What’s the story?
The Internet started life at the end of the 1960s as the ARPAnet research and defence network in the US that linked servers used by key military and academic collaborators. It was established as a network that would be reliable even if some of the links were broken. This was achieved because data and messages sent between users were broken up into smaller packets and could follow different routes.
However, the technological roots of the Internet can be traced back to 1957, a time of tension between the USA and the Soviet Union, when the Cold War was at it peak. Eisenhower, the American President at the time, had announced back in 1955 that the USA hoped to launch a small Earth orbiting satellite in 1957 on a mission to monitor the unusual solar activity expected that year. The Kremlin announced that it hoped to do the same and so became a race between the competing superpowers. By 4 October 1957 the USSR had won, through successfully launching Sputnik I into Earth orbit.
The Soviets’ success was a shock for the United States and led to a major re-think of their defence strategies. Part of their response was the creation of Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) with a brief to develop technologies for the US military that would help them keep ahead of the Soviets. ARPA was set to become the think tank of the American military and would employ many top scientists in a variety of defence-related research projects
ARPA’s early focus was on complex projects related to space travel, ballistic missiles and nuclear test monitoring. To cope with the complexity of such projects and communicate effectively with the sub-contractors involved, it rapidly started to develop links between computer systems. As a spin off from this ARPA started a computer research program in 1962 and appointed a scientist called John Licklider to lead it. Licklider had just published a paper called the "Galactic Network" where he set out his vision of a computer network that was accessible to everyone.
Licklider said:
'To appreciate the important the new computer-aided communication can have, one must consider the dynamics of "critical mass," as it applies to cooperation in creative endeavor. Take any problem worthy of the name, and you find only a few people who can contribute effectively to its solution. Those people must be brought into close intellectual partnership so that their ideas can come into contactwith one another. But bring these people together physically in one place to form a team, and you have trouble, for the most creative people are often not the best team players, and there are not enough top positions in a single organization to keep them all happy. Let them go their separate ways, and each creates his own empire, large or small, and devotes more time to the role of emperor than to the role of problem solver. The principals still get together at meetings. They still visit one another. But the time scale of their communication stretches out, and the correlations among mental models degenerate between meetings so that it may take a year to do a week's communicating. There has to be some way of facilitating communication among people without bringing them together in one place.'
Around the same time another ARPA scientist, Leonard Klienrock was developing key networking ideas for data transfer based on breaking a transmission up into 'packages'. This would work by sending them separately to their destination where they would then be reassembled into their original form. By 1966/67 all this related research work had developed sufficiently for the then head of computer research, Leonard Roberts, to publish a plan for a computer network system called ARPANET It is not unusual for researchers working in new fields to independently arrive at the same findings. When the ARPANET plans were published it turned out that teams at MIT, the National Physics Laboratory (UK) and by RAND Corporation had all been working on similar ideas - the feasibility of wide area networks, and so their best ideas were also incorporated into the ARPANET design.
The first LOGIN
In an unprecedented plan Kleinrock, a pioneering computer science professor at UCLA, and his small group of graduate students hoped to log onto the Stanford computer and try to send it some data. They would start by typing "login," and seeing if the letters appeared on the far-off monitor.
"We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI...," Kleinrock ... said in an interview: "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 we asked, "Do you see the O." "Yes, we see the O." "Then we typed the G, and the system crashed"... Yet a revolution had begun"...
The final piece in the jigsaw was to develop a standard means for different computer systems to talk to each other across the network. This new standard or protocol, was developed by 1968 and became known as an interface message processor (IMPs) and in October 1969 IMPs were installed in computers at both UCLA and Stanford universities And so ARPANET began to grow, by 1969 it comprised of four host computers as with the addition of research centres in Santa Barbara and Utah. Over the next few months the team worked on refining the software that would expand the network's capabilities. At the same time, ever more computers were linked to the net. By December 1971 ARPANET linked 23 host computers to each other
The first public demonstration of ARPANET was in October 1972 at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication, held in Washington DC, where computers from 40 different locations were networked together. The demonstration was a great success and, over the next few years, ARPA developed several key networking concepts including the fore runner to email and further networking protocols.
The development of transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) at ARPA in 1974 marked another crucial stage in networking development. One of it’s key concepts was that of an 'open architecture', implementing one of Licklider's original idea’s from his "Galactic Network” paper. However, it would take several years of modification and redesign work before universal adoption of TCP/IP. During this time ARPANET was still the backbone to the entire system and in 1982 when it finally adopted the TCP/IP standard to create a connected |