resident Dwight D. Eisenhower initiated
the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) after the
Soviet launch of Sputnik I in 1957. Eisenhower believed
in the great value of science, and formed ARPA in 1958
in a quest for "the scientific improvement"
of U.S. defense. This project employed, at one time or
another, some of the finest engineers and scientists of
the late 20th century. The early emphasis was on
missile-defense systems and the detection of nuclear
bomb tests. It wasn't until 1962, when J.C.R.
Licklider arrived on the management team, that ARPA
began investigating the idea of networked
computers. In the early 1960s, Licklider,
Leonard Kleinrock, 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.
Licklider jokingly called it an "Intergalactic
Computer Network," but he and his team began to
seriously build the ideas and the technology that
turned out to be the Internet. By 1964, some
researchers had begun using their enormous mainframe
computers to occasionally trade information by an
early, informal form of e-mail - but the purpose
wasn't to formulate a research network; they were
just trying to get their work done efficiently. In the
early 1960s, Baran and British scientist Donald Davies
both proposed the idea of sending blocks of data -
packets - through a digital network. Roberts and many
others got down to the serious business of taking this
concept, combining it with other researchers'
proposals and building a real network in 1967, 1968 and
1969. - Critical work on the first real
network was being completed, and information had to be
shared between far-flung research groups. Steve
Crocker, a young computer scientist, wrote a long memo
- the first of what came to be called a Request for
Comments (RFCs). These are, to this day, the accepted
way in which computer networking engineers and
scientists suggest, review and adopt new technical
standards. Since the day Crocker wrote the first
Request for Comments, thousands more have followed.
RFCs are a rich source of history about the development
of the internet. The researchers also established a
name for themselves at this time - the Network Working
Group. The democratic way in which decisions were made
by these pioneers became a basis for the free-speech,
free-exchange format of the internet. ARPANET went
online in an extremely basic format in late 1969,
connecting four major universities: the University of
California at Los Angeles, SRI at Stanford University,
the University of California at Santa Barbara and the
University of Utah. This rough system gave computer
scientists and engineers the opportunity to begin
refining ideas for a more efficient, reliable
communications network. They had a lot of work to do in
the years to come to get the "bugs" out,
brainstorming, trying and failing, exchanging RFCs and
improving the system. - In 1970, ARPANET machines five, six,
seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 and 12 were operating at
locations around the country, including those at a
Network Control Center at the technology corporation
Bolt Beranek & Newman, at Harvard, the RAND
Corporation and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. File-Transfer Protocol (FTP) - the method
for allowing computers to exchange files, was posted as
RFC 354 in July 1972. The ARPANET went on public
display for the first time at the International
Conference on Computer Communication in October 1972.
The first electronic mail delivery engaging two
machines was accomplished in 1972 by Ray Tomlinson -
also the originator of the use of the @ to indicate an
e-mail address. By 1973, three-quarters of all traffic
on the network was e-mail - still mostly researchers
sharing information. An e-mail list group of the time
named MsgGroup is believed to have been the first
"virtual community." The scientists had been
using Network Control Protocol (NCP) to transfer data
from one computer to another running on the same
network. Vinton Cerf of UCLA and Stanford and Robert
Kahn from ARPA came up with the ideas for Transmission
Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) over a
span during the mid- to late-1970s. The superior TCP/IP
allowed diverse computers networks to interconnect and
communicate with one another no matter what network
they were on at the time of use. TCP/IP made the
internet faster and more efficient; it was thus
possible to bring more computers online at a lower
price. This fueled the growth of the internet. - In 1976, Robert Metcalfe developed
Ethernet, which allowed data to be transferred at rapid
speeds over coaxial cables. Soon after, a packet
satellite project (SATNET) that used satellites to link
the United States with Europe was completed, thus a
basic worldwide data-delivery universe was born. Jimmy
Carter's presidential campaign staff sent out
e-mail several times a day in the fall of 1976, earning
him the descriptor "computer-driven
candidate." In 1979, Kevin MacKenzie, a member of
the MsgGroup e-mail list, complained about the
"loss of meaning," the lack of facial
expressions, vocal inflection and gestures in e-mail
correspondence. He suggested the use of a new form of
punctuation in e-mails and used the example -). This
was far less sophisticated than the :o) and many other
emoticons in use today. MacKenzie was flamed
(criticized) by the other people in the e-mail group at
the time, but his legacy lives on. At this stage in its
development, few people outside the research community
used the internet. - The National Science Foundation
started the Computer Science Research Network (CSNET)
and had more than 70 sites online by 1983. In the
mid-'80s, a coordinating group called the Internet
Activities Board centralized networking efforts; late
in the decade its membership numbered in the hundreds,
and it was split into two groups, the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Research
Task Force (IRTF). By 1986, most U.S. computer science
departments were connected through this method, paying
the NSF annual operation fees in order to use the
network. More networks emerged, including BITNET,
USENET and UUCP. In 1985, NSFNET, a
"backbone" to connect five supercomputer
centers located all over the United States, allowed the
establishment of regional networks around the country,
making a brighter, more-connected future possible for
more people. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at
CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, wrote
a memo to his supervisors suggesting his ideas for the
invention of a worldwide network that would
revolutionize everything. - Berners-Lee brought his
"World-Wide Web" to life in 1990, writing the
first html source code. He introduced the Web at a
conference in December of that year, but it didn't
actually appear online and come into use by other
people until 1991. 1990 was also the year that ARPANET
was decommissioned after 20 years of operation; the
NSFNET backbone - at least 25 times faster than ARPANET
- took over and democratized the network even further.
In 1991, thanks to the ease-of-use brought about by
Berners-Lee's Web, Internet Service Providers
(ISPs) - businesses that allowed people to "dial
up" to get access to use of the internet - began
gaining popularity. The first user-friendly interface,
"Gopher," created at the University of
Minnesota, was introduced in 1991. Gopher was extremely
limited in comparison with tools soon to come, but it
was the best thing yet to emerge in internet
communication, and it was nearly universally adopted.
The Internet Society was founded in 1992 with Cerf and
Kahn at the helm and assigned oversight of IETF and
IRTF. Mark Andreessen launched his Mosaic, a
revolutionary browser, in 1993; later marketed by the
start-up company Netscape, it combined text and
graphics and made it so easy to navigate that its role
in the mainstream consumer adoption of the internet was
significant. Gopher became obsolete. In 1994, the White
House launched its first Web page. By 1995, the
internet had an estimated 16 million users and venture
capitalists were busy full-time, funding hundreds of
new internet-related business concerns. 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, Dave Clark and so many others - some
of them anonymous hackers or users - it is impossible
to include them all. 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 in 218 of the 246
countries in the world. By 2002, there were between 600
and 800 million users (counting has become more and
more inexact as the network has grown, and estimates
vary). How does the arrival of the
internet compare to the introduction of other new
communications tools? It took 38 years for radio to get
a market of at least 50 million users; it took
television 13 years to achieve 50 million users; and
once it was open to the general public, it is estimated
that it took just four years for the internet to
achieve 50 million users. The Early '90s section
of Imagining the Internet tells the story of the
people of the internet in the early 1990s in their own
words; it tells us something about what those people
hoped or dreaded the internet would come to be. It
tells the story of the people who supported and opposed
a networked world and shares their views of the
positives and negatives that might be expected to
accompany such progress. We encourage you to use this
entire site as a base of exploration. We ask that you
please credit and link to Elon/Pew's Imagining
the Internet in any use of the material
herein. Abbate, Jane (1999) Inventing the
Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castels, Manuel (2001) The
Internet Galaxy. New York: Oxford University
Press. Berners-Lee, Tim, with Mark
Frischetti (1999) Weaving the Web. San Francisco:
HarperCollins. Hafner, Katie and Lyon, Matthew
(1996) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the
Internet. New York: Touchstone. Naughton, John (1999) A Brief
History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Utsumi, Takeshi (1998) Electronic
Global University System and Services. (Book Draft.)
This offers Utsumi's take on the history of packet
switching. It can be found online at:
http://www.friends-partners.org/GLOSAS/Bookwriting/PART_I/Chapter_I/Section_2/Chapter_1_Sect_2.html |
