Transcript considering the history of the internet

CONSIDERING THE
HISTORY OF THE
INTERNET
Philip Doty
LIS 386.13
November 8, 2000
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
NOT CANONICAL, BUT . . .
• Abbate (1999) -- scholarly, greater emphasis on
social meaning of IT, a bit more user oriented
• Hafner & Lyon (1996) -- more journalistic,
readable, informal
• Edwards (1996) -- military origins of virtually
all major computing efforts and what that
means; ballistics, cryptography, command and
control, $B in procurement as well as R&D
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
IMPORTANT NAMES
• Paul Baran at RAND, especially for concept of
packet switching, all-digital net, and
distributed computing
• Donald Davies at National Physics Laboratory
(UK), named “packets” and helped develop
first operational packet-switched (lab) net
• J.C.R. Licklider at various places, pioneered
concept of computers as communication
devices not just computational tools
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
MORE NAMES
• Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, TCP/IP
• Lawrence Roberts, manager at ARPA
• Tim Berners-Lee, CERN in Switzerland,
“invented” the Web (1990)
• Mark Andreesen and others, University of
Illinois at U-C, National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Mosaic
-- first (graphical Web) browser (1993)
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
ARPANET
ARPANET (1969-1990)
• Packet switching as opposed to circuit
switching; no dedicated part of the network;
messages in component parts; all digital
• Unreliable network -- (1) damaged and (2)
unacknowledged communications
• Sharing data sets, expertise, computational
resources, software/code
• First four sites: UC-SB, UCLA, U of Utah,
Stanford Research Institute
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
ARPANET (Cont’d)
• Aimed to join widely disparate hardware and
software
• To make such tools more useful beyond
dedicated sites and dedicated use(s)
• Hosts are peers, not the (then usual)
relationship of one computer master and many
peripheral slaves
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
ARPANET (Cont’d)
Emphasized the military values of:
• Survivability
• Flexibility
• High performance, error detection and control
Not the “general user” values of:
• Low cost
• Simplicity
• User appeal
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
ARPANET (Cont’d)
Thus, host (local) machines and systems had to
increase user support through, e.g., online
documentation, phone tech support, systemwide announcements.
Initially, ALL net users had or had access to
knowledge about sophisticated programming
techniques, tool design, and hardware and
software debugging
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
ARPANET (Cont’d)
Reliance on informal communication, personal
acquaintance, disciplinary training, and similar
social bonds
RFCs as exemplars: in “absence of technical
certainty or recognized authority” (Abbate,
1999, p. 74).
Email as the killer app, at first attached to ftp;
rlogin first app
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
NSF: SUPERCOMPUTING
NSF Supercomputer Centers/National Center for
Atmospheric Research (1984), 5 + 1
•
•
•
•
•
•
Pittsburgh
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
San Diego
Cornell University
Princeton (New Jersey)
NCAR at Boulder (Colorado)
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
NSF: NSFNET
NSFNET (1985); given momentum by CSNET
• To connect NSF supercomputer centers and
NCAR to ARPANET sites
• Three levels: (1) national backbone, (2)
regional and disciplinary/supercomputer nets,
and (3) campus nets (academic and
commercial)
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
NSF: NSFNET (Cont’d)
• Intercontinental backbone
made the net available to almost all interested
U.S. universities
facilitated transition of the net to civilian, then
commercial, control
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
NATIONAL NETWORKS:
INTERNET
Internet (c. 1983)
• TCP/IP-compliant network of networks
• Sharing common name and address spaces;
seven top-level domain names: com, edu, gov,
int, mil, net, and org; more considered
• A logical, social construct
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
NATIONAL NETS:
INTERNET (Cont’d)
1991 NSF lifted its Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)
forbidding commercial traffic on NSFNET
1992 Internet Society (ISOC) given formal
oversight of the Internet Activities Board
(IAB) and the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IE TF)
1995 NSF and rest of the Federal government no
longer infrastructure provider for the
“ordinary” Internet
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
NATIONAL NETS:
INTERNET (Cont’d)
Internet ≠ Web
There are many protocols supported by the
Internet beyond http.
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
NATIONAL NETS: OTHERS
• BITNET (c. 1981)
– Academic institutions
– Running IBM machines, using proprietary protocols
and software
• CSNET and other interdisciplinary nets
• International nets, both within and across
national borders
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
POLICY EVOLUTION
• Department of Commerce as dominant policy
actor, especially in the Information
Infrastructure Task Force/National
Telecommunications and Information
Administration
• Privatization, commercialization, and
competition as networking watchwords -Telecommunications Act of 1996 (PL 104-104)
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
POLICY EVOLUTION
(Cont’d)
• NSF and Federal government out of
networking infrastructure business except for
supercomputing and support of research (1995)
• Internet 2/vBNS/Next Generation Internet
(NGI)
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
U.S. NETWORKING
INITIATIVES
• From computer science experiment
(IAB/IETF/ISOC) to social experiment
• From science network to education network to
communication and entertainment network
• From telecommunications engineering research
project to information utility
• From government-aggregated non-profit
market to wider marketplace
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
POLITICAL RATIONALE
FOR NETWORKING R&D
• Provide robust communication for national
defense (recall interstate highway system)
• Facilitate competitiveness across the economy
using computing, telecommunications, and
their convergence
• Help U.S.-based computing, telecomm,
cryptographic, and other businesses
• Help maintain U.S. hegemony in defense and
surveillance technologies.
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
SELECTED SOURCES
Abbate, Janet. (1999). Inventing the Internet.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web: The original design
and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web by its
inventor. San Francisco: Harper.
Cerf, Vinton G., & Kahn, Robert E. (1974). A protocol
for packet network intercommunications. IEEE
Transactions on Communications COM-22, 637-648.
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
SOURCES (Cont’d)
Charles Babbage Institute. Center for the History of
Information Processing. University of Minnesota.
(2000). http://www.cbi.umn.edu/
Computer Museum History Center. Mountain View, CA.
(2000). http://www.computerhistory.org
Edwards, Paul N. (1996). The closed world: Computers
and the politics of discourse in Cold War America.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
SOURCES (Cont’d)
Hafner, Katie, & Lyon, Matthew. (1994). Where wizards
stay up late: The origins of the Internet. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Internet Activities Board (IAB). (2000).
http://www.iab.org/
Internet Society (ISOC). (2000). http://info.isoc.org/ [see
especially History of the Internet
http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/]
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
SOURCES (Cont’d)
Licklider, J.C.R. (1960). Man-computer symbiosis. IRE
Transactions on Human Factors in electronics, 1(1), 411.
_____, & Vezza, Albert. (1978). Applications of
information networks. Proceedings of the IEEE, 66,
1330-1345. [also appears in Irene Greif (Ed.),
Computer-supported cooperative work (pp. 143-183).
San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
SOURCES (Cont’d)
Norberg, Arthur, & O’Neill, Judy. (1996). Transforming
computer technology: Information processing for the
Pentagon, 1962-1986. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins.
Quarterman, John S. (1990). The matrix: Computer
networks and conferencing systems worldwide. s.l.:
Digital Press.
Internet “Requests for Comments” [RFC’s] Editor. (2000).
http://www.isi.edu/rfc-editor/rfc-sources.html
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000
SOURCES (Cont’d)
Roberts, Lawrence G. (1967). Message switching network
proposal. Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996). Computer networks (3rd
ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Copyright by Philip Doty, November
2000