Computers and internet
history
The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking
by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing
computers to share information on research and development in scientific and
military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of
computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock
of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to
form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a
Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up
telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also showed
that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet
switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and
developed his plan for ARPANET. These visionaries and many more left unnamed
here are the real founders of the Internet.
|
When Senator Ted Kennedy
heard in 1968 that the pioneering Massachusetts company BBN had won the ARPA
contract for an "interface message processor (IMP)," he sent a
congratulatory telegram to BBN for their ecumenical spirit in winning the
"interfaith message processor" contract.
|
The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought
online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in
the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the
University of Utah). The contract was carried out by BBN of Cambridge, MA under
Bob Kahn and went online in December 1969. By June 1970, MIT, Harvard, BBN, and
Systems Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica, Cal. were added. By January
1971, Stanford, MIT's Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, and Case-Western Reserve U
were added. In months to come, NASA/Ames, Mitre, Burroughs, RAND, and the U of
Illinois plugged in. After that, there were far too many to keep listing here.
|
Who was the first to use
the Internet?
Charley Kline at UCLA sent
the first packets on ARPANet as he tried to connect to Stanford Research
Institute on Oct 29, 1969. The system crashed as he reached the G in LOGIN!
|
The Internet was designed in part to provide a
communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed
by nuclear attack. If the most direct route was not available, routers would
direct traffic around the network via alternate routes.
The early Internet was used by computer experts,
engineers, scientists, and librarians. There was nothing friendly about it.
There were no home or office personal computers in those days, and anyone who
used it, whether a computer professional or an engineer or scientist or
librarian, had to learn to use a very complex system.
|
Did Al Gore invent the
Internet?
According to a CNN
transcript of an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Al Gore said,"During my
service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the
Internet." Al Gore was not yet in Congress in 1969 when ARPANET started
or in 1974 when the term Internet first came into use. Gore was elected to
Congress in 1976. In fairness, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf acknowledge in a paper
titled Al Gore and the
Internet that Gore has probably done more than any other elected official
to support the growth and development of the Internet from the 1970's to the
present .
|
E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN
in 1972. He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to
link the username and address. The telnet protocol,
enabling logging on to a remote computer, was published as a Request for
Comments (RFC) in 1972. RFC's are a means of sharing developmental work
throughout community. The ftp protocol,
enabling file transfers between Internet sites, was published as an RFC in
1973, and from then on RFC's were available electronically to anyone who had
use of the ftp protocol.
Libraries began automating and networking their
catalogs in the late 1960s independent from ARPA. The visionary Frederick G.
Kilgour of the Ohio College Library Center (now OCLC, Inc.) led networking of Ohio
libraries during the '60s and '70s. In the mid 1970s more regional consortia
from New England, the Southwest states, and the Middle Atlantic states, etc.,
joined with Ohio to form a national, later international, network. Automated
catalogs, not very user-friendly at first, became available to the world, first
through telnet
or the awkward IBM variant TN3270 and only
many years later, through the web. See The History of OCLC
|
Ethernet, a protocol for
many local networks, appeared in 1974, an outgrowth of Harvard student Bob
Metcalfe's dissertation on "Packet Networks." The dissertation was
initially rejected by the University for not being analytical enough. It
later won acceptance when he added some more equations to it.
|
The Internet matured in the 70's as a result of the TCP/IP
architecture first proposed by Bob Kahn at BBN and further developed by Kahn
and Vint Cerf at Stanford and others throughout the 70's. It was adopted by the
Defense Department in 1980 replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol (NCP)
and universally adopted by 1983.
The Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP) was invented in
1978 at Bell Labs. Usenet was started in 1979 based on UUCP. Newsgroups, which
are discussion groups focusing on a topic, followed, providing a means of
exchanging information throughout the world . While Usenet is not considered as
part of the Internet, since it does not share the use of TCP/IP, it linked unix
systems around the world, and many Internet sites took advantage of the
availability of newsgroups. It was a significant part of the community building
that took place on the networks.
Similarly, BITNET (Because It's Time Network)
connected IBM mainframes around the educational community and the world to
provide mail services beginning in 1981. Listserv
software was developed for this network and later others. Gateways were
developed to connect BITNET with the Internet and allowed exchange of e-mail,
particularly for e-mail discussion lists. These listservs and other forms of
e-mail discussion lists formed another major element in the community building
that was taking place.
In 1986, the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet
as a cross country 56 Kbps backbone for the Internet. They maintained their
sponsorship for nearly a decade, setting rules for its non-commercial
government and research uses.
As the commands for e-mail, FTP, and telnet were
standardized, it became a lot easier for non-technical people to learn to use
the nets. It was not easy by today's standards by any means, but it did open up
use of the Internet to many more people in universities in particular. Other
departments besides the libraries, computer, physics, and engineering
departments found ways to make good use of the nets--to communicate with
colleagues around the world and to share files and resources.
While the number of sites on the Internet was small,
it was fairly easy to keep track of the resources of interest that were
available. But as more and more universities and organizations--and their
libraries-- connected, the Internet became harder and harder to track. There
was more and more need for tools to index the resources that were available.
The first effort, other than library catalogs, to
index the Internet was created in 1989, as Peter Deutsch and his crew at McGill
University in Montreal, created an archiver for ftp sites, which they named Archie. This
software would periodically reach out to all known openly available ftp sites,
list their files, and build a searchable index of the software. The commands to
search Archie were unix commands, and it took some knowledge of unix to use it
to its full capability.
|
McGill University, which
hosted the first Archie, found out one day that half the Internet traffic
going into Canada from the United States was accessing Archie. Administrators
were concerned that the University was subsidizing such a volume of traffic,
and closed down Archie to outside access. Fortunately, by that time, there
were many more Archies available.
|
At about the same time, Brewster Kahle, then at
Thinking Machines, Corp. developed his Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), which would
index the full text of files in a database and allow searches of the files.
There were several versions with varying degrees of complexity and capability
developed, but the simplest of these were made available to everyone on the
nets. At its peak, Thinking Machines maintained pointers to over 600 databases
around the world which had been indexed by WAIS. They included such things as
the full set of Usenet Frequently Asked Questions files, the full documentation
of working papers such as RFC's by those developing the Internet's standards,
and much more. Like Archie, its interface was far from intuitive, and it took
some effort to learn to use it well.
Peter Scott of the University of Saskatchewan,
recognizing the need to bring together information about all the
telnet-accessible library catalogs on the web, as well as other telnet
resources, brought out his Hytelnet catalog in 1990. It gave a single place to
get information about library catalogs and other telnet resources and how to
use them. He maintained it for years, and added HyWebCat in 1997 to provide
information on web-based catalogs.
In 1991, the first really friendly interface to the
Internet was developed at the University of Minnesota. The University wanted to
develop a simple menu system to access files and information on campus through
their local network. A debate followed between mainframe adherents and those
who believed in smaller systems with client-server
architecture. The mainframe adherents "won" the debate initially,
but since the client-server advocates said they could put up a prototype very
quickly, they were given the go-ahead to do a demonstration system. The
demonstration system was called a gopher after the U
of Minnesota mascot--the golden gopher. The gopher proved to be very prolific,
and within a few years there were over 10,000 gophers around the world. It
takes no knowledge of unix or computer architecture to use. In a gopher system,
you type or click on a number to select the menu selection you want.
Gopher's usability was enhanced much more when the
University of Nevada at Reno developed the VERONICA
searchable index of gopher menus. It was purported to be an acronym for Very
Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives. A spider crawled
gopher menus around the world, collecting links and retrieving them for the
index. It was so popular that it was very hard to connect to, even though a
number of other VERONICA sites were developed to ease the load. Similar
indexing software was developed for single sites, called JUGHEAD (Jonzy's
Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display).
|
Peter Deutsch, who
developed Archie, always insisted that Archie was short for Archiver, and had
nothing to do with the comic strip. He was disgusted when VERONICA and
JUGHEAD appeared.
|
In 1989 another significant event took place in making
the nets easier to use. Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory
for Particle Physics, more popularly known as CERN, proposed a new protocol for
information distribution. This protocol, which became the World Wide Web in
1991, was based on hypertext--a system of embedding links in text to link to
other text, which you have been using every time you selected a text link while
reading these pages. Although started before gopher, it was slower to develop.
The development in 1993 of the graphical browser Mosaic by Marc
Andreessen and his team at the National
Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave the protocol its big
boost. Later, Andreessen moved to become the brains behind Netscape Corp., which produced the most
successful graphical type of browser and server until Microsoft declared war and developed its
MicroSoft Internet Explorer.|
MICHAEL
DERTOUZOS
1936-2001
The
early days of the web was a confused period as many developers tried to put
their personal stamp on ways the web should develop. The web was threatened
with becoming a mass of unrelated protocols that would require different
software for different applications. The visionary Michael Dertouzos of MIT's
Laboratory for Computer Sciences persuaded Tim Berners-Lee and others to form
the World Wide Web Consortium
in 1994 to promote and develop standards for the Web. Proprietary plug-ins
still abound for the web, but the Consortium has ensured that there are
common standards present in every browser.
|
Since the Internet was initially funded by the
government, it was originally limited to research, education, and government
uses. Commercial uses were prohibited unless they directly served the goals of
research and education. This policy continued until the early 90's, when
independent commercial networks began to grow. It then became possible to route
traffic across the country from one commercial site to another without passing
through the government funded NSFNet Internet backbone.
Delphi was the first national commercial online
service to offer Internet access to its subscribers. It opened up an email
connection in July 1992 and full Internet service in November 1992. All
pretenses of limitations on commercial use disappeared in May 1995 when the
National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone, and
all traffic relied on commercial networks. AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came
online. Since commercial usage was so widespread by this time and educational
institutions had been paying their own way for some time, the loss of NSF
funding had no appreciable effect on costs.
Today, NSF funding has moved beyond supporting the
backbone and higher educational institutions to building the K-12 and local
public library accesses on the one hand, and the research on the massive high
volume connections on the other.
Microsoft's full scale entry into the browser, server,
and Internet Service Provider market completed the major shift over to a
commercially based Internet. The release of Windows 98 in June 1998 with the
Microsoft browser well integrated into the desktop shows Bill Gates'
determination to capitalize on the enormous growth of the Internet. Microsoft's
success over the past few years has brought court challenges to their
dominance. We'll leave it up to you whether you think these battles should be
played out in the courts or the marketplace.
A current trend with major implications for the future
is the growth of high speed connections. 56K modems and the providers who
support them are spreading widely, but this is just a small step compared to
what will follow. 56K is not fast enough to carry multimedia, such as sound and
video except in low quality. But new technologies many times faster, such as
cablemodems, digital subscriber lines (DSL), and satellite
broadcast are available in limited locations now, and will become widely
available in the next few years. These technologies present problems, not just
in the user's connection, but in maintaining high speed data flow reliably from
source to the user. Those problems are being worked on, too.
During this period of enormous growth, businesses
entering the Internet arena scrambled to find economic models that work. Free
services supported by advertising shifted some of the direct costs away from
the consumer--temporarily. Services such as Delphi offered free web pages, chat
rooms, and message boards for community building. Online sales have grown
rapidly for such products as books and music CDs and computers, but the profit
margins are slim when price comparisons are so easy, and public trust in online
security is still shaky. Business models that have worked well are portal
sites, that try to provide everything for everybody, and live auctions. AOL's
acquisition of Time-Warner was the largest merger in history when it took place
and shows the enormous growth of Internet business! The stock market has had a
rocky ride, swooping up and down as the new technology companies, the dot.com's
encountered good news and bad. The decline in advertising income spelled doom
for many dot.coms, and a major shakeout and search for better business models
is underway by the survivors.
It is becoming more and more clear that many free
services will not survive. While many users still expect a free ride, there are
fewer and fewer providers who can find a way to provide it. The value of the
Internet and the Web is undeniable, but there is a lot of shaking out to do and
management of costs and expectations before it can regain its rapid growth.
May you live in
interesting times! (ostensibly an ancient Chinese curse)*
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق