Transcript An Outline History of the Internet

LIS 386.13
Information Technologies
and the
Information Professions
An Outline History of the Internet
R. E. Wyllys
Copyright © 2002 by R. E. Wyllys
Last revised 2005 May 13
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Lesson Objectives
• You will
– Learn how the Internet grew from
experiments on how to connect computers
into a world-wide network of networks—an
internetwork of networks—that supports
the World-Wide Web but also provides for
much other communication
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The Years before 1970
• 1940s - 1960s Computers grew rapidly in the
power of individual computers and in the
number of computers in use in the world.
• But before 1960 few efforts were made to
enable computers to talk directly to each
other.
– Intermittent, switchable communications between
computers, extremely common nowadays, were
essentially non-existent.
– Certain computers were designed to be in
communication with each other and had full-time,
hard-wired connections. Special programming
enabled such computers to communicate with
each other.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The Years before 1970
• 1940s - 1960s Almost all the full-time, hardwired
computer connections were those of military networks—
notably, the SAGE Air Defense network—that used
dedicated long-distance cabling to interconnect their
computers and other equipment such as radar stations.
• In general, before 1960 if you wanted to use results from
one computer in another computer, you would direct the
first computer to produce a deck of punched cards (or a
magnetic or punched-paper tape) containing the
information to be used in the second computer. You would
then carry the deck of cards (or the tape) to the reading
device of the second computer and turn it on.
– Such a means of computer "interconnection" is sometimes called
a "sneaker network."
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The Years before 1970
• Early 1960s The U.S. Department of Defense
(DoD), by now an experienced user of
computers, had become increasingly
concerned with the potential damage that
could be caused to its long-distance cable
networks by attacks
• Not only could conventional military attacks
damage communications lines, but also
nuclear explosions were known to produce
extremely strong electromagnetic waves that
could destroy electronic equipment over long
distances
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The Years before 1970
• 1962 DoD's Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA), formed in 1957 following
Sputnik, created its Computer Research
Division (CRD) and appointed as its head J.
C. R. Licklider (1915-1990), a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
• CRD tackled a variety of problems, including
that of inter-computer communications.
• Shortly before being appointed to head CRD,
Licklider had published a series of memos
that expounded his "Galactic Network," the
then theoretical idea of a world-wide network
of computers.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The Years before 1970
• 1962 Licklider’s "Galactic Network“ (described in,
inter alia, his memos “Man-Computer Symbiosis”
and “The Computer as a Communication Device”
[the latter co-authored with Robert W. Taylor])
embodied such principles as:
– Each network should be able to work on its own,
developing its own applications as it wished, so long as
it met the specifications for communicating with other
networks.
– Each network would have a large 'gateway' computer
through which it would link to other networks. Each
gateway would have close connections to several other
gateways.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The Years before 1970
• Licklider's principles for a Galactic Network,
continued
– A gateway's software would retain no information about the
traffic it handled, either from or into its network. Licklider
saw this as important not only for speed but also to prevent
possible outside censorship and control.
– Messages between networks would be routed via the
fastest available route through the various gateways. If one
route was blocked or slow, messages would be rerouted
through other parts of the interconnections among networks
till the messages finally reached their destinations.
– The gateways would always be open, and they would route
all messages on an equal basis.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The Years before 1970
• 1962 Leonard Kleinrock, a CRD staff member,
Paul Baran, a scientist at the RAND Corporation
(a non-profit "think-tank" in Santa Monica, CA),
and Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury, of
the National Physical Laboratory in the U.K.,
conceived the idea of communicating information
by
– Breaking a message up into many small packages
– Sending the small packages individually over many
possible communication paths to a desired destination,
and
– At the destination, reassembling them to form the
original message.
• This was the birth of the concept of "packet"
communication and the idea of a packet network.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The Years before 1970
• 1962-1968 ARPA conducted and
sponsored research into the many
theoretical and practical details of just how
packet networks could be set up and
made to work. The first generation of
packet network hardware and software
was designed. Military communications
networks were set up using packet
communications.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The Years before 1970
• 1967 A plan for an ARPA-sponsored civilian
packet network, ARPANET, was published.
• The plan's publication led to comments from
groups at MIT, RAND, and the National Physical
Laboratory in the U.K., all of which had been
working independently in related areas of
research on how to set up networks of
computers over long distances, i.e., wide-area
networks (WANs).
• A synthesis of these ideas contributed to
improvements in the proposed ARPANET.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The Years before 1970
• 1969 The first stage of ARPANET was established,
connecting computer centers at Stanford Research
Institute (SRI), the University of California, Los
Angeles (UCLA), the University of California, Santa
Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah.
• Initial experiments in October 1969 showed that
packet communications could enable students at
Stanford and UCLA to log in successfully on
computers at the other campus, run programs on
those computers, and receive results from them.
– In today's world it is hard to realize what a huge and
difficult step forward these experiments represented
– Many people now call these experiments the "birth of the
Internet."
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The 1970s
• 1970-1979 ARPANET was an instant
success, quickly growing to include many
universities and Federal research centers
(e.g., Atomic Energy Commission
laboratories) around the U.S. and abroad. By
1979 ARPANET connected nearly 200 host
sites, each of which in turn served many
computers via local-area networks (LANs).
• 1971 The UT-Austin Computing Center (now
ITS) became a host site of ARPANET.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The 1970s
• 1970-1971 ARPANET had been planned as a
tool for enabling people to log in to and
uutilize geographically remote computer
resources. It certainly served this purpose;
but to many people's surprise, email, which
had been introduced as a minor aid to help
with planning and handling remote-computer
use, turned out to be the most used
application.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The 1970s
• 1972 At the First International Conference on
Computers and Communication, held in Washington,
DC, ARPANET was demonstrated, bringing it for the
first time to the attention of the general public.
• 1972 To guide the development of ARPANET and of
the other large networks that could now be foreseen,
the InterNetworking Working Group (INWG) was
established to set standards. The INWG's chair,
Vinton Cerf, later became known as the "Father of
the Internet."
• 1972 The Ethernet protocol—the application of
packet communications to local area networks
(LANs)—was developed by Robert Metcalfe at the
Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox (Xerox PARC).
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The 1970s
• 1974 Researchers at ARPA and Stanford jointly developed
the first version of the Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), to be used in
implementing packet communications over the collection
of networks that were now beginning to be interconnected
with each other.
• TCP/IP was another major step in the development of
what we now know as the Internet.
• 1979 Students at Duke University and the University of
North Carolina established the first USENET newsgroups.
(By 2000 the number of newsgroups had increased to
over 40,000.)
• 1979 The first Multi-User Domain (MUD) was created by
players of the computer game, Dungeon.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The 1980s
• 1981 The BITNET (Because It's Time Network) was
established to connect academic computing centers.
Listserv software was developed for BITNET.
• 1985 The first T1 lines went into service on the
Internet at the speed of 1.544Mbps.
• 1986 The National Science Foundation established
NSFNET to be the backbone of the Internet.
• 1986 Students at Case Western Reserve University
and other residents of Cleveland developed the first
Freenet, a community-based network for providing
access to the Internet.
• 1988 One of the first major computer-worm attacks
disrupted 60,000 Internet-linked computers.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The 1990s
• 1990 Tim Berners-Lee developed his version of hypertext
at CERN (then called the "Centre Européenne pour la
Recherche Nucléaire"), to facilitate communications
among researchers there.
• 1990 The Internet had proven so successful that DoD
ended ARPANET. (DoD had already shifted most of its
own communications to MILNET, a separate and highly
secure network that nevertheless was connected with the
Internet.)
• 1991 The University of Minnesota released a text-based
tool, Gopher, for locating information on the Internet.
• 1991 Construction began on a new backbone for the
Internet usingT3 lines, which operate at 44.736Mbps.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The 1990s
• 1991 The National Science Foundation lifted its previously
existing ban on commercial activity on NSFNET, which had
become the backbone of the Internet. Commercial use surged.
• 1991 The High Performance Computing Act (HPCA) was signed
by President George H. W. Bush.
– The HPCA included provision for the National Research and Education Network
(NREN), to bring the benefits of the Internet to schools and libraries as well as to
laboratories, universities, and businesses.
– The NREN began with five test networks, running at gigabit-per-second rates,
which showed the feasibility of sending such materials as CAT scans and realtime video over the Internet.
– The HPCA was spearheaded through Congress by Senator Albert Gore, Jr., with
the slogan of a "national superhighway for information." Though not an "inventor
of the Internet" (a claim that, in fact, he never made), Gore deserves
considerable credit for the HPCA/NREN.
• In 2005, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences honored Gore with a
"Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of the pivotal role he [had] played in
the development of the Internet over the past three decades." Vinton Cerf presented
the award to Gore.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The 1990s
• 1993 In April, Marc Andreessen and other students at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) offered
the first release for general public use of an Internet
browser, Mosaic. The explosively rapid and widespread
adoption of Mosaic gave rise to the World-Wide Web.
• 1993 The U.S. Government set up the InterNIC
Corporation to regulate the Domain Name System, the
system by which Internet addresses are assigned and
registered.
• 1993 On June 7, a computer named "Bongo" began
running UT-Austin's first official Web server.
• 1994 Andreessen and some of his colleagues left UIUC to
help start Netscape, making Andreessen a billionaire
almost overnight.
• 1994 The Asynchronous Transmission Mode backbone of
the Internet was established, at a speed of 145Mbps.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The 1990s
• 1995 The very high speed Backbone Network Service
(vBNS) commenced service, linking supercomputer
centers.
• 1996 The National Science Foundation initiated the Next
Generation Internet (NGI), aimed at developing a faster
and higher-capacity Internet to assist in fields as diverse
as health care, education, and scientific research. NGI is
also known as Internet2.
• 1998 The first national optical internet, CA*net 3, was
established in Canada.
• 1999 Conflicts in Serbia and Kosovo extended to the
Internet arena and became the first large-scale
"CyberWar", in which combatants attacked each other's
computers.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The 2000s
• 2000 The estimated size of the World-Wide Web reached
1 billion pages.
• 2000 Registration of domain names in Chinese, Japanese,
and Korean began on an experimental basis.
• 2000 The success of Napster, Gnutella, Freenet, and other
databases of audio and video images, distributed widely
and privately, became serious challenges to copyright
laws.
– Furthermore, Erik Nilsson, a well known student of the Internet,
has observed in an essay, “Napster: Popular Program Raises
Devilish Issues,” that Napster and similar programs create a de
facto separate domain-name space independent of the formal
structure of the Internet.
• 2000+ Just watch and see what new developments occur!
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
The Internet Is Bringing the World
Closer Together than Ever Before
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
For Further Information
• The Internet Society maintains an excellent
historical summary, entitled A Brief History of
the Internet.
• This society also provides a Webpage,
entitled "All About the Internet," which
displays links to other histories of the Internet
and to news about it.
• Hobbes' Internet Timeline is a useful
chronology of the Internet, including
quantitative data on its growth.
• A helpful source of information on Ethernet is
Charles Spurgeon's Ethernet Web Site.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions