The Origin of the Internet - Article Example

03 December 2007 History of the Internet In 25 years, the Internet which started as a US defense initiative has developed into the main communications mechanism for the academic and research community and most recently has expanded into a major business tool for the commercial sector (Okin 19). The Internets potential to change the way we conduct business is only just beginning to be understood. Already it is clear that managers must orientate their thinking to adapt to the opportunities that are being created. The origin of the internet is rooted in the circumstances of the Cold War, a period during which nuclear conflict featured as poten­tially the most immediate and catastrophic of all global dangers. The most common view is that the Internet is a product of the US military and was developed for military and defense purposes (Naughton 47). The launch of Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957 by the Soviet Union spawned a very specific fear: if nations were capable of launching space satellites, they might also be capable of launching long-distance nuclear attacks. During the late 1960s and early 1970s the US Department of Defense (DoD) was concerned that centralized forms of communications would be vulnerable to nuclear attack. In the era before the distributed processing power of the PC had been dreamt of, the DoDs fear that the countrys defense systems were reliant upon a few, very large, computers was all too real (Naughton 53-54). There was a need to link computers together in such a way that was not dependent on any single machine for the integrity of the whole network. At this time, networks were totally reliant on a few machines and if these were damaged then all computer processing would cease. The technological development that was created from this military objective was known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANet). Thus, some researchers connect the history of the Internet with the name of George Stibitz (1940) who developed the concept of a teletype terminal and demonstrated that computers can communicate at a distance (Naughton 49-51). The ARPA’s task was to establish and maintain a worldwide lead in science and technology. Its first director, however, defined the agencys role almost completely in military terms, and failed to recognize the importance of cutting-edge research taking place in the nations univer­sities at that time (ONeill 67). This misjudgment was to threaten the continuation of the agency during its early years, and in 1958, ARPA saw many of the projects and programs it had initiated transferred to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Consequently, the agency was forced to rethink its mission or face being abolished. The Advanced Research Projects Agencys reputation as an innovat­ive research institution only really began in 1961 when Jack Ruina was appointed as its director. He decentralized the structure of the agency and redefined its role as a body supporting and funding the work carried out by teams of researchers on special projects (Walton 54). One of the most import­ant research programs supported by the agency involved the investigation of various kinds of computer technologies (Salus 54; Okin 49). The objective was twofold: first, to develop a commun­ication network which would facilitate the exchange of information between various research centers involved in ARPA projects, and second, to allow participants in the network to share scarce computer resources. The creation of this so-called ARPANET in 1969 has become widely recognized as the origin and advent of the internet (ONeill 68). The next stage of development was connected with packet-switching technologies. These technologies were independently introduced by three research institutes: the National Physical Laboratory (Great Britain), and the Massachu­setts Institute of Technology and the RAND Corporation. Paul Baran suggested that it is possible to develop a communication network with no central command or control point. While Baran had been conducting his study into packet-switching, Joseph Licklider has been appointed to head the computer research program at ARPA (Salus 32). AS a psychologists wit ha back ground in hearing and speech research at MIT, he was mainly interested in computers as com­munication devices. Licklider saw networking not so much as a way of connecting computers, but as a way of connecting people (Okin 55). In his paper Man-computer Symbiosis he had already explored the idea of inter­connected networks of information storage and retrieval centers sup­porting the team effort of groups and individuals (Salus 65). These ideas were reflected in his work for ARPA as he continued to decentralize the activ­ities of the agency, setting up research contracts and bringing together computer scientists from MIT, Stanford, the University of California at Los Angeles, Berkeley and a number of companies. He nicknamed his dispersed team of scientists the intergalactic network. Licklider later extended this concept to mean a globally interconnected network which would allow all participants to access and use information and programs from any site. When Licklider left ARPA in 1964 the name of the research program he had led changed from Command and Control Research to the Information Processing Techniques Office. This change symbol­izes and reflects both the changes that had taken place in ARPA as an organization and the changing role of computers in human activity (Hafner and Lyon 56; Okin 55). Although there were clearly definite conceptions as to the use of com­puter-mediated communication, this is not to say that all those involved were fully aware of the possibilities (Salus 37). Within ARPA opinions diverged as to the necessity of a decentralized computer network to promote new opportunities for horizontal communications between the various. centers (Salus 38). Individual researchers located in the various centers could not understand that others had information relevant to their work or that they themselves had material others wanted to see. In any case, they argued, researchers could always read each others reports. A very different perspective, however, emerges from the account given by Hafner and Lyon, describ­ing the terminal room attached to the suite of Bob Taylor, director of the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA headquarters (Naughton 116-117). In 1968, ARPA awarded the contract to build the ARPANET to Bolt, Beranek and Newman, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, specializing in information systems. Licklider, who had returned to work at MIT, claimed that in a few years individuals would be able to commun­icate more effectively through the digital computer than face to face (Salus, 1995). The ARPANET was launched at the end of 1969, creating the first long-haul computer network and connecting four sites: the University of California at Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the Uni­versity of Utah. These sites did not remain alone for long. Within sixteen months there were more than ten sites with an estimated 2,000 users and at least two routes between any two sites for the transmission of informa­tion packets (Naughton 130; Okin 50). A public demonstration of the ARPANET was held during the first International Conference on Computer Communications in Washington DC in October 1972. Representatives from projects in countries such as Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Japan, France, Canada and the United States were present (Naughton 129). The gathering highlighted the beginnings of net­working elsewhere in the world and resulted in the setting up of the InterNetwork Working Group which was to begin to discuss global inter-connectivity (Naughton 88). An important part of the ARPANET was the Network Control Pro­tocol which governed how packets of data were to be transmitted from one computer to another. Because the ARPANET was the only network being used, a very high level of reliability could be achieved (Okin 68). With the advent of global information infrastructures, however, involving the connecting up of a variety of computer networks, the same sender-to-receiver reliability could not be provided. Weak connections were the cause of transmission errors and different networks often used incom­patible protocols (Naughton 160). A new protocol was therefore needed, one which would allow individual networks to be designed separately in order to meet local requirements while still allowing distant users to communicate with each other. On a global scale this would have to be achieved with­out the need for any kind of direct control or intervention (Naughton 161). The new concept was first introduced by Bob Kahn in 1972, the same year in which ARPA was renamed DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It involved the idea of so-called open architecture net­working. Kahn and Vint Cerf, who had been involved in the original Network Control Protocol development, set to work on what would become the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) (Salus 51). The TCP organized the data into packages, put them into the right order on arrival at their destination, and checked them for errors. The IP was responsible for the routing of packages through the network. By 1983 all networks connected to the ARPANET had to make use of TCP/IP and the old Network Control Protocol was replaced entirely. From then on, the collection of interconnected and publicly accessible networks using the TCP/IP protocols came to be called the internet (Naughton 166). Real-time interaction has also been extended in many ways. One ex­ample of this was the creation of so-called multi-user dungeons (MUDs). Initially, these were developed as a multiplayer adventure game by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University in 1979 (Naughton 167, 276). The invention of the modem and the development of the Xmodem protocol in the late 1970s by two Chicago students allowed for the transfer of in­formation between computers over the regular telephone system. Using such technology, computer networks which had so far been excluded from connecting to ARPANET, or other backbone systems, were now also able to communicate with each other (Naughton 162; Okin 155). In its restricted way it pointed to the existence of a wider potential demand for computer-mediated communication and to the wide range of situations in which it could be successfully used. The modem, together with the advent of the personal computer, particularly contributed to the development and worldwide proliferation of electronic notice boards such as bulletin board systems (BBSs) and electronic discussion forums such as USENET. Following Franda (2001): “the Internet and the Web have also moved to the center of attention for governments, business leaders, lawyers and judges, police forces and military establishments” (6). From the mid-1990s the development of the internet took a new turn as a growing number of large and medium-sized organizations started running the TCP/IP protocols on their intra-organizational communication networks (Dreyfus 12-13). TCP/IP is often called the glue which binds the Internet together. As long as the electronic address of another computer was known it was possible to initiate a dialogue over the physical electrical network, irrespective of the make and type of the two computers (Naughton 39). It is probably this very early adoption of a universally agreed set of standards which gave ARPANet the ability to grow so quickly, since it removed the damaging conflict and delay that invariably follows when there are competing standards vying for technical supremacy. Basically, if you wished to enjoy the benefits provided by this global network, then you had to use the agreed TCP/IP standards. From this period he term Internet became more widely used to refer to a collection of networks that specifically used TCP/IP protocols to communicate. At this date there were probably less than 700 computers connected to the network (Naughton 211). If the society fast-forwards to the end of the 1980s the number of computers connected to the network had grown to close on 200 000. By the end of 1997 this figure had exploded to 20000000. By this stage other major networks had adopted the same set of protocols. The most important of these was the network implemented in 1986 by the US National Science Foundation (NSFNet). The creation of this network provided connectivity between five supercomputing centers and universities and research establishments. By the beginning of the 1990s what has now become the Internet was still very much the tool of the research and education world. The driving principles and priorities of the network had not been appreciably influenced by the requirements of the commercial sector (Briggs and Burke 246). Around this time the first commercial providers of Internet connection started to appear. Commercial and non-profit information service providers began connecting to the network. The most important development of the current era of the Internet occurred at this same time (1991) with the initial world wide web program being developed at CERN (Naughton 25). This is one of the worlds largest scientific laboratories located on the French—Swiss border near to Geneva. It is fascinating to note that, yet again, the drive for this development did not come from the commercial world but originated in a research institution (Briggs and Burke 244-245; Franda 7). Three years after the first release of Microsofts Windows operating system (in 1990), can be said to be the birth of the hyper-growth phase of the Internet. The first release of a software product called Mosaic for X which was created by Marc Andreessen, who has had a central role in the current era of the Internets evolution, took place in 1993. Andreesen is better known as the man who founded Netscape, the company whose Navigator software rapidly became the software that most people used to access the WWW (Naughton 256-257). This business and technological phenomenon shocked the PCs leading software supplier, Microsoft, to aggressively pursue Netscape and challenge it for supremacy of the browser software market. This battle is still being fought with Microsoft progressively encroaching on Netscapes initial market dominance (Okin 36). By the middle of March 1995 the WWW had gone from its birth, four years beforehand, to become the greatest single generator of traffic on the NSFNet. In the same year Marc Andreessens Netscape Company went public with the third largest ever initial public share value on the NASDAQ market. At the close of 1996 the companys market capitalisation stood at just over $5 billion. By the end of 1997 this value had approximately halved. Even during the high tech bull market of 1997 the relentless competitive pressure had taken its toll on Netscape (Okin 110). In sum, the emergence of the internet, however, is not only the outcome of military and scientific endeavor, and the activities of big business. The internet, however, with its global reach and local call accessibility, soon surpassed the opportunities offered by such networks, whereupon many of them became connected to the internet themselves. The internet may well be creating a new technical scenario, but the varied and complex social and technological transformations users are experiencing today have roots which can be traced back in time. Works Cited 1. Briggs, A., Burke, P. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Polity Press; 2Rev Ed edition, 2005. 2. Dreyfus, H. L. On the Internet Routledge, 2001. 3. Franda, M. Governing the Internet: The Emergence of an International Regime. Lynne Rienner, 2001. 4. Hafner K., Lyon, M. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1995. 5. Naughton, J. A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet. Phoenix, 2000. 6. Okin, J. R. The Internet Revolution: The Not-for-dummies Guide to the History, Technology, And Use of the Internet. English, 2000. 7. ONeill, J. E. The role of ARPA in the development of the ARPANET, 1961-1972, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 17 (1995), 67-69. 8. Salus, P. H. Casting the Net: From Arpanet to Internet and Beyond. Addison Wesley, 1995. 9. Walton, R. E. 1989. Up and Running: Integration, Information Technology and the Organization. Harvard Business School Press, Boston,. Read More