Where Did The Internet Come From Essay

Where Did The Internet Come From? Essay, Research Paper

Where Did The Internet Come From?

In the summer of 1969, not everyone was at Woodstock. In laboratories on either side of the continent a small group

of computer scientists were quietly changing the future of communication. Their goal was to build a computer

network that would enable researchers around the country to share ideas (Kantrowitz 56).

The Internet we make so much today — the global Internet which has helped scholars so much, where free speech is

flourishing as never before in history — the Internet was a cold war military project. It was designed for purposes of

military communication in a United States devastated by a Soviet nuclear strike. Originally, the Internet was a

post-apocalypse command grid (Tappendorf 1). The threat of nuclear war was a tangible, and frightening, possibility

during the cold war period. In the 1960s the Vietnam War was grabbing all of the headlines. The history books

describe the decade as brimming with social unrest and change. This decade also witnessed the birth of a military

experiment that was to evolve into what we now call the Net (Net 1).

The history of the Internet begins with the research and development, RAND, group in 1966. Paul Baran was

commissioned by the United States Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command control over its

missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. Baran’s finished document described several ways to accomplish this

task. What he finally proposes is a packet switched network (Tappendorf 2). Packet switching is a method of

fragmenting messages into sub-parts called packets, routing them to their destinations and reassembling them.

Packetizing information has several advantages. It facilitates allowing several users to share the same connection by

breaking up the data into discrete units which can be routed separately. Because no transmission medium is 100%

reliable, packet switching allows one bad packet to be re-sent while other good packets are uninterrupted in their

transmission (Hardy 6).

Packets may carry information about themselves, where they have been and where they are going. In addition,

packets may be compressed for speed and size advantages or encrypted for security. Most packets carry some sort

of internal check for consistency that helps to weed out bad packets. Packetizing data has advantages in overcoming

certain inherent bandwidth and speed constraints, particularly in older network and modem based communication

(Hardy 6).

The early pioneers of Advanced Research Projects Agency network, ARPAnet, wanted to create a network that was

robust, reliable, and did not have a single point of failure. A single point of failure would be a network designed with

one device that was the master node, or controlling device, for the network. This leads to problems in that when the

master node goes down, the whole entire network is lost. These early pioneers of ARPAnet acknowledged this

single point of failure concept, in turn, created a network that had no central controlling device; rather, it was made

up of individual devices, or nodes that all worked together and participated on the network. Although these first

networks consisted of few machines, it laid the foundation for things to come (Boyce 492).

The reliable networking part involved dynamic rerouting. If one of the network links were to become disrupted by

enemy attack, the traffic on it could automatically be rerouted to other links. Fortunately, the net rarely has come

under enemy attack. But an errant backhoe cutting a cable is just as much of a threat, so it’s important for the net to

be backhoe resistant (Levine 12).

Starting with the ARPAnet the government began researching ways to exchange information among various

government sites located in the United States. The research and implementation of ARPAnet led to the early

beginnings of the Internet. This network allowed government officials at various sites to exchange files, documents,

and messages with one another, even though they were physically separated by many miles (Boyce 492).

In 1969, what would later become the Internet was founded. It contrasts sharply with today’s Internet. The ARPAnet

network had four machines on it, linked together with a packet switched network. Soon afterward other government

agencies became interested in this new network; Department of Defense, NASA, National Science Foundation, and

the Federal Reserve Board. Because of this new interest and the fact that ARPAnet was growing, now 24 nodes in

1972, Information Processing Techniques Office, IPTO, began to look to other ways to transmit data other than

through a wire. Two projects were launched to settle these needs. The first was the use of satellites for data

transmission. IPTO quickly learned that it would be possible to send data via satellite and went into negotiations

with the board of directors of International Telecommunications Satellite Organization. The second project was for

radio transmitted data. It soon also became apparent that a packet switched radio network for mobile computing

would be possible. In 1976, the packet satellite project went into practical use. Atlantic packet Satellite network,

SATNET, was born. This network linked the United States with Europe. This network was interesting in that it used

commercial Intelsat satellites that were owned by the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization as

opposed to government military satellites (Tappendorf 2).

In the same year a man called Ray Tomlinson created an e-mail program that could send personal messages across

the network. Seems harmless enough, but this development played an important role in the nets evolution by helping

it move further away from its military roots. The academics with access to the system were using it predominantly to

communicate with colleagues, and their messages were not always about research. Mailing lists on a variety of

subjects proved to be very popular (Net 2).

In 1973, the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, initiated a research program to

investigate techniques and technologies for interlining packet networks of various kinds. The objective was to

develop communication protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently across

multiple, linked packet networks. This was called the Internetting Project and the system of networks which emerged

from the research was known as the Internet. The system of protocols which was developed over the course of this

research effort became known as the TCP/IP protocol suite, after the two initial protocols developed: Transmission

Control Protocol, TCP, and Internet Protocol, IP (Liener 1). In 1976 the Department of Defense, began to experiment

with this new protocol and soon decided to require it for use on ARPAnet. January 1983 was the date fixed as when

every machine connected to ARPAnet had to use this new protocol (Tappendorf 3). In addition to the selection of

TCP/IP for the NSFNET program, Federal agencies made and implemented several other policy decisions which

shaped the Internet of today (Leiner 11). The creation of the TCP/IP protocol made possible the text based Net

communications systems so popular today, including electronic mail, discussion lists, file indexing, and hypertext.

E-mail, of course, is the most widely used of the Net services, the most convenient and the most functional (Diamond

42).

The backbone had made the transition from a network built from routers out of the research community to

commercial equipment. In its 8 1/2 year lifetime, the backbone had grown from six nodes with 56 kbps links to 21

nodes with multiple 45 Mbps links. It had seen the Internet grow over 50,000 networks on all seven continents and

outer space, with approximately 29,000 networks in the United States (Leiner 12).

Widespread development of Lans, Pcs, and workstations in the 1980s allowed the nascent Internet to flourish.

Ethernet technology, developed by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC in 1973, is now probably the dominant network

technology in the Internet, and Pcs and workstations the dominate computers. This change from having a few

networks with a modest number of time-shared hosts, the original ARPAnet model, to having many networks has

resulted in a number of new concepts and changes to the underlying technology. First, it resulted in the definition of

three network classes A, B, and C to accommodate the range of networks. Class A represented large national scale

networks, a small number of networks with large number of hosts; Class B represented regional scale networks; and

Class C represented local area networks, a large number of networks with relatively few hosts (Leiner 8).

Beginning around 1980, university computing was moving from a small number of large time-sharing machines, each

of which served hundreds of simultaneous users, to a large number of smaller desktop workstations for individual

users. Because users had gotten used to the advantages of time-sharing systems, such as shared directories of files

and e-mail, they wanted to keep those same facilities on their workstations (Levine 12). Workstation manufactures

began to include the necessary network hardware also, so all anyone had to do to get a working network was to

string a cable to connect the workstations, something that universities could do inexpensively because they usually

could get students to do it (Levine 13).

In 1983, the ARPAnet was split into ARPAnet and MILnet. The latter was integrated into the Defense Data Network

created in 1982. ARPAnet was taken out of service in 1990. ARPAnet’s role as network backbone was taken over by

NSFNET which may in time be supplanted by the National Research and Educational Network, NREN (Hardy 8).

In 1988, in a conscious effort to test Federal policy on commercial use of Internet, the corporation for National

research Initiatives approached the Federal Networking Council for permission to experiment with the

interconnection of MCI Mail with the Internet. An experimental electronic mail relay was built and put into operation