|
 The public internet
came along after four decades of television dominance
and decades of private internet use and development. It
came along after hundreds of years of inventive
thinking and groundbreaking theorizing, and it built on
every bit of human intelligence that had come before.
The key innovators were dozens of scientists whose work
covers decades; the entrepreneurs were thousands of
political leaders, policy wonks, technology
administrators, government and commercial contractors,
and even grassroots organizers
In the early 1960s, J.C.R.
Licklider (pictured above), Leonard Kleinrock, Donald
Davies, Paul Baran, Lawrence Roberts and other research
scientists came up with the ideas that allowed them to
individually dream of and eventually come together to
create a globally interconnected set of computers
through which everyone could quickly and easily access
data and programs from any site.
 The first group of
networked computers communicated with each other in
1969, and ARPANET, or the Advanced Projects Research
Agency Network became the start of the internet. Four
U.S. universities were connected and became a research
system by which computer scientists began solving
problems and building the potential for worldwide,
online connectivity. ARPANET had its first public
demonstration in 1972, and in this same year the first
e-mail program was written by Ray Tomlinson. By 1973, a
majority of the internet use was for e-mail
discussion.
Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn came up
with a streamlined networking standard - internet
Protocol or IP - in the late 1970s. At the time, there
were still only 188 host computers on the network, but
IP brought new growth in the next few years. In 1984, a
domain-name service was created, allowing the
organization and classification of the world's
online sites. This address system is still in use
today; for example, .com, .org, .edu. More have since
been added.
 In 1991, the World
Wide Web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee (pictured at
left) as a way for people to share information. The
hyper-text format available through his Web made the
internet much easier to use because all documents could
be seen easily on-screen without downloading. The first
"browser" software - Mosaic - was introduced
by Marc Andreessen in 1993, and it enabled more fluid
use of images and graphics online and opened up a new
world for internet users.
In 1996, there were approximately
45 million people using the Internet. By 1999, the
number of worldwide Internet users reached 150 million,
and more than half of them were from the United States.
In 2000, there were 407 million users worldwide. By
2004, there were between 600 and 800 million users
(counting has become more and more inexact as the
network has grown, and estimates vary).
The internet is a work in
progress. While IP version 6 is now ready for
implementation, some scientists - led by internet
pioneer David Clark and others - are working toward a
complete reinvention of the worldwide internet,
starting from scratch. The project is expected to
develop over the next decade.
After Berners-Lee brought his
"World-Wide Web" to life in 1990, and
Andreessen launched Mosaic, the revolutionary browser,
in 1993, the Internet had an estimated 16 million users
by 1995, and venture capitalists were busy full-time,
funding hundreds of new Internet-related business
concerns. Individuals all over the world are sharing
their interests, hopes and dreams online, and the
number of internet users is nearing a billion.
 Thanks to the work
of thousands of collaborators over the final four
decades of the 20th century, today's Internet is a
continually expanding worldwide network of computer
networks for the transport of myriad types of data. In
addition to the names above, there were direct
contributions from Ivan Sutherland, Robert Taylor, Alex
McKenzie, Frank Heart, Jon Postel, Eric Bina, Robert
Cailliau, Tom Jennings, Mark Horton, Bill Joy, Douglas
Engelbart, Bill Atkinson, Ted Nelson, Linus Torvalds,
Richard Stallman and so many others - some of them
anonymous hackers or users - it is impossible to
include them all.
Wireless satellite and broadband
communications networks are helping people in even the
most remote locations find ways to connect. Overcoming
the initial concerns that commercialization would limit
creativity or freedom of speech, the Internet has
become a crazy-quilt mix of commercial sites,
government information, and incredibly interesting
pages built by individuals who want to share their
insights.
The number of people making
Internet pages continues to grow. As of mid-2004, more
than 63 million domain names had been registered,
approximately one for every 100 people living in the
world.
Mondo 2000 editor R.U. Sirius
(real name, Ken Goffman), as quoted in a 1992 article
in the Bergen (N.J.) Record headlined "Unfolding
the Future":
"Who's going to
control all this technology? The corporations, of
course. And will that mean your brain implant is going
to come complete with a corporate logo, and 20 percent
of the time you're going to be hearing
commercials?"
Peter Huber, a senior fellow at
the Manhattan Institute, quoted in a 1992 Forbes
article titled "An Ultimate Zip Code":
"Combine GPS with a
simple transmitter and computer ... If you want to
track migratory birds, prisoners on parole or –
what amounts to much the same thing – a teenage
daughter in possession of your car keys, you are going
to be a customer sooner or later."
David Porush, a professor at the
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in a 1992 speech for
the Library and Information Technology
Association:
"If cyberspace is
utopian it is because it opens the possibility of using
the deterministic platform for unpredictable ends ...
We might even grow a system large and complex and
unstable enough to leap across that last possible
bifurcation - autopoetically - into that strangest of
all possible attractors, the godmind."
Author and Wired magazine
columnist Bruce Sterling, in a 1993 Wired article
headlined "War is Virtual Hell":
"The whole massive,
lethal superpower infrastructure comes unfolding out of
21st-century cyberspace like some impossible fluid
origami trick. The Reserve guys from the bowling
leagues suddenly reveal themselves to be digitally
assisted Top Gun veterans from a hundred weekend
cyberspace campaigns. And they go to some godforsaken
place that doesn't possess Virtual Reality As A
Strategic Asset, and they bracket that army in their
rangefinder screens, and then they cut it off, and then
they kill it. Blood and burning flesh splashes the far
side of the glass. But it can't get through the
screen."
Futurist Jim Dator, in a speech
to the WFSF World Conference in 1993:
"As the electronic
revolution merges with the biological evolution, we
will have - if we don't have it already -
artificial intelligence, and artificial life, and will
be struggling even more than now with issues such as
the legal rights of robots, and whether you should
allow your son to marry one, and who has custody of the
offspring of such a union."
Futurist Alvin Toffler, in a 1993
Wired article titled "Shock Wave (Anti)
Warrior":
"If we are now in the
process of transforming the way we create wealth, from
the industrial to the informational … the more
knowledge-intensive military action becomes, the more
nonlinear it becomes; the more a small input someplace
can neutralize an enormous investment. And having the
right bit or byte of information at the right place at
the right time, in India or in Turkistan or in God
knows where, could neutralize an enormous amount of
military power somewhere else … Think in terms
of families. Think in terms of narco-traffickers. And
think in terms of the very, very smart hacker sitting
in Tehran."
John Perry Barlow, internet
activist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, in a 1994 essay for Wired magazine titled
"The Economy of Ideas":
"We're going to have
to look at information as though we'd never seen
the stuff before ... The economy of the future will be
based on relationship rather than possession. It will
be continuous rather than sequential. And finally, in
the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual
rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the
stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business
will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than
nouns."
Tom Maddox, in a 1994 article for
Wilson Quarterly titled "The Cultural Consequences
of the Information Superhighway":
"The sharp-edged
technology of the NII can cut a number of ways: It can
enlarge the domain of the commodifiers and controllers;
it can serve the resistance to these forces; it can
saturate us all, controlled and controllers alike, in a
virtual alternative to the real world. Meanwhile, most
of humanity will live and die deprived of the wonders
of the NII, or indeed the joys of adequate nutrition,
medical care, and housing. We would do well to regulate
our enthusiasms accordingly - that is, to remember
where love and mercy have their natural homes, in that
same material world. Otherwise we will have built yet
another pharaonic monument to wealth, avarice, and
indifference. We will have proved the technophobes
right. More to the point, we will have collaborated to
neglect the suffering of the damned of the earth
– our other selves – in order to entertain
ourselves."
Nicholas Negroponte, in a 1995
column for Wired magazine titled "Wearable
Computing":
"How better to receive
audio communications than through an earring, or to
send spoken messages than through your lapel? Jewelry
that is blind, deaf, and dumb just isn't earning
its keep. Let's give cuff links a job that
justifies their name ... And a shoe bottom makes much
more sense than a laptop - to boot up, you put on your
boots. When you come home, before you take off your
coat, your shoes can talk to the carpet in preparation
for delivery of the day's personalized news to your
glasses."
Greg Blonder, in a 1995 essay for
Wired magazine titled "Faded Genes":
"In 2088, our branch on
the tree of life will come crashing down, ending a very
modest (if critically acclaimed) run on planet earth.
The culprit? Not global warming. Not atomic war. Not
flesh-eating bacteria. Not even too much television.
The culprit is the integrated circuit ... By 2090, the
computer will be twice as smart and twice as insightful
as any human being. It will never lose a game of chess,
never forget a face, never forget the lessons of
history. By 2100, the gap will grow to the point at
which homo sapiens, relatively speaking, might make a
good pet. Then again, the computers of 2088 might not
give us a second thought."
Hans Moravec, as quoted in a 1995
article in Wired titled
"Superhumanism":
"The robots will
re-create us any number of times, whereas the original
version of our world exists, at most, only once.
Therefore, statistically speaking, it's much more
likely we're living in a vast simulation than in
the original version. To me, the whole concept of
reality is rather absurd. But while you're inside
the scenario, you can't help but play by the rules.
So we might as well pretend this is real - even though
the chance things are as they seem is essentially
negligible."
View history of other
information technologies:
<Telegraph> <Radio>
<Telephone> <Television> <Internet>
|
