 1,000 10-digit numbers.
Creation of The Internet
An internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.
The Internet was developed in the 1960s by DARPA, actually, with 4 nodes and 4 computers (see some good maps of the evolving net, starting from 1 node and 1 computer in Sept. 69) by 1971, the net was in heavy use by most of the serious researchers in the country.
The original motivation of the ARPANET was to link together DARPA-supported computer science researchers, to allow them to share resources and information. It was a wild success that changed the way work was organized and performed in that research community.
It was the very success of the ARPANET that created demand among non-DARPA-funded computer science researchers - for a comparable capability. All those NSF-funded researchers were watching their DARPA-funded cubicle-mates get a lot more work done. The result was first CSnet and the various supercomputer networks (as well as a few other field-specific networks for high-energy physics folks and such) ultimately leading to the NSFnet. Linked together, these various networks formed the Internet.
It's also worth noting that, during the 70s, an increasing amount of unclassified military traffic - from bases that had military labs - started flowing over the ARPANET. It simply worked a lot better than the antiquated messaging systems the military had in use. This created demand for splitting the ARPANET into two separate, built linked, networks - the research-community ARPANET and the MILNET. It also lead to several separate networks carrying classified traffic.
ARPAnet WAS NOT AN INTERNET.
The 20th anniversary of the Internet by Bob Braden Dec 14, 2002
We ought not to let pass unnoticed the impending 20th anniversary of the Internet. The most logical date of origin of the Internet is January 1, 1983, when the ARPANET officially switched from the NCP protocol to TCP/IP. Six months later, the ARPANET was split into the two subnets ARPANET and MILNET, which were connected by Internet gateways* (routers).
The planning for the January 1983 switchover was fully documented in Jon Postel in RFC 801. The week-by-week progress of the transition was reported in a series of 15 RFCs, in the range RFC 842 - RFC 876, by UCLA student David Smallberg. There may still be a few remaining T shirts that read, "I Survived the TCP/IP Transition". People sometimes question that any geeks would have been in machine rooms on January 1. Believe it!! Some geeks got very little sleep for a few days (and that was before the work "geek" was invented, I believe.) So, on New Year's Eve, hoist one for the 20th anniversary of the Internet.
Bob Braden says:
* Routers brought to you by Bob Hinden of BBN.
** Prominent survivors included Dan Lynch of Interop fame. And of course Vint Cerf was working the Levers of Power at ARPA.
2004 - 35th Anniversary of Arpanet now known as the Internet ARPAnet history background by Bob Taylor
In February of 1966 I initiated the ARPAnet project. I was Director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from late '65 to late '69. There were only two people involved in the decision to launch the ARPAnet: my boss, the Director of ARPA Charles Herzfeld, and me.
From 1962 to 1970, beginning with J.C.R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, and then me, IPTO funded several of the first projects devoted to the creation of interactive computing -- then referred to as time-sharing. In '64 - '65, I witnessed that within each local site when users were first connected by a time-sharing system, a community of people with common interests began to discover one another and interact through the medium of the computer. I was struck by the fact that this was a wonderfully new and powerful phenomenon.
The next obvious step was to connect those sites with an interactive network. To me, computing was about communication, not arithmetic. Hence the ARPAnet. This theme is elaborated in a paper Lick and I wrote in 1968 entitled, "The Computer as a Communications Device". Google can find it for you. On the last couple of pages there is a scenario that is reminiscent of today's Internet.
Numerous untruths have been disseminated about events surrounding the origins of the ARPAnet. Here are some facts:
- The creation of the ARPAnet was not motivated by considerations of war. The ARPAnet was created to enable folks with common interests to connect to one another through interactive computing even when widely separated by geography.
- The singularly most important contribution to the architectural design of the ARPAnet/Internet came from Wesley Clark: the interface message processor (IMP). Wes is the designer of the LINC which was arguably the first personal computer. Wes' ARPAnet concept ensured the critically valuable distributed architecture of the ARPAnet. Prior to Wes' contribution, Larry Roberts, whom I hired in Dec '66 to be ARPAnet's program manager, was considering a single, central ARPAnet control computer at a military base in Nebraska. Fortunately, Wes quickly disabused Roberts of this notion.
- The most significant role in actually building the ARPAnet was played by Frank Heart and his Bolt, Beranek & Newman team: Severo Ornstein, Will Crowther, Bob Barker, Bernie Cosell, Dave Walden, and Bob Kahn.
Two suspicious claims relating to the ARPAnet were an important part of the case for awarding the 2001 Draper Prize to Kahn and Kleinrock.
- Kahn has claimed far and wide to be "responsible for the systems design of the ARPAnet" while a member of the BB&N team. Since no other team member agrees, I doubt the validity of this claim.
- Roberts and Kleinrock (close friends since college) began to claim in 1995, more than 30 years after the fact, that Kleinrock invented packet switching. Most of us believe that Donald Davies in England and Paul Baran in the U.S. independently invented packet switching in the early '60s.
- RFC Index - This file contains citations for all RFCs in numeric order.
I believe these two claims are false but they are recorded as facts on the web sites of the National Academy of Engineering and the Computer History Museum. The worst property of self-promotion is that it takes credit away from the people who actually made the contributions. Roberts, Kahn, and Kleinrock have, however, made other important contributions. These can only be tarnished by extravagant claims.
Packet switching is an important part of modern networking, but it is not the only key piece. The multiplicity of the applications and the openness of the standards also played critical roles in ARPAnet development, as did Steve Crocker's initiation and management of the RFC process.
I believe the first internet was created at Xerox PARC, circa '75, when we connected, via PUP, the Ethernet with the ARPAnet. PUP (PARC Universal Protocol) was instrumental later in defining TCP (ask Metcalfe or Shoch, they were there).
For the internet to grow, it also needed a networked personal computer, a graphical user interface with WYSIWYG properties, modern word processing, and desktop publishing. These, along with the Ethernet, all came out of my lab at Xerox PARC in the '70s, and were commercialized over the next 20 years by Adobe, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Novell, Sun and other companies that were necessary to the development of the Internet.
The ARPAnet was not an internet. An internet is a connection between two or more computer networks. The ARPAnet, with help from thousands of people, slowly evolved into the Internet. Without the ARPAnet, the Internet would have been a much longer time in coming.
ACT ONE celebration of ARPANET 20 at UCLA, I wrote up an article recording what had been said there. The article was published in American Scientist in November 1989.
Robert Kahn & Vint Cerf developed TCP/IP Robert E Kahn Started the Internet project at DARPA in the early 1970s and Vint Cerf ran it from 1976-1982. By 1983, the technology had matured to the point that DARPA transitioned the ARPANET to the TCP/IP protocols and the operational Internet was put in place.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/18/kahn_net_neutrality_warning/
Video from 1993 showing the early mbone tools in action:
The youtube snippet has pointers to the full 2-hour program on Google Video and Internet Archive. (Also features Brewster Kahle showing WAIS and Whit Diffie showing PKE.)
Google or Internet Archive There's a 1995 program featuring Eric Schmidt, plus the rep for the then-white house, and the official spokespuppet for the cable industry, all talking about the "nightmare scenario" of how "only 2 or 3 major operators" would *never* dominate the industry thus the "inconceivable" need for net neutrality regulation.
Eric called it right on the mark, even in retrospect.
(That program also features Marshall Rose and me talking about ecommerce transactions and even a brief screen showing what the first facility on the net that took money from strangers looked like.
Robert Kahn warns against Net Neutrality No Kahn do
1/18/ 07
Paul Baran received a recognition award for his seminal work in inventing the packet switching concept.
LEARN HOW THE INTERNET WORKS
HUBS AND SPOKES - GLOBAL INTERNET PRIMER
IN THE BEGINNING ARPANET NCC (Network Control Center) lived at BBN. Real people with a real phone number to call for network-related problems.WATCH Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing
INTERNET SOCIETY
a professional membership society with more than 100 organization and over 20,000 individual members in over 180 countries. It provides leadership in addressing issues that confront the future of the Internet, and is the organization home for the groups responsible for Internet infrastructure standards, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). Board of Trustees
1775 Wiehle Ave., Suite 102,
Reston, VA, USA 20190-5108
Tel: +1 703 326 9880 Fax: +1 703 326 9881
Internet Protocal Journal subscription information and the advisory board
The Center for Civic Networking
Miles R. Fidelman Director of Municipal Telecommunications Strategies Program.
Interview with Susan Estrada - Starting Up the Internet
An original developer of the Internet, Susan Estrada founded CERFnet,
an Internet service provider, in 1988. During her 5-year tenure as the
CERFnet executive director, she was instrumental in CERFnet's user
growth from 25 university members to hundreds of corporate members and
thousands of individual users including an annual profit. In 1993,
Susan wrote Connecting to the Internet, An O'Reilly Buyer's Guide. Also in 1993, Susan founded Aldea Communications, Inc. which focuses on advising companies and universities on strategic telecommunications strategies. Its client list includes the University of California, Hughes, AT&T InterNIC, Network Solutions, Cisco Systems, AT&T Jens, Pacific Bell, and Bell South. Susan is an elected Trustee of the Internet Society, a founder of the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX), a former area director for the Internet Engineering Software Group (IESG) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). She currently is an appointed member of Pacific Telesis's Telecommunications Consumer Advisory Panel and the U.S. Federal Networking Council's Advisory Committee (FNCAC). -- Interview by Nic Paget-Clarke.
Meet the INTERNET / SOFTWARE PIONEERS Cap'n Crunch," part of an aging community of high-tech wunderkinds who developed one of the first word-processing programs.
SEE SECURITY
Zen and the Art of the Internet - A Beginner's Guide to the Internet, First Edition, January 1992
Nov. 3 1992 On the day that Bill Clinton is first elected U.S. president, there are 50 pages on the World Wide Web, which is run by all of 26 reasonably reliable servers, NCSA's having just been added.
Find the origins of Computer words like cyberspace, surf the net, bug, and hypertext come from. See a pocket-sized" timeline of events.
JOIN ARPA NOW AND BECOME PART OF
THE NON COMMERCIAL INTERNET
1993 K12 SCHOOLS GO ONLINE
EDUCATIONAL CYBERPLAYGROUND SCHOOL DIRECTORY ©1993
School Directory Is History - THE FIRST ARCHIVE OF K12 SCHOOL SITES
Look up Arbor Heights Elementary in Seattle, Washington. One of the first 9 or 10 elementary schools in the US with a web site. Until the summer of 1995, all pages were all written and maintained on a 386-33, 4mb RAM, 110mb HD computer using a 14,400 bps modem for file uploads to the server. The browsers used to check this page were NCSA Mosaic, Cello, and Lynx - Netscape and Internet Explorer weren't around yet.THE COMMERCIAL INTERNET
When the Net became commercial Cash became more important than cooperation. Unrestricted information flow soon stopped. The culture of the Net was the culture of science, like science, information was shared; the technology was more important than the credentials of who invented it; rewards came mostly through the recognition of your peers and money was the last thing on anyone's mind.
Richard Stallman was talking up his "copyleft" idea, which he called "a mirror image" of copyright. Stallman points out how Net culture has strayed far from its early days of open software to closed, proprietary systems like Microsoft Windows and suggests the Linux operating system as a free alternative.
Daily Internet and demographics Dump A collection of Web sites that track statistical data about the Internet. Internet Traffic statistics include reports on the current speed of the Internet. Specialty Internet Statistics contains links to data-based surveys of servers, domains and search engines on the Internet. Statistics Portals link to other extensive lists of Internet statistics and Market Research connects to e-commerce research firms which make some of their data publicly available.
THE EARLY DAYS OF THE COMMERCIAL INTERENT WHAT DID THEY LOOK LIKE?
Read the December 1993 article John Markoff wrote about the Web and Mosaic in "The New York Times" (US) business section; "The Guardian" (UK) publishes a page on the Web; "The Economist" (UK) analyses both the Internet and the Web.
Feb. 4 1994 "Newsday" (US), a Long Island, NY, newspaper, publishes this sentence: "Following the lead of their sister in the motion-picture business, "content providers" like Paramount Publishing are aggressively seeking to buy up electronic rights and submarkets." Guy Jackson, Editor of "The Cambridge International Dictionary of English," finds this the earliest U.S. citation for "content provider" in the Cambridge International corpus, noting "the use of quotation marks, which indicates that the term was not yet widely known."
March 1994 Marc Andreessen and colleagues leave NCSA to form "Mosaic Communications Corp" (now Netscape).
World Wide Web Consortium http://www.w3.org/
Founded in 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been primarily concerned with developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web. To do so, they draw on a set of international professionals and experts throughout the field of computer science and
related fields. The W3C is led by Tim Berners-Lee, who directs the project and who was also responsible for inventing the World Wide Web. Carbon-dating the Internet
Mar. 1 1995 "The Daily Telegraph" (UK) quotes a Mr. Connell that "People want better control over their lives, they want to see things when it's convenient for them, and we will give time and attention to linking up with existing content providers." Guy Jackson finds this the earliest British citation for "content provider" in the Cambridge International corpus.
August 9, 1995 -- Netscape IPO'd, and ushered
in the Dot Com Boom that has brought us to where we are today.
The Ulitmate Band List 1996
Summer of 1994 at Caltech U., UBL, originally known as the Web Wide World of Music, or WWWOM
National Center for Supercomputer Applications aka NCSA 1997
The Beginning of the Erate
Schools, libraries order more than $2 billion in Internet hookups Copyright 1998 Nando.net
WASHINGTON Schools and libraries have requested $2.02 billion in the discounted hookups to the Internet that are becoming available under a new government program.
WHO IS ONLINE CURRENTLY - STATISTICS FROM 2002
A nation online - How Americans are expanding their use of the internet.
The Commercial Internet Exchange and the Board Members
2005 INTERNET STATSGoogle has the largest share of U.S. Web searches with 46 percent, according to November 2005 figures from Nielsen//NetRatings. Yahoo is second with 23 percent, and MSN third with 11 percent. [Please note that each reduction is by just about eactly half!]
46% Google -- 23% Yahoo -- 11% MSN = 80% Top 3
From "Estimating the number of Internet users:"
Using this technique, the author computes a total of 471 million internet users. This is the average who are online in a particular day, and represents 7.2% of the world population.
Using different methods, http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/ estimates a total of 880+ million users, or 13.6% of the world population.
Top 12 Languages Used on the Interent
ABOUT NETORKS
The Cook Report has been published since 1992 by the former Director of the US Congress OffiIt monitors the increasing convergence between voice and data networks as it follows the technologies that are being used by the next generation telcos. ce of Technology Assessment of the NREN.
Tutorial: Insight Into Current Internet Traffic Workloads
"Measurement Studies of End-to-End Congestion Control in the Internet" where we are trying to track information from measurement studies about how end-to-end congestion control is actually doing in the Internet.
MAWI working group Traffic Archive
National Laboratory for Applied Network Research
Passive Measurement and Analysis
Monitor the link traffic for both average and peak rates, FIND link congestion and duration.
About PORTS What are they? Which ones are used for trojans?
The Internet Protocol Journal (IPJ) is published quarterly by Cisco Systems. The journal is not intended to promote any specific products or services, but rather is intended to serve as an informational and educational resource for engineering professionals involved in the design, development, and operation of public and private internets and intranets. The journal carries tutorial articles ("What is...?") as well as implementation / operation articles ("How to..."). It provides readers with technology and standardization updates for all levels of the protocol stack and serves as a forum for discussion of all aspects of internetworking.
HOW WE THINK ABOUT THE INTERNET TODAY
It's Silicon Valley vs. Telcos in Battle for Wireless Spectrum
If you want to carry a television signal over a long distance then use that darn Internet. The problem is that we have layers upon layers of simplifying assumptions and we pile them on instead of rethinking. This is a key point in Robert Laughlin's "A Different Universe".
We tend to solve problems as if they exist in isolation. We do need to decompose problems in order to deal with them but there isn't a unique decomposition and we have to be open to rethinking the decomposition.
In the early 1900's the first decomposition was to assume that "communications" is a unit. We then decomposed that into voice and video. We also had wired vs wireless. The accidental properties of wires led us to use them for one-to-one communications because they were point to point connections. Wireless signals couldn't be contained hence they were broadcast to all. It doesn't help that "radio" and "telephony" are now used to describe business rather than technologies thus making it hard to talk about the basic assumptions separate from the market assumptions.
This is why TV over wires is not treated as a point to point medium -- it was originally implemented as shared antenna system and our policies continue to make that implicit assumption.
Today this decomposition is extremely dysfunctional. We now understand the concept of bits as a common representation for information and that is a very effective point of decoupling as we've seen with the Internet.
We can then use packets to organize the bit transports.
This decoupling of the communications from the bit transport (as in TCP/UDP vs IP) is very hard for people to accept because we base our understanding on the nave assumption that we are simply relaying sound waves through electronic tubes. There is assumption that you must preserve the
relationships between the bits as in isochronous and QoS models. This was a defining assumption for analog telephony and the solution, eventually, was digital telephony and then packet telephony. We treated the answer as way to make analog telephony work better without using the new understanding to question whether we were asking the right question in light of our understanding. Digital technology freed us from the constraint of isochronicity and thus allowed us to get many orders of magnitude in improvement (by various measures). But it was an answer the put a lie
to the decomposition that defined the industry that asked the question in the first place and thus they had a stake in failing to understand the answer they got.
Once you decouple the bits from the interpretation you can view wired and wireless bits indifferently and can dispense with the complexity and expense of slicing and dicing the transports and the use of special kinds of wires and gear for each particular message.
Yet we continue to argue as if it is still 1934 and every bit is special - sort of like the $100 Japanese Honeydew Melons but far pricier.
These concepts extend far beyond "telecom" into our basic understanding of how systems work. The isochronous assumption has a parallel in the assumption that we have to solve problems as stated and that if any component fails the system fails. Thus the Y2K scare and the presumption that we must govern systems lest people do things the "wrong" way -- alas wrong often means finding that we've solved far more interesting problems -- we may have wanted a guidance system for airplanes but we got digital computers instead. We presume music comes from record companies and not musicians and thus we preserve a particular industry structure rather than allowing for musicians to be heard.
Telecom is useful case study because it's a simple problem and the price of continuing to live in 1900 is higher than we should have to bear.
Too bad this fight over slivers of spectrum is treated as if it were any more real than the rest of professional wrestling. The entertainment value doesn't make up for the collateral damage.
New Academic Ideas ~ Noel Chiappa MIT
All this neat packet networking stuff only exists now (2007) because for many years (during Baran's first RAND work ca. 1960-64, then during the ARPANet development in the late 60's-early-70's, and then the early internetwork work in the 1975-1982 time-frame) this stuff was all funded by "bureaucrats in DC".
There was *no* commercial market for any of this stuff back then, so there was no other way to make it happen. (A fact of which I am well aware, because I was one of the first people - maybe the first, actually - to make money selling IP routers commercially - and that was in 1984 or so, almost 10 years after the bureacrats starting putting money into TCP/IP.)
In fact, to add a nice topping of irony, many commercial communications people of the day (circa 1980) said much the same things about TCP/IP that they are now saying about other efforts: I distinctly recall the TCP/IP people being told to "roll up our toy academic network" (and yes, they explicitly and definitely used the work "academic") and go home.
Wendy Grossman: Carbon-dating the Internet
http://www.theinquirer.net/Default.aspx?article=18978
Friday 08 October 2004, 12:33
|THE DEMENTED three-year-old that rampages through all of Microsoft's software - My Music; MY Pictures; MY COMPUTER - seems to have been let loose on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Internet, which is around now sometime. Or isn't. It depends whose publicity department you listen to.
The year most people seem to be dating the Internet to is 1969, when the ARPAnet was first connected up. It's certainly tempting to set it then. That's the network that's generally agreed to be the most important precursor of the Internet. October 29 is the date [2]UCLA has chosen for the official celebration. That's commemorating September 2, the day the first Internet message was sent from Leonard Kleinrock's UCLA computer lab.
That of course makes that date entirely correct as far as UCLA is concerned. But is that the [3]Big Bang that created the Internet? Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyons, in their 1996 book Where Wizards Stay Up Late, document the efforts of Boston-based [4]Bolt Beranek Newman to create the IMP machines that Kleinrock's lab used. BBN was where,
in 1971, Ray Tomlinson inaugurated person-to-person network email and chose the now-ubiquitous @ symbol. But we can't take either 1969 or 1971 as the beginning of email itself, since that was first created for the [5]time-sharing systems of the 1960s.
We could go back a few years earlier, to when Paul Baran, working at Rand Corporation, and Donald Davies, working at the UK's [6]National Physical Laboratory independently came up with the idea of packet switching. That was a completely new way of looking at transmitting data across a network, and is the heart of the way the Internet as we know it operates.
Thing is, packet-switching could have remained just an idea. The telephone network, still the biggest network in the world, doesn't work that way. The TCP/IP protocols that arguably define the Internet weren't invented until 1974, by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. If you want to go, say, from the publication of their paper, you could pick May 1974, as Cerf mentions in a [7]recent column. That would make the Internet 30 years old. But obviously it would be more logical to date from when the ARPAnet moved to using TCP/IP, which was 1983. In which case - glory be! -- the Internet turned 21 years old in January. That would mean it's newly an adult, although you'd never know it from the behavior of some of the people on it. Perhaps they're still out on the now obligatory American coming-of-age pub crawl.
That year - 1983 - is a good pick for another reason. That's the year the [8]domain name system as we now know it was designed and deployed. Without that relatively user-friendly veneer email would have been slower to take off, and the commercial Web as we know it might not exist at all. The domain name system did as much or more to make the
Internet usable as graphical Web browsers did. Though 1969 can answer that by pointing out that the first-ever RFC, the Requests for Comments that define Internet standards, is dated [9]April 7, 1969. That gives UCLA the right year, but puts it six months behind schedule.
Of course, to most people the Internet means the Web and email (and sometimes email also means the Web). In which case, you could go for 1989, when [10]Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, invented it. That's straightforward enough. Except that the Web didn't really take off until graphical browsers turned up, which is not, as Netscape (now an AOL division) might like to claim, 1994, when the first version of Netscape was released, nor its precursor, [11]Mosaic, which came out in 1993. When Mosaic came out, there were already a number of browser projects competing for attention, of which the earliest were [12]Viola and Erwise, which were released within a month of each other in 1992.
There are still more dates you could consider: 1995, the year Bill Gates got net; 1979, the year Usenet was created; 1985, the year the supercomputing centers were created and linked to form NSFnet, which became an important Internet backbone; 1991, the year that acceptable use policies were changed to allow commercial traffic on the Internet;
1994, the year that the big online information services - AOL, CompuServe, Delphi - set up their Internet gateways.
In 1998, I appeared at a conference called "Technological Visions", hosted at the University of Southern California, and as part of the exercise felt required to produce some predictions. The papers eventually appeared earlier this year - ah, Internet time - in a [13]book. Six years is of course long enough to look really silly, but one prediction seems clearly to have come true. I said that it would take constant vigilance to ensure that history did not record that Bill Gates invented the Internet. I think the general reaction was, "Nah, nah, come on, these people are still alive, and this stuff is all written down."
Yes. By PR departments. Who take the view that the Internet started when their company made its memorable contribution. In which case, I say to hell with it, the Internet is 13 years and four months old, because I got online in June 1991. So there.
References
1. mailto:netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk
2. http://www.internetanniversary.com/
3. http://www.internethistory.info/
4. http://www.bbn.com/
5. http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Email
6. http://www.npl.co.uk/
7. http://global.mci.com/us/enterprise/insight/cerfs_up/
8. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1591.html
9. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1591.html
10. http://www.w3c.org/
11. http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/NCSAMosaicHome.html
12. http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~wei/viola/violaHome.html
13. http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1686_reg.html
14. http://www.pelicancrossing.net
15. http://www.pelicancrossing.net/nwcols.htm
16. http://www.livejournal.com/~wendyg
