A Brief History of the Internet

1
A Brief History of the Internet

• The origins of the Internet (ARPANET) and the
  birth of the World Wide Web

2
Introduction

• Oct 1957
• USSR launch Sputnik (4 Oct 1957) reduced USs
  booming post-war confidence and optimism.
• Debate over in-house/corporate research or
  free-reign grant model.
• Neil McElroy Secretary of Defence proud of
  research, founded Advanced Research Projects
  Agency (ARPA)
• 1950s 1960s
• Computers were very expensive machines. The only
  cost effective way to use these expensive
  machines was to time-share.
• Hundreds of users would log into one machine
  directly (from a dumb-terminal)
• and this one computer would execute each users
  instructions in batches.

Time-Share ComputerCentral Processing Unit
memory store
Just keystrokes display characters sent to and
fro
A dumb-terminaljust an input and output device
NOT A COMPUTER
3
The Idea (Feb 1966 )

• Pentagon, Washington, USA
• Charlie Herzfield becomes Director of Advanced
  Research Projects Agency (ARPA)
• Every research project tender had an
  equal-opportunity directive ignoring bidders
  existing hardware resources (or lack-of).Led to
  a climate of expensive research projects, with
  every new project including the cost of a new
  time-share computer.
• Bob Taylor becomes Director of Information
  Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) within
  ARPA.
• Bob Taylor becomes very frustrated with having 3
  large terminals/teletypes connected to 3 US
  Univs MIT (Cambridge), Berkley and Santa Monica
  (California) different login, operating
  procedures and language.
• First ARPANET plan

4
The Birth (1967/1968)

• In 1967, National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in
  Middlesex, England develops NPL Data Network
  under Donald Watts Davies who coins the term
  packet.
• In 1968, request for proposals for building the
  ARPANET sent out.
• Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) awarded
  Packet Switch contract to build Interface Message
  Processors (IMPs) the precursor to modern-day
  Internet routing hubs.(US Senator Edward Kennedy
  sends a congratulatory telegram to BBN for its
  million-dollar ARPA contract to build the
  "Interfaith" Message Processor, and thanking them
  for their ecumenical efforts.)

5
The Start (1969)

• ATT provides 50kbps lines
• BBN build four initial IMPs Honeywell DDP-516
  mini computer with 12K of memory
• Node 1 UCLA (30 August, hooked up 2 September)
• Node 2 Stanford Research Institute (SRI) (1
  October)
• Node 3 University of California Santa Barbara
  (UCSB) (1 November)
• Node 4 University of Utah (December)
• Network Control Protocol (NCP) initially used to
  be replaced by TCP

6
The Email Years (1970s)

• 1970 - cross-country link installed by ATT
  between UCLA and BBN at 56kbps.
• 1971 - 15 nodes (23 hosts) UCLA, SRI, UCSB,
  Univ of Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND, SDC, Harvard,
  Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIU(C), CWRU, CMU,
  NASA/Ames
• Ray Tomlinson of BBN invents email program to
  send messages across a distributed network.
• 1972 - packet radio network connects to Hawaii
  (via ALOHAnet)
• Ray Tomlinson (BBN) modifies email program for
  ARPANET where it becomes a quick hit, the _at_ sign
  first used for email.
• 1973 -international connection to University
  College of London (England) via NORSAR (Norway)
• ARPA study shows email composing 75 of all
  ARPANET traffic
• 1974 - Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish the design
  of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
• 1975 - Satellite links cross two oceans (to
  Hawaii and UK) as the first TCP tests are run
  over them by Stanford, BBN, and UCL.
• First ARPANET mailing list, MsgGroup, is created
  by Steve Walker, human moderator.
• Queen Elizabeth II, sends out an email on 26
  March from the Royal Signals and Radar
  Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern.
• 1978 - TCP split into TCP and IP (March)
• 1979 - internet game MUD, MUD1, by Richard Bartle
  and Roy Trubshaw at Univ of Essex.
• On April 12, Kevin MacKenzie emails the MsgGroup
  a suggestion of adding some emotion back into the
  dry text medium of email. Though flamed by many
  at the time, emoticons became widely used after
  Scott Fahlman suggested the use of -) and -( in
  a CMU BBS on 19 September 1982

7
Internet Growth (1980s)

• 1980 network virus ARPANET grinds to a
  complete halt on 27 October because of an
  accidentally-propagated status-message.
• 1982 - first definition of an "internet" as a
  connected set of networks, specifically those
  using TCP/IP, and "Internet" as connected TCP/IP
  internets.
• 1984 - Number of hosts breaks 1,000.
• Domain Name System (DNS) introduced.
• Joint Academic Network (JANET) established in the
  UK
• 1987 Number of hosts breaks 10,000
• Email link established between Germany and China,
  with the first message from China sent on 20
  September.
• 1988 - Internet worm (2 November) burrows through
  the Net, affecting 10 of the 60,000 hosts.
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) developed by Jarkko
  Oikarinen.
• 1989 - Number of hosts breaks 100,000

8
The W W W (1990s)

• 1990 - ARPANET ceases to exist replaced by
  NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network
  sponsorship)
• 1991 - World-Wide Web (WWW) released by CERN Tim
  Berners-Lee developer.
• 1992 - Number of hosts breaks 1,000,000.
• The term "surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean
  Armour Polly
• 1993 web browser Mosaic takes the Internet by
  storm (22 Apr) WWW proliferates at a 341,634
  annual growth rate of service traffic.
• US White House comes on-line http//www.whitehou
  se.gov/ president_at_whitehouse.gov
• 1995 - WWW surpasses ftp-data in March as the
  service with greatest traffic on NSFNet
• Registration of domain names is no longer free.
  Beginning 14 September, a 50 annual fee has been
  imposed, which up until now was subsidized by
  NSF.
• 1996 - Internet phones catch the attention of US
  telecommunication companies who ask the US
  Congress to ban the technology (which has been
  around for years)
• The WWW browser war, fought primarily between
  Netscape and Microsoft new releases made
  quarterly.
• Restrictions on Internet use around the world
• - China requires users and ISPs to register with
  the police
• - Saudi Arabia confines Internet access to
  universities and hospitals
• -Singapore requires political and religious
  content providers to register with the state.
• 1999 - Number of hosts breaks 50,000,000.
• 2000 - Number of hosts breaks 100,000,000.

9
Further Reading

• A definitive online list of history of the
  Internet documents are available from the
  Internet Society website
• http//www.isoc.org/internet/history/index.shtml
• Non-technical books
• Hafner, K. 1996 Where Wizards Stay Up Late The
  Origins of the Internet, Simon Schuster Inc.,
  New York ISBN 0-684-83267-4 (paperback), ISBN
  0-684-81201-0
• Berners-Lee, T. 1999 Weaving the Web The Past
  Present and Future of the World Wide Web by its
  Inventor, Orion Business Books, London ISBN
  0-75282-090-7