Introduction
The Internet hasrevolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. Theinvention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage forthis unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once aworld-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination,and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and theircomputers without regard for geographic location.
The Internetrepresents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of sustainedinvestment and commitment to research and development of informationinfrastructure. Beginning with the early research in packet switching, thegovernment, industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deployingthis exciting new technology. Today, terms like«bleiner@computer.org» and «www.acm.org» triplightly off the tongue of the random person on the street.
This is intended tobe a brief, necessarily cursory and incomplete history. Much material currentlyexists about the Internet, covering history, technology, and usage. A trip toalmost any bookstore will find shelves of material written about the Internet.
In this paper,several of us involved in the development and evolution of the Internet shareour views of its origins and history. This history revolves around fourdistinct aspects. There is the technological evolution that began with earlyresearch on packet switching and the ARPANET (and related technologies), andwhere current research continues to expand the horizons of the infrastructurealong several dimensions, such as scale, performance, and higher levelfunctionality. There is the operations and management aspect of a global andcomplex operational infrastructure. There is the social aspect, which resultedin a broad community of Internauts working together to create and evolvethe technology. And there is the commercialization aspect, resulting in anextremely effective transition of research results into a broadly deployed andavailable information infrastructure.
The Internet today isa widespread information infrastructure, the initial prototype of what is oftencalled the National (or Global or Galactic) Information Infrastructure. Itshistory is complex and involves many aspects — technological, organizational,and community. And its influence reaches not only to the technical fields ofcomputer communications but throughout society as we move toward increasing useof online tools to accomplish electronic commerce, information acquisition, andcommunity operations.
Origins of the Internet
The first recordeddescription of the social interactions that could be enabled through networkingwas a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962discussing his «Galactic Network» concept. He envisioned a globallyinterconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly accessdata and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like theInternet of today. Licklider was the first head of the computer researchprogram at DARPA, 4 starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors atDARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, ofthe importance of this networking concept.
Leonard Kleinrock atMIT published the first paper on packet switching theory in July 1961 and thefirst book on the subject in 1964. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of thetheoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits,which was a major step along the path towards computer networking. The otherkey step was to make the computers talk together. To explore this, in 1965working with Thomas Merrill, Roberts connected the TX-2 computer in Mass. to the Q-32 in California with a low speed dial-uptelephone line creating the first (however small) wide-area computer network everbuilt. The result of this experimentwas the realization that the time-shared computers could work well together,running programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine, butthat the circuit switched telephone system was totally inadequate for the job.Kleinrock's conviction of the need for packet switching was confirmed.
In late 1966 Robertswent to DARPA to develop the computer network concept and quickly put togetherhis plan for the «ARPANET», publishing it in 1967. At the conferencewhere he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet networkconcept from the UKby Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL. Scantlebury told Roberts aboutthe NPL work as well as that of Paul Baran and others at RAND.The RAND group had written a paper on packetswitching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964. It happened thatthe work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND(1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without anyof the researchers knowing about the other work. The word «packet»was adopted from the work at NPL and the proposed line speed to be used in theARPANET design was upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps.
In August 1968, afterRoberts and the DARPA funded community had refined the overall structure andspecifications for the ARPANET, an RFQ was released by DARPA for thedevelopment of one of the key components, the packet switches called InterfaceMessage Processors (IMP's). The RFQ was won in December 1968 by a group headedby Frank Heart at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). As the BBN team worked on theIMP's with Bob Kahn playing a major role in the overall ARPANET architecturaldesign, the network topology and economics were designed and optimized byRoberts working with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis Corporation,and the network measurement system was prepared by Kleinrock's team at UCLA.
Due to Kleinrock'searly development of packet switching theory and his focus on analysis, designand measurement, his Network Measurement Centerat UCLA was selected to be the first node on the ARPANET. All this cametogether in September 1969 when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and thefirst host computer was connected. Doug Engelbart's project on«Augmentation of Human Intellect» (which included NLS, an earlyhypertext system) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) provided a second node.SRI supported the Network Information Center,led by Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler and including functions such as maintainingtables of host name to address mapping as well as a directory of the RFC's. Onemonth later, when SRI was connected to the ARPANET, the first host-to-hostmessage was sent from Kleinrock's laboratory to SRI. Two more nodes were addedat UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah. These last twonodes incorporated application visualization projects, with Glen Culler andBurton Fried at UCSB investigating methods for display of mathematicalfunctions using storage displays to deal with the problem of refresh over thenet, and Robert Taylor and Ivan Sutherland at Utah investigating methods of 3-Drepresentations over the net. Thus, by the end of 1969, four host computerswere connected together into the initial ARPANET, and the budding Internet wasoff the ground. Even at this early stage, it should be noted that thenetworking research incorporated both work on the underlying network and workon how to utilize the network. This tradition continues to this day.
Computers were addedquickly to the ARPANET during the following years, and work proceeded oncompleting a functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and other networksoftware. In December 1970 the Network Working Group (NWG) working under S.Crocker finished the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the NetworkControl Protocol (NCP). As the ARPANET sites completed implementing NCP duringthe period 1971-1972, the network users finally could begin to developapplications.
In October 1972 Kahnorganized a large, very successful demonstration of the ARPANET at theInternational Computer Communication Conference (ICCC). This was the firstpublic demonstration of this new network technology to the public. It was alsoin 1972 that the initial «hot» application, electronic mail, wasintroduced. In March Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the basic email message sendand read software, motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easycoordination mechanism. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing thefirst email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, andrespond to messages. From there email took off as the largest networkapplication for over a decade. This was a harbinger of the kind of activity wesee on the World Wide Web today, namely, the enormous growth of all kinds of«people-to-people» traffic.