The Internet was created:
A. completely by accident;
B. in response to the threat of nuclear attack;
C. because the traditional mail system was becoming too slow and untrustworthy;
D.
If you answered "D," you're definitely jaded. If you answered "B," you already know more about the Internet than most people.
The story behind the creation of the Internet is a fascinating one, yet few people know why it was created and who the people are that helped shape the Net. It began just over four decades ago with an event that shook the world and was to have a far-reaching effect on American society.
Welcome, Fellow Traveler
The story of the Internet really began with the space launch of a small piece of metal that weighed 184 pounds and was shaped like a basketball with four antennae. Translated into English, its name meant "fellow traveler," but it became known worldwide as Sputnik. When it was launched in October 1957, it was hailed as a technical marvel and gave the Soviet Union a leg up in the Cold War. The Soviets had made history: the first country to successfully send a man-made satellite into space.
While Sputnik gave a tremendous boost to the Soviet ego, it sent shockwaves through the American psyche. The armed forces were particularly concerned about a satellite that passed over the United States every 96 minutes, that was close enough to be seen by the naked eye on a clear night. Both the U.S.S.R. and U.S. possessed formidable nuclear arsenals, but as the Soviets could send an satellite into orbit, U.S. military planners theorized the Soviets launching a satellite with a nuclear missile.
The possibility of a nuclear attack was considered very real. The communication aspect of our nation's readiness concerned the armed forces. The U.S. had in place a sophisticated command-and-control communication network linking cities, states and military bases, but the switches and wires of that network would be destroyed by the atomic blasts, severing our lines of communication.
Publicly, President Eisenhower attempted to curb the growing Sputnik hysteria, referring it as "one small ball in the air."1 Behind the scenes, however, Eisenhower began taking dramatic steps for the nation's security. In 1958, Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). That same year, the National Defense Education Act was implemented to train scientists and engineers. The budget of the National Science Foundation was nearly tripled between 1958 and 1959; it was then doubled again by President Kennedy in 1962.
President Eisenhower also created the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which was one of the organizations responsible for the 1958 launch of the first U.S. satellite, Explorer I. In the late 1960s, ARPA also played an instrumental role in the implementation of the Internet.
RAND and the Internet
The idea behind the current design of the Internet, however, was brought to us by the RAND Corporation. Originally a government project designed to connect military planning with research and development decisions, the RAND Corporation became an independent, private, nonprofit organization in 1948. As its staff grew, its reputation for high-quality, objective information again attracted the interests of the federal government, and so, in the early 1960s, RAND was asked to come up with a solution to the communication situation.
One of the key issues involved in the design of such a network was the way it would be controlled. Traditional communication networks had demanded a framework with an established central base or authority from which orders or messages would be received. All forms of communications would be routed through a central base (e.g., the Pentagon), or perhaps the Kremlin in the Soviet Union.
The problem with such a system was that any central authority or base would be an obvious target for an enemy missile. In the case of a nuclear attack, that communications center would be one of the first places to be destroyed. How could a network maintain its integrity if its primary station or base were knocked out of operation?
That was the question facing the RAND scientists as they began work on the project in the 1960s. Working under government secrecy, the researchers studied and struggled for nearly two years before arriving at an ingenious answer. The result, according to the corporation's proposal, was a network that would "have no central authority" and would be "designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters."2
The principles behind this new communication system were deceptively simple. The network would be assumed to be unreliable, but it would also be designed to overcome its own unreliability. Each of the "nodes" or stations in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes. Each node would also have its own authority to send, receive and pass along messages.
The messages themselves would not be sent as one continuous stream of information, but rather as packets of data that were addressed separately. Each packet would begin at a specified station or node and find its way through the network on an individual basis. Each packet would also contain routing information, so that any computer node within the system would know where to forward, or "switch," the message, a technique that became known as "packet-switching." (The idea of packet-switching technology was the brainchild of RAND staffer Paul Baran, one of the co-authors of the corporation's proposal.)
The particular route that a packet took would be unimportant; only the final result of the message being delivered would count. The packets would operate on the "hot-potato" principle. Instead of going directly to a source, they would be tossed around from station to station until they ended up in the proper place. If large sections of the network had been destroyed by a nuclear blast, it wouldn't matter. The packets would still travel across the rest of the network, being shipped back and forth across the airwaves along whatever remaining nodes had survived the attack. The system lacked efficiency, but had the flexibility to operate under adverse conditions.
During the 1960s, the idea of a decentralized, bomb-proof, packet-switching network was bandied about at RAND, at UCLA (home of a number of ARPA projects), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1968, the first packet-switching experiments were conducted by Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain and met with promising results. A year later, with the assistance of the Advanced Research Projects Network, the first working model of the Internet was born.
ARPANet -- the First True "Internet"
While the RAND Corporation was busy devising its framework for a communications system, computer pioneer Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was articulating his own ideas for something resembling an Internet system. Dr. Licklider, who headed up the ARPA's office of information processing technology, was a visionary who sought to make the government's use of computers more interactive.
In 1963, Dr. Licklider wrote a memo addressed to "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network."3 In his note, Licklider theorized that if computers could communicate with one another, it would be of great value and help researchers share information. He even foresaw a day when whole communities of people with common interests could communicate with each other on line: lofty thinking in a time when compact discs and e-mail hadn't been invented.
To raise the level of technology, Licklider saw the need to move ARPA's contracts and studies from the private sector to universities and scientific institutions. This move prompted the ARPA to commission the construction of an experimental computer network in 1968. Based on Paul Baran's packet-switching technology, and aided with the information from Davies' early experiments, this network (nicknamed "ARPANet" after the agency backing the study) would be designed to help researchers work more effectively and explore ways to link computers and share information.
In January of 1969, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company called Bolt Beranek and Newman was awarded a contract to build the packet switches (originally called interface message processors, or IMPs) for ARPA. That September, the first packet switches arrived on the campus of UCLA, which had contributed as an existing network contractor with the agency.
Led by computer scientist Len Kleinrock and graduate student Vinton Cerf (later hailed by some as "the father of the Internet"), the scientists quickly set to work installing the packet switches and setting them up for connection to other nodes in the experimental network. A few weeks later, other packet switches were shipped to the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California; the University of California at Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Once all of the packet switches were installed and each node in place, it was time for the scientists to begin experimenting with their unprecedented project. According to Cerf, the establishment of the network was an immediate success: "When they turned it on," Cerf said, it just started running."4
After determining that the network was indeed operational, the scientists decided to opt for something simple. They would start by typing the word "login" from a computer at UCLA and seeing if the letters would appear on a computer monitor at Stanford. In a 1996 interview, Dr. Kleinrock recalled what happened that first day at UCLA.
"We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI," said Kleinrock. "We typed the L and we asked on the phone, "'Do you see the L?'"
"'Yes, we see the L,'" came the response."
"We typed the O, and asked, 'Do you see the O?'"
"'Yes, we see the O.'"
"Then we typed the G, and the system crashed."5
Despite the crash, Kleinrock's system signaled the birth of an information revolution. Less than two months after Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon (July 20, 1969), the seeds of the Internet had been planted in southern California, which would soon take root and spread across the planet. Within two decades, the Internet would grow from a small network of four computers to the largest communications system in human history, with tens of millions of users on line and hundreds of millions of messages being sent and received on a daily basis.
Internet History Links
The story behind the Internet is one that every computer user should be familiar with. There are enough subtle plot twists and interesting characters behind the creation of the Net to easily fill an issue of Dynamic Chiropractic.
Space restrictions make it impossible to tell the entire story of the Internet, even with a whole series of columns. There are a number of history sites available for those who are interested in learning more about the Internet's beginnings:
- BBN's Internet timeline (www.bbn.com/timeline) traces the origins of the Internet from the 1950s through 1997. More than just an Internet timeline, this site also provides important dates in America's social and political history, and a number of pictures of the people who helped shape the Net.
- PBS has its own Internet timeline at www.pbs.org/internet/timeline/index.html. It's a Java-based timeline, which means that some AOL users may have trouble reading the site. The PBS site is filled with dozens of dates and a year-by-year description of the Internet's growth.
- Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling gives his take on the Net with his article "A Short History of the Internet." Written with the same style that has won him both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Sterling's article from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction can be found at http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/AIM/scale/nethistory.html and a few hundred other sites on the World Wide Web.
- Delphi's Internet history page glances at the beginnings of the Internet, but it focuses more on Internet protocols, networks, indexing programs and browsers. Still, it's an interesting article that documents how other programs helped push the Internet along. You can find Delphi's Internet history page at www.delphi.com/navnet/faq/history.html.
- Perhaps the best collection of Internet history sites can be found at the Internet Society's website (www.isoc.org/internet-history). The site includes links to a handful of related articles, including Paul Baran's RAND papers on packet switching and Vinton Cerf's own "Brief History of the Internet." If you want to know about the history of the Net from the people who were there from the beginning, this might be the best place to start.
As always, we welcome your comments. If you have any questions about the history of the Internet, feel free to contact me by e-mail or at the phone number below.
References
- Hall A. The beep heard round the world. Scientific American Online, October 6, 1997.
- Sterling B. A short history of the Internet. FSF February 1993.
- Internet history. Discovery Channel Online
(http://www.discovery.com). - Laursen JV. The Internet: past, present and future. Available from Vissking Kommunikation (http://www.vissink.dk/inthist.html).
- Sacramento Bee, May 1, 1996.
Michael Devitt
Huntington Beach, California
Tel: (714) 960-6577
Fax: (714) 536-1482
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