essay on history of internet

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The Invention of the Internet

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 28, 2019 | Original: July 30, 2010

Unlike technologies such as the light bulb or the telephone, the internet has no single “inventor.” Instead, it has evolved over time. The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War. For years, scientists and researchers used it to communicate and share data with one another. Today, we use the internet for almost everything, and for many people it would be impossible to imagine life without it.

The Sputnik Scare

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first manmade satellite into orbit. The satellite, known as Sputnik, did not do much: It relayed blips and bleeps from its radio transmitters as it circled the Earth. Still, to many Americans, the beach-ball-sized Sputnik was proof of something alarming: While the brightest scientists and engineers in the United States had been designing bigger cars and better television sets, it seemed, the Soviets had been focusing on less frivolous things—and they were going to win the Cold War because of it.

Did you know? Today, almost one-third of the world’s 6.8 billion people use the internet regularly.

After Sputnik’s launch, many Americans began to think more seriously about science and technology. Schools added courses on subjects like chemistry, physics and calculus. Corporations took government grants and invested them in scientific research and development. And the federal government itself formed new agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to develop space-age technologies such as rockets, weapons and computers.

The Birth of the ARPAnet

Scientists and military experts were especially concerned about what might happen in the event of a Soviet attack on the nation’s telephone system. Just one missile, they feared, could destroy the whole network of lines and wires that made efficient long-distance communication possible. 

In 1962, a scientist from M.I.T. and ARPA named J.C.R. Licklider proposed a solution to this problem: a “galactic network” of computers that could talk to one another. Such a network would enable government leaders to communicate even if the Soviets destroyed the telephone system.

In 1965, another M.I.T. scientist developed a way of sending information from one computer to another that he called “packet switching.” Packet switching breaks data down into blocks, or packets, before sending it to its destination. That way, each packet can take its own route from place to place. Without packet switching, the government’s computer network—now known as the ARPAnet—would have been just as vulnerable to enemy attacks as the phone system.

On October 29, 1969, ARPAnet delivered its first message: a “node-to-node” communication from one computer to another. (The first computer was located in a research lab at UCLA and the second was at Stanford; each one was the size of a small house.) The message—“LOGIN”—was short and simple, but it crashed the fledgling ARPA network anyway: The Stanford computer only received the note’s first two letters.

The Network Grows

By the end of 1969, just four computers were connected to the ARPAnet, but the network grew steadily during the 1970s. 

In 1971, it added the University of Hawaii’s ALOHAnet, and two years later it added networks at London’s University College and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway. As packet-switched computer networks multiplied, however, it became more difficult for them to integrate into a single worldwide “internet.”

By the end of the 1970s, a computer scientist named Vinton Cerf had begun to solve this problem by developing a way for all of the computers on all of the world’s mini-networks to communicate with one another. He called his invention “Transmission Control Protocol,” or TCP. (Later, he added an additional protocol, known as “Internet Protocol.” The acronym we use to refer to these today is TCP/IP.) One writer describes Cerf’s protocol as “the ‘handshake’ that introduces distant and different computers to each other in a virtual space.”

The World Wide Web

Cerf’s protocol transformed the internet into a worldwide network. Throughout the 1980s, researchers and scientists used it to send files and data from one computer to another. However, in 1991 the internet changed again. That year, a computer programmer in Switzerland named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.

Since then, the internet has changed in many ways. In 1992, a group of students and researchers at the University of Illinois developed a sophisticated browser that they called Mosaic. (It later became Netscape.) Mosaic offered a user-friendly way to search the Web: It allowed users to see words and pictures on the same page for the first time and to navigate using scrollbars and clickable links. 

That same year, Congress decided that the Web could be used for commercial purposes. As a result, companies of all kinds hurried to set up websites of their own, and e-commerce entrepreneurs began to use the internet to sell goods directly to customers. More recently, social networking sites like Facebook have become a popular way for people of all ages to stay connected.

HISTORY Vault: 101 Inventions That Changed the World

Take a closer look at the inventions that have transformed our lives far beyond our homes (the steam engine), our planet (the telescope) and our wildest dreams (the internet).

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A short history of the internet

Published: 3 December 2020

Read about the history of the internet, from its 1950s origins to the World Wide Web’s explosion in popularity in the late 1990s and the ‘dotcom bubble’.

The origins of the internet

The origins of the internet are rooted in the USA of the 1950s. The Cold War was at its height and huge tensions existed between North America and the Soviet Union. Both superpowers were in possession of deadly nuclear weapons, and people lived in fear of long-range surprise attacks. The US realised it needed a communications system that could not be affected by a Soviet nuclear attack.

At this time, computers were large, expensive machines exclusively used by military scientists and university staff.

These machines were powerful but limited in numbers, and researchers grew increasingly frustrated: they required access to the technology, but had to travel great distances to use it.

To solve this problem, researchers started ‘time-sharing’. This meant that users could simultaneously access a mainframe computer through a series of terminals, although individually they had only a fraction of the computer’s actual power at their command.

The difficulty of using such systems led various scientists, engineers and organisations to research the possibility of a large-scale computer network.

Who invented the internet?

No one person invented the internet. When networking technology was first developed, a number of scientists and engineers brought their research together to create the ARPANET . Later, other inventors’ creations paved the way for the web as we know it today.

• PAUL BARAN (1926–2011)

An engineer whose work overlapped with ARPA’s research. In 1959 he joined an American think tank, the RAND Corporation, and was asked to research how the US Air Force could keep control of its fleet if a nuclear attack ever happened. In 1964 Baran proposed a communication network with no central command point. If one point was destroyed, all surviving points would still be able to communicate with each other. He called this a distributed network.

• LAWRENCE ROBERTS (1937–2018)

Chief scientist at ARPA, responsible for developing computer networks. Paul Baran’s idea appealed to Roberts, and he began to work on the creation of a distributed network.

• LEONARD KLEINROCK (1934–)

An American scientist who worked towards the creation of a distributed network alongside Lawrence Roberts.

• DONALD DAVIES (1924–2000)

A British scientist who, at the same time as Roberts and Kleinrock, was developing similar technology at the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex.

• BOB KAHN (1938–) AND VINT CERF (1943–)

American computer scientists who developed TCP/IP , the set of protocols that governs how data moves through a network. This helped the ARPANET evolve into the internet we use today. Vint Cerf is credited with the first written use of the word ‘internet’.

When asked to explain my role in the creation of the internet, I generally use the example of a city. I helped to build the roads—the infrastructure that gets things from point A to point B. —Vint Cerf, 2007

• PAUL MOCKAPETRIS (1948–) AND JON POSTEL (1943–98)

Inventors of DNS , the ‘phone book of the internet’.

• TIM BERNERS-LEE (1955–)

Creator of the World Wide Web who developed many of the principles we still use today, such as HTML, HTTP, URLs and web browsers.

There was no “Eureka!” moment. It was not like the legendary apple falling on Newton’s head to demonstrate the concept of gravity. Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realisation that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way. And that awareness came to me through precisely that kind of process. The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, and realisations from many sides. —Tim Berners-Lee,  Weaving the Web , 1999

• MARC ANDREESSEN (1971–)

Inventor of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser.

The first use of a computer network

In 1965, Lawrence Roberts made two separate computers in different places ‘talk’ to each other for the first time. This experimental link used a telephone line with an acoustically coupled modem, and transferred digital data using packets.

When the first packet-switching network was developed, Leonard Kleinrock was the first person to use it to send a message. He used a computer at UCLA to send a message to a computer at Stanford. Kleinrock tried to type ‘login’ but the system crashed after the letters ‘L’ and ‘O’ had appeared on the Stanford monitor.

A second attempt proved successful and more messages were exchanged between the two sites. The ARPANET was born.

The life and death of the ARPANET

President Dwight D. Eisenhower formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958, bringing together some of the best scientific minds in the country. Their aim was to help American military technology stay ahead of its enemies and prevent surprises, such as the launch of the satellite Sputnik 1, happening again. Among ARPA’s projects was a remit to test the feasibility of a large-scale computer network.

Lawrence Roberts was responsible for developing computer networks at ARPA, working with scientist Leonard Kleinrock. Roberts was the first person to connect two computers. When the first packet-switching network was developed in 1969, Kleinrock successfully used it to send messages to another site, and the ARPA Network—or ARPANET—was born.

Once ARPANET was up and running, it quickly expanded. By 1973, 30 academic, military and research institutions had joined the network, connecting locations including Hawaii, Norway and the UK.

As ARPANET grew, a set of rules for handling data packets needed to be put in place. In 1974, computer scientists Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf invented a new method called transmission-control protocol, popularly known as TCP/IP , which essentially allowed computers to speak the same language.

After the introduction of TCP/IP, ARPANET quickly grew to become a global interconnected network of networks, or ‘Internet’.

The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.

What is packet switching?

‘Packet switching’ is a method of splitting and sending data. A computer file is effectively broken up into thousands of small segments called ‘packets’—each typically around 1500 bytes—distributed across a network, and then reordered back into a single file at their destination. The packet switching method is very reliable and allows data to be sent securely, even over damaged networks; it also uses bandwidth very efficiently and doesn’t need a single dedicated link, like a telephone call does.

The world’s first packet-switching computer network was produced in 1969. Computers at four American universities were connected using separate minicomputers known as ‘Interface Message Processors’ or ‘IMPs’. The IMPs acted as gateways for the packets and have since evolved into what we now call ‘routers’.

Packet switching is the basis on which the internet still works today.

What is TCP/IP?

TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. The term is used to describe a set of protocols that govern how data moves through a network.

After the creation of ARPANET, more networks of computers began to join the network, and the need arose for an agreed set of rules for handling data. In 1974 two American computer scientists, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, proposed a new method that involved sending data packets in a digital envelope or ‘datagram’. The address on the datagram can be read by any computer, but only the final host machine can open the envelope and read the message inside.

Kahn and Cerf called this method transmission-control protocol (TCP). TCP allowed computers to speak the same language, and it helped the ARPANET to grow into a global interconnected network of networks, an example of ‘internetworking’—internet for short.

IP stands for Internet Protocol and, when combined with TCP, helps internet traffic find its destination. Every device connected to the internet is given a unique IP number. Known as an IP address, the number can be used to find the location of any internet-connected device in the world.

What is DNS?

DNS stands for Domain Name System. It is the internet’s equivalent of a phone book, and converts hard-to-remember IP addresses into simple names.

In the early 1980s, cheaper technology and the appearance of desktop computers allowed the rapid development of local area networks (LANs). An increase in the amount of computers on the network made it difficult to keep track of all the different IP addresses.

This problem was solved by the introduction of the Domain Name System (DNS) in 1983. DNS was invented by Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel at the University of Southern California. It was one of the innovations that paved the way for the World Wide Web.

The beginnings of email

Email was a rapid—but unintended—consequence of the growth of ARPANET. As the network increased in popularity and scope, users quickly realised the potential of the network as a tool for sending messages between different ARPANET computers.

Ray Tomlinson , an American computer programmer, is responsible for electronic mail as we know it today. He introduced the idea that the destination of a message should be indicated using the @ symbol, which was first used to distinguish between the individual user’s name and that of their computer (i.e. user@computer). When DNS was introduced, this was extended to  [email protected] .

Early email users sent personal messages and began mailing lists on specific topics. One of the first big mailing lists was ‘SF-LOVERS’ for science fiction fans.

The development of email showed how the network had transformed. Rather than a way of accessing expensive computing power, it had started to become a place to communicate, gossip and make friends.

Early home computers

From the 1970s onwards, the home computer industry grew exponentially. The uptake of home computers was not necessarily driven by users’ needs or a computer’s functionality; early machines could actually do relatively little. The appeal to the consumer was the idea of becoming part of the ‘Information Revolution’. Computers were embedded with the rhetoric of the future and learning, but in most cases this meant learning to program so that people could actually make the technology do something, such as play games.

More information about collection object

The growth of the internet, 1985–95.

The invention of DNS, the common use of TCP/IP and the popularity of email caused an explosion of activity on the internet. Between 1986 and 1987, the network grew from 2,000 hosts to 30,000. People were now using the internet to send messages to each other, read news and swap files. However, advanced knowledge of computing was still needed to dial in to the system and use it effectively, and there was still no agreement on the way that documents on the network were formatted.

The internet needed to be easier to use. An answer to the problem appeared in 1989 when a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to his employer, CERN, the international particle-research laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee proposed a new way of structuring and linking all the information available on CERN’s computer network that made it quick and easy to access. His concept for a ‘web of information’ would ultimately become the World Wide Web.

The launch of the Mosaic browser in 1993 opened up the web to a new audience of non-academics, and people started to discover how easy it was to create their own HTML web pages. Consequently, the number of websites grew from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the start of 1996.

By 1995 the internet and the World Wide Web were established phenomena: Netscape Navigator, which was the most popular browser at the time, had around 10 million global users.

How is the World Wide Web different from the internet?

The terms ‘World Wide Web’ and ‘internet’ are often confused. The internet is the networking infrastructure that connects devices together, while the World Wide Web is a way of accessing information through the medium of the internet.

Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of a ‘web of information’ in 1989. It relied on ‘hyperlinks’ to connect documents together. Written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a hyperlink can point to any other HTML page or file that sits on top of the internet.

In 1990, Berners-Lee developed Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and designed the Universal Resource Identifier (URI) system. HTTP is the language computers use to communicate HTML documents over the internet, and the URI, also known as a URL, provides a unique address where the pages can be easily found.

Berners-Lee also created a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format. He called this ‘browser’ the ‘WorldWideWeb’.

On 6 August 1991 the code to create more web pages and the software to view them was made freely available on the internet. Computer enthusiasts around the world began setting up their own websites. Berners-Lee’s vision of a free, global and shared information space began to take shape.

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. Tim Berners-Lee (1998)

The introduction of web browsers

Tim Berners-Lee was the first to create a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format. He called this ‘browser’ the ‘WorldWideWeb’. However, this original application had limited use as it could only be used on advanced  NeXT machines . A simplified version that could run on any computer was created by Nicola Pellow, a maths student who worked alongside Berners-Lee at CERN.

In 1993, Marc Andreessen, an American student in Illinois, launched a new browser called Mosaic. Created at the National Center for Super-computing Applications (NCSA), Mosaic was easy to download and install, worked on many different computers and provided simple point-and-click access to the World Wide Web. Mosaic was also the first browser to display images next to text, rather than in a separate window.

Mosaic’s simplicity opened the web up to a new audience, and caused an explosion of activity on the internet, with the number of websites growing from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the start of 1996.

In 1994 Andreesen formed Netscape Communications with entrepreneur Jim Clark. They led the company to create Netscape Navigator, a widely used internet browser that at the time was faster and more sophisticated than any of the competition. By 1995, Navigator had around 10 million global users.

Early ecommerce and the ‘dotcom bubble’

The enormous excitement surrounding the internet led to a massive boom in new technology shares between 1998 and 2000. This became known as the ‘dotcom bubble’.

The claim was that world industry was experiencing a ‘new economic paradigm’, the likes of which had never been experienced before. Investors in the stock market began to believe the hype and threw themselves into a frenzy of activity. The internet was thought to be central to economic growth, while share prices implied that new online companies carried the seeds for expansion. This led in turn to a feverish level of investment and unrealistic expectations about rates of return.

We have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years and bring increasing prosperity for—quite literally—billions of people on the planet. We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. —Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden,  Wired , July 1997

Venture capitalists flourished and many companies were founded on dubious business plans. The most notorious of these was the high fashion online retailer Boo.com, which spent its way through $200 million, only to collapse within six months of its website going live.

However, despite their failure, such businesses helped cause a fundamental transformation and left an important legacy. Many investors lost money, but they also helped to finance the new system and lay the groundwork for future success in ecommerce.

Further reading

• Brief History of the Internet , Internet Society
• Internet History 1962 to 1992 , Computer History Museum
• Internet Pioneers , ibiblio
• Tim Berners-Lee biography , World Wide Web Consortium
• The World Wide Web: A global information space , Science Museum
• John Naughton,  A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet , 1999
• Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon,  Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet , 1996
• Tim Berners-Lee,  Weaving the Web , 1999

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The Evolution of the Internet: From Early Networks to Today‘s Global Phenomenon

• by history tools
• March 27, 2024

The internet has revolutionized communication, commerce, and countless aspects of modern life. But how did we get here? Tracking the origin and growth of the internet reveals a story filled with collaboration, innovation, and far-reaching impact.

Networking Breakthroughs Set the Foundation

Creating a functional computer network involved solving daunting technical barriers. In the early 1960s, scientists across disciplines began to map out solutions.

MIT professor Leonard Kleinrock developed the concept of packet switching, breaking data into blocks instead of one long message. This allowed more efficient transfers by routing packets individually.

In 1965, Welsh scientist Donald Davies coined the term "packet" for chopped up messages and built a packet switching network in the UK.

Soon after, the U.S. Defense Department‘s ARPA (later DARPA ) funded efforts to allow researchers to access computers remotely through a network. Under the leadership of Larry Roberts , the ARPANET project launched in 1969 with Kleinrock helping design the network.

The initial ARPANET linked computer science departments at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah using 50kbps modem lines. By 1971, it connected over 20 machines. This humble start sparked rapid advancement.

(Insert network size growth statistics over time)

Equally important work came from little-known genius Radia Perlman , who developed the spanning tree algorithm and other fundamental concepts that underlie reliable network bridge operations to this day.

The collaborative infrastructure took shape with established standards like Ethernet local area connections, Transmission Control and Internet Protocols ( TCP/IP ), and fiber optic cables capable of transmitting data securely at the speed of light across continents.

As LAN networks bridged together into larger WANs (wide area networks), they relied on an ever-expanding array of routers, servers and computers to transmit packets around the world.

Birth of the World Wide Web

Another visionary named Tim Berners-Lee pioneered the World Wide Web application in 1989. Working at CERN research center, Berners-Lee developed a brilliantly simple system using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Universal Resource Locators (URLs).

This allowed seamless linking between documents and easy searching across connected machines. Combined with the first web browsers, the web provided intuitive access that sparked rapid growth in the 1990s.

(Insert internet user statistics over time)

Meanwhile, the internet backbone capacities exploded exponentially from early modem speeds thanks to fiber optic network lines spanning the globe. New cables with endless bandwidth capabilities became critical infrastructure for our increasingly digital-dependent world.

1990s: Internet Goes Mainstream

As internet speeds ramped up in the 1990s, commercialization and privatization opened the gates to mass adoption. AOL‘s easy on-ramp enticed millions of average household consumers to “get online.”

The launch of consumer browsers like Mosaic and Netscape Navigator unlocked the World Wide Web‘s potential for the public. In 1995, ambitious startups like Amazon and eBay recognized this potential early. Internet pure plays jumped in to lead the dot-com investor frenzy.

(Insert e-commerce adoption statistics over time)

Hundreds of internet companies launched sites for news, entertainment, chat rooms and early networked gaming. Portals like Yahoo became popular homepages to help navigate the messy early web.

Meanwhile, internet connections progressed rapidly from sluggish dial-up modem connections to always-on high bandwidth broadband, led by cable and phone company network upgrades.

As the 20th century closed, nearly 50% of U.S. households adopted internet access at home – a remarkable penetration rate for a technology introduced less than 30 years prior.

Dot-com Bubble Burst

The dizzying pace of the late 90s internet gold rush hit a harsh reality check when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000-2001. Scores of companies failed as the market corrected itself from unrealistic valuations.

However, this shakeout produced important lasting companies like Google, which revolutionized search and internet advertising. Other healthy businesses like Amazon weathered the storm.

This period also saw infrastructure advances. WiFi hotspots for wireless connectivity took root. Creative tinkerers explored early Internet of Things applications allowing remote control of connected devices in homes and offices.

Web 2.0 and Beyond

In the early 2000s, sites promoting user-generated content democratized the internet. Blogging platforms let anyone share their expertise. Wikipedia users collectively built an expansive online encyclopedia.

The launch of social networks like MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook ushered in unprecedented direct interaction. User behaviours shifted radically as social feeds, messages and photos dominated online activity.

Video sharing sites like YouTube brought streaming entertainment to the masses. This kicked off the rise of influencer culture and citizen journalism documenting current events in real-time across the globe.

Smartphones accelerated adoption and usage with always-on mobile access. Apps became preferred direct internet gateways over browsers alone.

Over 60% of the world population now uses the internet regularly via an ever-expanding array of devices from phones to watches to refrigerators.

(Insert mobile/social network adoption statistics)

Ongoing Evolution

The past 20 years produced exponential advances across technologies intertwined with internet networks:

• Digital content streaming
• Video conferencing
• Cloud computing
• Artificial intelligence
• Cryptocurrencies
• Remote healthcare
• Smart homes/cities

The modern internet connects the world in profound ways spotlighting both bright and dark aspects of humanity. It provides lifelines of communication and knowledge while enabling scams, isolation, and conflict.

Networked apps catalyzed monumental social change enabling uprisings like Arab Spring while exacerbating spread of misinformation and extremist recruitment.

Questions around ownership, privacy and objectivity loom large over big tech’s dominance. Calls for regulation fight to balance security, fairness and freedom. The digital divide still blocks billions in poorer nations from internet access, while most of the developed world enjoys broadband speeds moving from Mbps to Gbps.

As web pioneer Sir Tim Berners Lee pointed out on the 30 year anniversary of the public web, "It‘s not that technology has created a perfect world by any means. But we have ended up with a much more connected world." No one can predict what innovations still lie ahead as the internet continues reshaping civilization.

Related posts:

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• What is a Replay Attack, and How Does it Work?
• The Extreme Security of Air Gap Laptops: An Expert Guide
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History of the Internet Research Paper

The arpanet, necessity of development, packet switching network, works cited.

Internet is an acronym that is used to refer to internetworking which was adapted in early 70s. Users all over the globe use an internet protocol to access information from unified computers all over the world.

The users can only access information from internet sources when they are given permission by relevant authorities. Originally, the internet was developed for communication between researchers in different universities. As the demand for internet grew all over the world, demand for new techniques were necessary to accommodate the growing demand worldwide.

The growth of internet has since escalated all over the world as a result of increased usage. Now the internet has evolved to be one of the most vital tools in communications and broadcast of information. It has been embraced by all stakeholders in the world including individuals, private sector and government agencies.

According to Luckanavanaporn (44), “internet is used to send messages via emails and social networks which help in interaction between people in different parts of the world. This helps in spreading of information and increases understanding between people of different backgrounds thus bringing about friendship.”

In the late 1960s, some proponents of the internet conducted research to find out the likelihood of interconnection between systems using the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

They settled on building a network with the first one linking Stanford Institute of research and California University. Ten years down the line, there was significant growth in the industry because more than 200 institutions had subscribed for the interconnection network.

The ARPANET became the basis upon which the internet grew. When it was first developed, it main purpose was to facilitate for exchanging comments which is still used today to relay internet protocols. Global exchange of information on ARPANET was not very reliable, and various developments in Europe were adopted to improve the system.

Before the internet was invented communication systems were restricted in nature. They were based on the fundamental central processing unit of a computer. It only allowed sharing information between specified places.

As the necessity of internet use increased, programs were put in place to find out and survey the possibility of standard interconnections between physically separate systems. Different states came in to participate with the likelihood of designing a network which could allow communication between them.

Luckanavanaporn (56) wrote that “the United States financed a project of its military agency to assemble strong and secured networks that could not be hacked. The USSR on the other hand launched their technology which motivated the United States to develop more superior machinery in their army to allow interactions and linkage between their computers and the pentagon.”

With the offset of research programs to develop a solitary networking working structure, a digital networking system was developed. Luckanavanaporn (23) argued that, research brought about upgrading and development of several packet switching networking solutions comprising several protocols.

This eventually led to the idea of global networking, called the internet, in a typical protocol. After the idea was born, internet was quickly embraced across the world but still the poor countries lacked behind. Providers of the internet commercialized and ran their services privately after all these developments. These brought about huge changes on culture and trade as investors ventured new markets.

Luckanavanaporn (97) argued that “the Internet development is strongly linked to the military as it was an innovation of the military. The department of the American defense funded research plans towards development of military which were aimed at solving their problems.”

They were especially interested in developing away of communication with each other using computers. These developments would advance development in technology and offer a protected command and manage information during wartime. The department began to concern itself with building an efficient network.

Research was conducted to determine whether there could be communication between computers in different universities without the necessity of a central system. Interface message processor (IMP), which was the basis of the communication system, was developed. This processor was used for forming the network between computers. These were the backbone of packet switching network.

The packet switching system became more reliable as it had more advantages because it could not be destroyed easily because it did not depend entirely on one computer. However these system ran into problems and so there was a need to develop a new technology. Network control protocol was developed to curb this problem (Luckanavanaporn, 19).

This became the concept of networking. After all these innovations were developed, a satellite was running as more and more host was connected over the lines. This technology however could not accommodate many hosts so they had to design another one for a large network. Broadcast control procedures were developed. It was more complicated than the previous protocols.

As advancements continued more networks sprung up but existed separately. Later on, they negotiated to build gateways between them. More developments are still being made today as networks continue to be designed to suit the new challenges. We are yet to see major advancements that might out do the previous developments.

When the Internet started its course most people could not use it because it required a lot of expertise. As a result of the expenses that came with the installation of the internet, huge institutions were the only ones that could afford connectivity. When autonomous business networks came on board, more software which was user friendly was developed.

Services have been made more efficient and easily accessible by the presence of the internet. Communications have increased a great deal and now information can be accessed easily. Researchers project that, by the year 2012, the overall percentage of people using the internet in the world would have grown to 23% and associated installation costs would have reduced significantly.

Luckanavanaporn Rasamee. The Evolution of the Telecommunication and Cellular Phone Industry in Thailand . University of Oregon, USA: Oregon University Press.1997.

• Packet Switching and Fibre Optics in Modern Communication and Data Storage
• Packet Switching in Data Communication
• Effects of Word Processors on Writing Ability
• Impact of Computer Based Communication
• Impact of the Internet on Information Systems Ethics
• What is a Weblog?
• The Policies and Documentation: IPv4 vs. IPv6
• IT & Networks for Business
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2018, July 8). History of the Internet. https://ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-the-internet/

"History of the Internet." IvyPanda , 8 July 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-the-internet/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'History of the Internet'. 8 July.

IvyPanda . 2018. "History of the Internet." July 8, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-the-internet/.

1. IvyPanda . "History of the Internet." July 8, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-the-internet/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "History of the Internet." July 8, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-the-internet/.

Internet50 Highlights

On October 29, 1969 at UCLA, Professor Lenonard Kleinrock and his team sent the first message over a network of computers that would evolve into the internet. The world’s leading technology experts and visionaries gathered at UCLA on October 29, 2019 to honor the significance of this moment and discuss the current state and future aspirations of our connected world.

*Internet50 content is owned by UCLA Samueli School Of Engineering .

President Eisenhower Created the Advanced Research Project Agency

Speaker 1: Today, a new moon is in the sky. A 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket.

Leonard Kleinrock: In 1957, Sputnik went up. It caused a great distress for this country. We were now behind the Soviets in technology. President Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Project Agency.

Steven Lukasik: ARPA was created in 1958. The guiding principle was ARPA did things that no one else was doing. And therefore, it better do it.

Bob Taylor: And their first research programs were space programs because Sputnik had been a space program.

Steven Lukasik: The ARPA director got cross-wired with the President over whether ARPA should be the launcher of all satellites for the United States. People had thought we better not let too much of the space technology stay in Defense. So NASA was established.

Bob Taylor: And these space programs were transferred from ARPA to NASA which left ARPA with room to start research in other areas. And computer research was one of the areas they opened up.

Steve Crocker: ARPA as an agency is divided up into offices. Each office has a director and a handful of program managers and that was it. So an extremely lightweight, nearly flat structure. The Information Processing Techniques Office was where all of this funding for advanced computer science was coming from.

J.C.R. “Lick” Licklider: The thing that makes the computer communication network special is that it puts the workers, that would be the team members who are geographically distributed, in touch not only with one another but with the information base with which they work all the time.

Charles Herzfeld: Licklider came and gave a seminar at the Pentagon, even talked about the new way of computing. By that time, everybody had seen the ORD batch process. You give a program your problem, this goes away in programs and finally comes back with a stack of paper in which it is alleged that the answer is hidden. That’s a miserable way to do research, but Licklider said, “This is all wrong, you need direct interaction by the individual scientists and the real machine and you don’t have to be in the same institution at the same place. You can do it all by some magic distant medium which we call the net.”

Bob Taylor: A year or two later when ARPA had created this computer research program, they invited Lick to come and be its first director.

Leonard Kleinrock: Licklider basically became the head of the computer side of this research effort.

Charles Herzfeld: I think Licklider is the smartest man I’ve ever met.

Alan Kay: Because he wasn’t a technologist, because he hooked up to this big idea, he was a big… He was big. Lick was big. He had a vision as to what a network might do, give people connectivity and they’ll do some wonderful things. He had no idea how to do it.

Why Did You Pick October 29th, 1969?

JOHN MARKOFF: He left UC Berkeley after taking all of their computer science courses. So Charlie, why don’t we start with you? How did you end up running software for this machine?

CHARLIE KLEIN: Well, I had gone to UCLA as an undergrad and I’d already learned to do some programming from my dad so I ended up…

JOHN MARKOFF: Go ahead.

CHARLIE KLEIN: So I ended up having to take a programming class and went to the department chair and said, “Do I really need to take this?” And he said, “No, you don’t need to. Why don’t you work on my research project?” So I was working for Gerry Estrin on the research, and then, Len got this project to work on the ARPANET. And most of us switched over to Len’s project and I was working on trying to keep our computer system working and working on the operating system and then when the IMP came, I had to write some software to make it work.

JOHN MARKOFF: And you were building an operating system, mostly though, right? For something called the Sigma 7.

CHARLIE KLEIN: Right. Right.

JOHN MARKOFF: Okay. And how did you end up being on campus at 10:30 tonight, 50 years ago?

CHARLIE KLEIN: I enjoyed programming.

CHARLIE KLEIN: I sort of described it as when you got a programming working, it’s like moving up the next level in a video game. You got a little excitement. So I would often stay late at night, sometimes I stayed all night and programmed all night, then went to my classes in the morning.

JOHN MARKOFF: Okay, so the first connection that you had with Menlo Park was not seen as a big deal by you?

CHARLIE KLEIN: Not to me.

JOHN MARKOFF: And why did you pick October 29th 1969 to do it on?

CHARLIE KLEIN: I’m not sure there was any specific reason for that date, we were ready to try it, Bill was ready to try it and we started trying it.

JOHN MARKOFF: Bill, how did you come to be on the other end of that communication?

BILL DUVALL: How did I come to the…

JOHN MARKOFF: To be on the other end of that communication?

BILL DUVALL: Well, basically, I was working with, at SRI with Doug Engelbart and his group, and that’s where a lot of the paradigm that we see today on the internet came from the idea of using a computer, which up to that point, had been used for basically databases for bank and for numerical processing. The idea of using it as a page-oriented, with a mouse, information system, and in fact, that’s where the mouse… He invented the mouse as part of that whole effort. But part of the concept was that there would be basically a lot of workstations… He called them knowledge centers, basically, and these would all have these types of terminals and they’d be connected via network. And so, when the idea of the… And it was being funded by ARPA, so when the idea of a network came along, it was a very natural step to say, “We’ll be one of their first nodes.”

JOHN MARKOFF: You and Charlie hadn’t physically met?

BILL DUVALL: No, in fact, we never physically met for… Until I think 10 years ago or 15 years ago, so.

CHARLIE KLEIN: Yeah. [laughter]

JOHN MARKOFF: But you did regularly talk on the phone?

BILL DUVALL: We did talk on the phone. The whole… When the IMP was delivered, which was, I think the beginning of October at SRI, along with the IMP came a deadline and the deadline was October 31st to basically have a login from one computer to another over the ARPANET at that point. And so, we worked furiously to try and get all the software ready do that, and in order to get… We knew that everything was… There were a lot of things that we were putting together. It was a complicated system, a lot of pieces, and so we decided to start testing early and that’s why… It was October 29th, to see if we could beat the deadline, and so we scheduled a test for 29th, it was at 10 o’clock at night because there were other people that used the system during the day and we knew that it was fragile to say the least, this was pre-alpha stuff.

JOHN MARKOFF: But also, this wasn’t your primary job at the Augmentation Research Center, this was something you were sort of called into the last moment to do?

BILL DUVALL: That’s right, yeah. There was… A person had been contracted to do the interface and when the IMP was delivered, doing a review of the state of software was obvious that it wasn’t gonna get there and at that time, I was the only person in the group that both understood the protocols and could work in the SDS 940 Time-Sharing System. So I sort of, I was volunteered, let’s put it that way.

JOHN MARKOFF: So, this is the “Watson come here quick” moment of the internet and nobody really knew that that was the case for maybe a decade or two, is that right?

When the Idea of a Network – We’ll Be One of their First Nodes

08:11 JOHN MARKOFF: You and Charlie hadn’t physically met?

08:13 BILL DUVALL: No, in fact, we never physically met for… Until I think 10 years ago or 15 years ago, so.

08:19 CHARLEY KLINE: Yeah. [laughter]

08:20 JOHN MARKOFF: But you did regularly talk on the phone?

08:22 BILL DUVALL: We did talk on the phone. The whole… When the IMP was delivered, which was, I think the beginning of October at SRI, along with the IMP came a deadline and the deadline was October 31st to basically have a login from one computer to another over the ARPANET at that point. And so, we worked furiously to try and get all the software ready do that, and in order to get… We knew that everything was… There were a lot of things that we were putting together. It was a complicated system, a lot of pieces, and so we decided to start testing early and that’s why… It was October 29th, to see if we could beat the deadline, and so we scheduled a test for 29th, it was at 10 o’clock at night because there were other people that used the system during the day and we knew that it was fragile to say the least, this was pre-alpha stuff.

09:16 JOHN MARKOFF: But also, this wasn’t your primary job at the Augmentation Research Center, this was something you were sort of called into the last moment to do?

09:23 BILL DUVALL: That’s right, yeah. There was… A person had been contracted to do the interface and when the IMP was delivered, doing a review of the state of software was obvious that it wasn’t gonna get there and at that time, I was the only person in the group that both understood the protocols and could work in the SDS 940 Time-Sharing System. So I sort of, I was volunteered, let’s put it that way.

09:49 JOHN MARKOFF: So, this is the “Watson come here quick” moment of the internet and nobody really knew that that was the case for maybe a decade or two, is that right?

Request for Comment and the Basic Plan for the ARPANET

JOHN MARKOFF: Well, so then, let’s talk a little bit about how this came to be. Steve, there was this process called Request for Comment and I think that that… If you could explain that and how that came to be, ’cause that was really where the architecture for the system came from.

Steve Crocker: The basic plan for the ARPANET had been laid out by the adults, we were the kids. And so, the IMP was designed by Bolt Beranek and Newman, and the long lines, the telephones that were procured from AT&T. And then what seemed, in a way, an after thought, was okay, “I gotta get some software running on the host to talk to each other.” There was a meeting called at Santa Barbara, UCSB and Elmer Shapiro from the SRI group chaired the meeting, Vint and I drove up, we were… Did you make the choice to send us up there? Somebody said we should go…

Leonard Kleinrock: I wanted to go the cheapest way, you kept busting my budget.

STEVE CROCKER: That came later, the trip to Santa Barbara was cheap, the expenses grew after that. So, Vint and I… This was August ’68, so this was more than a year before the time that we’re talking about. The contract for the IMPs had not yet been let but it was in process, we met counterparts from the other groups. Bill, were you at that meeting? Jeff Rulifson was there, I remember.

Bill Duvall: Yeah, I was there. That was Jeff Rulifson, [12:31] ____ Elmer Shapiro and…

STEVE CROCKER: And it was a pretty interesting meeting in that there was not much of an agenda, we all came with… To find out what was going on and it was sort of like a cocktail party engagement, where you instantly click with certain people, that you can tell you’re on the same wavelength. And we could see that this communication was going to be more interesting than just logging into a remote machine, or sending a file, those were obvious… We obviously wanted to be able to do that, but we could see a bigger picture and we kind of self-organized after that and decided that we would keep talking, and in the process to keep talking, we said, “Well, we should visit each other’s laboratories,” which is were Len’s comment about busting his travel budget came from. And we understood the irony right at the very instant that we said that, that this network was supposed to make it possible to collaborate at a distance, without having to travel. And the first thing we did was lay out a whole travel schedule, so we could visit each other’s laboratories.

STEVE CROCKER: Those meetings, we engaged in large and small topics. The specification for the fine grain communication had not yet been specified ’cause BBN was not yet working on this and they hadn’t published their interface specifications. So we looked at the bigger picture what kinds of things would you wanna do? We sketched out a number of interesting ideas and we did this just sitting around the table in these occasional meetings every six weeks or eight weeks, and then in the spring of 1969, so about six months before the date we’re talking about here, we said, “Well, we should start writing down some of these ideas after all we’re supposed to be academics and we’re supposed to be doing research, we should write something down.” So we dealt out assignments to each of us, “You write this, you write this, I’ll write this” and then I casually offered that I would organize the notes, which I didn’t think about it at the moment, but over the next couple of weeks, every time I sat down to write what should have been a trivial administrative clerical note, I found myself balking big time, I had trepidation and I realized what it was, it was that the act of writing things down might make it look like these were official important authorized and I was very fearful that some adult was gonna come from the East, I didn’t know whether it would be from Boston or from Washington, but “Who are you guys and who gave you authority to do any of this?”

JOHN MARKOFF: Let me quote from RFC 1, you wrote “very little of what is here is firm and reactions are expected.”

STEVE CROCKER: That’s right, that’s right. So late one evening when I was, I was determined I had to write something down I said, “Look, these things have no status, no authority, write anything you want, write as little as you have in mind, you can write questions without answers and so forth.” Bill had suggested the term “request for comments”, I hadn’t remembered that until recently but it stuck in my mind and I said, just as a matter of form, we will make every one of these notes called a request for comments. I figured it was a temporary hack last maybe six months until there was formal documentation of this network. And the other rule that I put down was that you had to write it before I give you a number ’cause I didn’t want a lot of holes in the sequence. And so that seemed to work pretty well except that it didn’t stop, it just kept going and going and going and when I was asked… We did an index of the first 100 and then I was asked to write something for the first 1000 I thought, oh this is a sorcerer’s apprentice kind of situation where you can’t turn it off.

Vint Cerf: They’re about 8800 RFC.

JOHN MARKOFF: Today.

STEVE CROCKER: Well, and they’re not the same because in the early days we had no other way of communicating. We sent these out by snail mail, by US postage, we had a mailing list and in fact, the mailing list was maintained as one of these RFCs and every time we added somebody to the mailing list, it was another RFCs, another RFC.

JOHN MARKOFF: Bill remembered that you guys flipped the coin to see who would write one and two, is that, your memory?

STEVE CROCKER: I lost, I got RFC 1.

Bill Duvall: I remember it the other way, you won and got RFC 1.

ARPANET and how to make it flexible Enough to Accommodate the Future

JOHN MARKOFF: What was remarkable to me about RFC 1 is that it was about two experiments. Did you guys know much about the online system when you actually set that up?

STEVE CROCKER: We had visited this process from August ’68 to spring of ’69, we had now visited each of the laboratories. What was remarkable particularly in retrospect, was the SRI laboratory, Engelbart’s lab, had… They had invented the mouse and ordinary people didn’t see it for another 30 years or something like that, approximately and a graphics interface with hyperlinks and structured text and everything. So the future was sitting right there and better yet, it wasn’t just you could take a tour and see it in laboratory, that group was using it every day. That was part of their basic thing and so it just had to wait ’til it became commercially viable. But we were living, at least, thinking in a mode of, this is the way the world is gonna be and we were gonna lace it together with this ARPANET and then how could we make it flexible enough so that it can accommodate the future technologies that were coming along?

JOHN MARKOFF: I wanna ask a little bit about the culture of those laboratories at the time that you guys were doing this work. You guys both started early, Steve and Vint, you started as high school students spending regular time on the UCLA campuses, is that right?

STEVE CROCKER: Oh yes.

JOHN MARKOFF: Breaking in even on occasion.

STEVE CROCKER: I was afraid you were going there.

VINT CERF: Wait a minute, Steve got permission from Mike Melkenoff who chairman of the department at the time to use a Bendix G-15 paper tape-based machine at UCLA and I think eventually we got to use the 7090, so we had permission. But one evening we showed up or maybe it was a weekend, we showed up and the door was locked. And so what happened then, Steve?

STEVE CROCKER: Statute of limitations has passed. Vint and I had been playing with some silly equations and decided we would try to explore them numerically, at least… It sounds better now than whatever I was able to say then. So this Bendix G-15 was in a building they called Engineering 1 which I believe is now gone but I did have permission to use it and we arranged to come over from Van Nuys High School in San Fernando Valley, it took a little less time to do than it would take today I think.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: You know the dean is in the audience.

STEVE CROCKER: Tell everybody. So we came over on a Saturday, and the building was locked, and I was crestfallen. Two of us are standing there staring at the door, and Vint notices that the second floor window is open and so one of these crank things. And I’m thinking, we’re not really going to… Next thing I know, he’s on my shoulders.

VINT CERF: I always have, that was the beginning.

STEVE CROCKER: He goes through the window, he comes around to the main door, pushes the bar open, and we taped the door so that we could get in and out easily during the day to go buy some food at lunchtime or whatever. Nobody else was around. The interior doors were all open in the offices. This was long before student demonstrations and all other kinds of things that have beset us. We worked all day and we cleaned up afterwards and we went home. That was spring of ’61. Eleven years later in ’72, I’m working for the Defense Department, I’ve got a top-secret clearance, and the Watergate burglars break in, and they taped the door. And one of their cohorts who’s in the hotel across the street is on lookout, but he doesn’t recognize the threat because the security guard who found it was in plain clothes, and the shiver that went down my spine was something.

JOHN MARKOFF: So… Go ahead, you can tell your side of the story.

VINT CERF: I was at the White House in 1999. Hillary Clinton was doing her Millennium Evenings, Honor the Past and Imagine the Future, and she told that story. So the question is, how the hell did she find out about that?

Was it a Hacker Culture?

JOHN MARKOFF: So Steven Levy has written a book called Hackers, you know that… The term “hacker” meant one thing before it meant something else, and when you guys were first computing in the ’60s, a hacker was someone who was really obsessed with computing. And there was a laboratory at MIT, the iLab, where this culture grew up. Would you call the culture you guys created, both at Menlo Park and LA, similar? Was it a hacker culture in that first sense of shared information?

VINT CERF: Well, it was MIT that adopted that term. You were there.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: I was there, but there was an interesting story. These guys again are guilty. There was some guy on campus that committed some terrible break-in to a computer system. Vint decided to hire him as a programmer. Smart guy, you fired him a few months later, right? Didn’t work out.

STEVE CROCKER: It was a question as to whether he could learn to do something other than breaking into systems, particularly if we said, “Look, it’s not interesting, we’ll give you the keys to everything and see if you can do something constructive,” and…

VINT CERF: So hack was a really cool piece of software. The hacker was somebody who produced really clever code, and that was an honorable title for many years.

JOHN MARKOFF: Bill, was the culture the same at Menlo Park?

BILL DUVALL: No, I wouldn’t say it was at all. The culture in Doug Engelbart’s group, the one that I was in, was basically almost self-contained, and people were very focused on this one vision that we were working on. And, although there was some connection to the outside and interchange, it was very little. The group, in and of itself, was a little bit odd, and for SRI, it was generally disliked, I guess I would say. It was certainly not understood. They did things like… We’d work at all hours and we’d have… Friday afternoons would be for wine and beer, and… This was very un-SRI-ish. And one of the things I remember is when I was interviewing to join the group, the last interview had to be with the head of the engineering department, and he asked a few questions, “Why do you wanna do this now?” I’m saying, “What they’re doing is the future, I want to be with that.” And after a while, he thought about it and he looked over his desk at me and he said, “Son, you don’t think what they’re doing up there is science, do you?”

LEONARD KLEINROCK: John, you know you’re talking about the culture for the period, and there is a very strong component that mattered and helped create what we have today, and it’s the way in which the funding took place. I think you’re familiar with the story, the way ARPA funded the various centers, the universities and… They would go to a great researcher there and say, “Here’s a pile of money. Go do something great. Shoot for the moon. Failure’s okay, go high, keep going, you have the money for a long time and we’re not going to watch you.” Now, what else could you ask for? It was an environment that just generated… It was a golden era. And when that came to a principal investigator, passed it off to these guys. Same idea. They complained we didn’t supervise them. I said, “Go do it. Eventually, if you want something, come back to us, but… ” And they ran with it. You can just hear the stories, the way they organized themselves and created this community across many universities, was a very important component that gave a lift to this whole project.

JOHN MARKOFF: Well, and how quickly did that end? And was it the Proxmire Amendment that ended that era of…

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Not totally, but it hurt a lot. They said, basically, it has to have a military application, has to be competitive. You go to a guy, here’s the money, that’s not competitive, it’s not peer-to-peer, but it worked.

VINT CERF: Well, on the other hand, ARPA has some pretty smart people, and so they created this thing called a Broad Area Announcement which said, “This is the area in which we would like to explore. Would you like to submit proposals for that?” I think we managed to induce the right people to submit the right proposals, and the longevity of support from both NSF and ARPA is countable in decades, and so that’s still true today.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It’s true to… But your point about having really good people at the government deciding where the money should go, people like these two here. They were at ARPA. That level of capability looking out and finding the projects to support. That whole thing worked so well.

JOHN MARKOFF: I wanna ask about the design of the network, but before I go there, you were… A lot has been made of the first crash, and I wanna ask a different question about the first crash. When you type G, there was what is known today as a buffer overflow error. And the machine crashed, and you had to fix that problem, and you started over again. What struck me when I learned about for the first time, is that buffer overflow errors have continued to plague the design of computer systems ever since. And in fact, you might say they’re one of the real vulnerabilities in the design of modern computing. What I don’t understand is when Robert Tappan Morris for example, brought the internet to its knees in 1988, the then young internet, he used a buffer overflow there. Why didn’t the designers…

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Because…

BILL DUVALL: I can answer that, it’s because they didn’t talk to me.

JOHN MARKOFF: Walk us through that.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It’s stupid mistakes.

BILL DUVALL: There are two answers to this. One of them is that the initial specification for the first connection was that all messages would be one character in length, and because of the way that the 940 and time-sharing system worked, when you typed a character on your terminal, it didn’t appear on your terminal, it went to the computer and the computer then sent back that character. That’s called full duplex. And the 940 had what they call command recognition. So as you were logging in, as soon as it realized what you wanted to say, it would tie it back, it would send back the rest of the command. So when you type an L, you got an L, and O, you got an O, and a G, you got G-I-N. Well, that’s three characters. And there was no memory available. Memory was very, very tight in the 940. And so when I was allocating buffers and things like that for output, I allocated one character because that’s what the spec said. And three came along and there was a buffer overflow. Now, that seems to absolve me, but the problem is I wrote the spec.

How Leonard Kleinrock Came to Put Together the Networking Group

JOHN MARKOFF: So, Len, tell us the story of how you came to put together the networking group that actually sort of did this on your end.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Well, I came to UCLA having this theory in my hands, waiting for it to have it implemented. Finally, as I said, ARPA said, “Let’s build a network. So I had to get this group together. As Charlie said, he was working with Gerry Estrin. Gerry Estrin had put together a group of great programmers doing a variety of things. When we got the contract, the whole group moved over to me to jump on this really exciting project. So that’s how this group entered the picture. And they continued to run with it beautifully.

29:13 JOHN MARKOFF: So what about the design ideas? Packet switching seems to be kind of a non-obvious idea. And what was the networking theoretical world like when you were starting this process and why did you would… What attracted you to packet switching?

29:28 LEONARD KLEINROCK: So there was no world. At the time, nobody was thinking about data networking in a serious way. And all my classmates at MIT were working on information theory and coding theory which Claude Shannon had solved fundamentally. And the problems that were left over were small and hard. And I was dragged in to do a PhD. I didn’t want to. My supervisor, “You gotta do it.” So I said, “I’m gonna do it.” I wanted to do something with impact, and I wanna get the best professor I know. So I spoke to Claude Shannon and you may not know his name, but he’s a great man. He took me on, and I looked around and I was surrounded by computers and I said, “One day, they’re gonna have to talk to each other.” And the telephone network was woefully inadequate.

30:13 LEONARD KLEINROCK: So I looked at this problem. Here’s a new problem. If it can be solved, it’ll have impact. And I had an approach. I knew how to basically extract the essence of the system which had to do with what we now call the sharing economy. It’s called Airbnb. If you got a room that’s not being used, if you got a communication channel that’s not being used, let somebody else use it who needs it right now. That whole idea of dynamic resource sharing was a principle that I put into the theory. The whole idea of the packet switching, I analyzed a case where you would chop messages into fixed link things called packets, and handle them one at a time. And that had some advantages.

30:53 LEONARD KLEINROCK: So that whole thing came together. I had done the analysis, did an optimization, and then stood around and extracted the principles as to why this thing works well. Most of the students these days don’t bother to do that. They get a result and they… And “Okay, I’m done,” instead of saying, “What is it teaching me?” And we extracted some principles like, dynamic resource sharing was key, like big systems are better, wanted to study a large network, millions of nodes, instead of tens of nodes. Because then you get emergent properties you don’t see in a small network. And looking at distributed algorithm, distributed control and recognizing nobody’s in control when you have a large network, but you can’t get one node to be in control ’cause it’s too much traffic, too vulnerable, too much traffic going in and out. So distribute it. Once you distribute the control, nobody’s in control. So will that work? So you had to prove it wouldn’t collapse. And you could chop pieces, it would still work. So those are the kinds of things we extracted. Came to UCLA with that, waiting to build it, the opportunity came along as I said, and bang…

32:01 JOHN MARKOFF: And it was a DARPA-funded opportunity. Is that what you’re talking about?

32:04 LEONARD KLEINROCK: DARPA-fund… ARPA funded.

32:05 JOHN MARKOFF: ARPA-funded opportunity. Right.

32:06 LEONARD KLEINROCK: Yes.

Survivability in the Event of a Nuclear War

JOHN MARKOFF: So let me jump up a level. And there’s for many years, been a debate over whether ARPA was funded or in some way back because of the design was about survivability in the event of a nuclear war. This is hotly controversial, is it wrong?

VINT CERF: Yes, it is.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It’s an urban myth, but there’s some truth to it.

JOHN MARKOFF: Okay, Lukasik apparently made that assertion.

VINT CERF: Look, in the video that you saw, you could tell that Taylor and Roberts were trying to figure out how to share computing resources among about a dozen universities that were studying artificial intelligence and computer science for ARPA in the 1960s. They couldn’t buy a new computer for every university, every year, so they said, “We’re gonna build a network and you’re gonna have to share.” So, the whole idea in papers that Roberts and Barry Weston wrote were about resource sharing. Even though some of the early ideas of packet switching came from Paul Baran in the study that he did a RAND Corporation, and that was about building survivable networks for post-nuclear responses and post-nuclear scenario, so we should not conflate those two things. The subsequent internet design, however, did go after this question of survivability in a post-nuclear environment, and we even tested that idea because we used the packet radio system and put radios in the strategic Air Command aircraft, artificially broke up the ARPANET into pieces and then glued it back together using the TCP/IP protocols in packet radio. So there is truth to some of this, but it wasn’t specific to ARPANET as much as it was to the subsequent…

LEONARD KLEINROCK: You know, once.

JOHN MARKOFF: Steve…

STEVE CROCKER: Let me… So this is to say is that sort of the persistent myth and the question is, to what extent there’s truth there, and it’s subtle because there’s various layers. As Vint said, Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts were all focused on how do you build a system that would allow the computers to communicate, and people to communicate, share resources, and the degree of “survivability” had to do with just normal operation. Parts are going to break, lines are gonna go down and so forth. When you talk about survivability in a much more stringent sense, you’re in a different part of the design space, and it isn’t just all or nothing because the worst case, the one that attracts everybody’s attention is imagine nuclear holocaust, and nobody’s ever really focused hard on that problem. And I’ll come back to that in just a second, ’cause I spent some time with Lukasik over the past couple of years, having a discussion about that. But you also have, apropos of what Vint talked about, you have stressful situations, particularly in the military, that are more stressful than ordinary daily operation, but less stressful than the Holocaust kind of total catastrophe, and the kind of survivability and knitting the pieces back together again are important experiments there. But they still won’t take you all the way to what do you do if… In the worst case.

STEVE CROCKER: The other part of the story that I think is very important is this culture of initiative that you described, played out in multiple layers. So, you have the agency, ARPA, which later became known as DARPA, which was created after Sputnik, and inside you had a division into various offices and the office that was of concern to us was this Information Processing Techniques Office. And there was quite a bit of delegation down to the offices and to the program managers, and more importantly, even to the researchers themselves, the principal investigators, to invent the projects. And so, there was as much bottom-up kind of operation and choice of topics and so forth, as there was top-down. It was not a dictatorial thing, like we’re gonna build… This was sort of different from saying, “We’re gonna put a man on the moon,” and everything gets organized to that one objective. It was much, much broader. So, the problem that the director of the agency, there was a series of them, but Steve Lukasik was central for a long period of time, is how does he provide the support for all of these projects to go forward and justify that to the higher levels of authority in the Defense Department and Congress?

STEVE CROCKER: So, a conversation approximately like this took place. Lukasik says to Larry Roberts, “Well, could it solve the reconstitution problem?” And allegedly the answer was, “Well, I suppose.” [chuckle] And there’s no paperwork on this, except that years later, Lukasik wrote “Why I signed the cheques for the ARPANET,” and among, included in there is a little reference to nuclear survivability. But Roberts, I pressed him on that a couple of years ago, I interviewed him and he said, “Well, if I’d really been trying to solve that problem, we would have connected every IMP to four other IMPs.” So, and clearly down at the levels that we were working at, there was zero, absolutely zero attention to that. We were working on the problem that affects us all today. How do you get people to talk to each other? How do you get the computers to talk to each other? How do you accommodate the differences among all these systems and get them and so forth? And we were not at all focused on sort of the hardcore defense problem of the day.

JOHN MARKOFF: Weren’t there some… Go ahead.

VINT CERF: So, wait a minute. I’m sorry, I really feel compelled to jump in here, because there are two different things that we’re talking about. We’ve been talking about the ARPANET, that’s what this big celebration is about, on the first connection of the two hosts. But, I really must insist, Steve, that when Bob Kahn and I started to work on the internet design, it was driven by the idea that we would use these technologies for command and control. It was very driven by exactly a military requirement, and that’s why we ended up with satellites and mobile radio, as well as the original ARPANET. So, I wanna make sure that it is not misunderstood, that the motivations behind the original TCP/IP work was somehow only to do with civilian applications, because frankly it wasn’t.

STEVE CROCKER: Yeah. So, this is the area that takes some care in describing, because of course, and the project and the orientation that you’re working on is very important, but I was trying to say is that that kind of application, the command and control and reconstitution in the case that you lose various pieces, is qualitatively different from trying to imagine a post-nuclear exchange environment in which.

VINT CERF: I accept that although I will argue that we try to test at least some ideas that would be needed in order to contribute to that solution and that’s why we did the artificial break-up of the ARPANET.

How Distributed Architecture Won the Day

JOHN MARKOFF: I’m also very interested in how this distributer architecture won the day. When I showed up as a young reporter in the early 1980s, IBM was pushing this idea of a Token Ring and there were many centralized ideas around. Actually, before I get to that all the computing you guys have talked about IBM and AT&T generally don’t show up in that community that you were building. They were the dominant… Why was that?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It was a proprietary network, they were pushing it, you had an SNA network and IBM SNA network you bought IBM equipment and used their communication protocols.

JOHN MARKOFF: Wasn’t IBM and some of those large companies, weren’t they also skeptical about the idea of this project? They didn’t even bid on this, is that right?

VINT CERF: Right, we’re not skeptical about networking because IBM had SNA, Digital had DECnet, HP had DS, they wanted to network their computers but they wanted only their brands of computers to be interconnected and the defense department didn’t wanna end up trapped in one particular brand of computer for purposes of networking which is why the heterogeneous interconnection of different brands of computers which is demonstrated on the ARPANET and then subsequently expanded to allow multiple packet-switched networks should be interconnected was important to the Defense Department.

STEVE CROCKER: There are multiple times here, if you look at 1972, for example, when the public unveiling of the ARPANET a bunch of… Few good people from AT&T came and looked at it and turned up their nose and walked away. You talked about later in the late 1970s, then IBM and AT&T and others are all pushing networking of their particular flavor and then it took a while for it to settle down.

CHARLEY KLINE: If you go back to ’68 when the IMP project was being… The RFP for the IMP was… AT&T and IBM both refused to bid, they both said, “This is a waste of time, it won’t work.”

LEONARD KLEINROCK: AT&T finally launched in 1983, their great network called Net 1000, three years later they closed it down with a billion dollar loss ’cause they couldn’t do it. The technology is not trivial and they [42:13] ____ never got it going.

First Demonstrations of Email

VINT CERF: Well, I think if first demonstrations of email which came in mid to late 1971 when Ray Tomlinson demonstrated that, very quickly after that.

JOHN MARKOFF: So email was not on the ARPANET in the first two years?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: That’s right, yeah.

VINT CERF: It was a development that it was foreshadowed by use of time-sharing systems for email among the participants on the time-sharing system. Tomlinson at Bolt, Beranek and Newman figured out that he could use file transfers to move messages from one machine to another, he only had to say which machine it was going to and for whom. So he used the only character on the keyboard that wasn’t already used with other operating systems, the ‘@’ sign that’s why he had user@host as the basic form for email. So as soon as email popped up and we all got excited about it, we started seeing mailing list and that’s when I realized that there was a real social element to this. The first mailing list I remember was called Sci-Fi Lovers because we used to argue who were the best science fiction writers and the next one I remember from Stanford was called Yum Yum and it was a restaurant review for the Palo Alto area. It was very clear that this technology had a social component.

JOHN MARKOFF: Do you remember HumanNets?

VINT CERF: Yes I do.

JOHN MARKOFF: Because that was what drew me to the early ARPANET because there you had technologists talking about the impact of technology which was a really interesting window into that role.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: There’s another story, I visit my graduate students, mostly theoretical guys not the software developers, and I walked into their lab one day and instead of doing researches that I wanted them to, they were busy on the machines, intensely, on news groups, restaurants, hiking, astronomy. “What are you doing? Oh my God, this is hot.”And it really caught on.

JOHN MARKOFF: It was social media. Bill.

BILL DUVALL: Just on that, one of the things that, just speaking of email, another kind of social impact was there was a project that was being done joint between Xerox and PARC and a part of Xerox in El Segundo that was being coordinated by email. This was pretty early, this was in the ’70s, mid-’70s. And the thing that became very obvious was that using email to coordinate a project shifted the power. The people that now had the power, not the people that presented well, that could talk well that were big, but they were the people that could write well, and it was just an interesting… Subtle but very interesting shift that was a direct result of basically, this distributed… The networking.

Why Did the Network Name Change from ARPANET to Internet

JOHN MARKOFF: So, here’s another question. How and why did the network name change from ARPANET to internet? And if they could change the name internet now, what would you call it?   That’s a perfect name, it seems to me.

VINT CERF: Well, originally, we called it, the paper that Bob Kahn and I wrote said “A Protocol For Packet Network Intercommunication.” And it took too long to say that. And so, within a year or so, we used the term “internet” to refer to the multiple network thing. I don’t know what I’d call it now, probably a… No, there are some bad words that occur to me. [chuckle]

Moment Understood it was Going to Impact the World

JOHN MARKOFF: One last word. Steve, was there a moment where you understood it was gonna have the impact on the world that it did?

STEVE CROCKER: It was pretty evident, almost instantly to me, that if you had a computer, you would want it connected to the other computers. Now in those days, computers were big. That was a tiny computer by comparison. So, universities, and businesses, and governments had computers, personal computers didn’t exist yet. But it was evident to me that basically, that every computer if you owned it, you would wanna be connected to the network. And so, it was just a question of how long it would take for that to happen. And I thought that was real important from a utility point of view, from a practicality point of view. My head was focused on different kinds of research, much more abstract kinds of things, and so I used to sneer that this networking stuff was only socially useful, it didn’t have any real depth.

History Of Internet Short Essay

The Internet has a long and complex history. Its origins can be traced back to the early days of computer networking in the 1950s. In the decades since then, the Internet has undergone numerous changes and developments, transforming from a simple network of computers into the global phenomenon we know today.

The Internet first came into existence in the late 1960s, with the development of a computer network called ARPANET. This network was designed to allow government agencies and universities to share information and resources. ARPANET quickly grew beyond its original purpose, and by the early 1970s it had become a major research tool for scientists all over the world.

In the 1980s, a new generation of computer networks emerged, based on the TCP/IP protocol. These networks, which included the Internet, allowed for greater communication and collaboration between users. The Internet soon became a popular tool for business and commerce, and by the 1990s it had become a staple of everyday life.

Today, the Internet is used by billions of people all over the world. It has become a vital part of our economy and our society, and shows no signs of slowing down. Thanks to its origins in ARPANET, the Internet is one of the most resilient and adaptable technologies ever created. Its future is bright, and we can expect to see even more amazing things from it in the years to come.

Within our culture, there has been a revolution that rivals that of the Industrial Revolution. The Technological Revolution is credited with launching this change. The Internet is at the forefront of this transformation. This information haven has all types of thrills, surprises, and even love for some people. Today, everyone in society knows what the Internet is and where it came from, yet for others it’s still unclear What is the Internet and how did it develop? A strange strategic problem arose thirty years ago for RAND Corp., America’s leading Cold War think-tank.

The solution they came up with was a ‘network of networks’, a concept that would eventually be known as the Internet. Although the Internet was originally designed for military purposes, it soon became apparent that this new technology had much wider applications.

In the early 1980s, US universities began to connect to the Internet, followed by research laboratories and government departments. By the end of the decade, there were over 100,000 computers connected to the Internet worldwide. The Internet had become a truly global phenomenon.

The Internet has come a long way since those early days. It is now possible to use the Internet for everything from booking airline tickets to listening to music and watching movies. The Internet has become an essential part of our lives, and it is hard to imagine a world without it.

The infrastructure required in a post-nuclear America would need to include a command-and-control network that was connected from city to city, state to state, and base to base. Regardless of how well that network is armored or protected, its switches and wiring will always be vulnerable to the effects of atomic bombs.

A nuclear assault would destroy any network imaginable. Also, how would the network be managed and directed? An aggressor’s missile would target any centre of authority, whether it is a central authority or a network headquarters. RAND considered this macabre conundrum in great military secrecy and devised an innovative answer.

They would create a distributed network, one that had no central authority and no single point of failure. This would be the world’s first information network—an idea that would later come to be known as the Internet. RAND’s engineers designed a distributed network based on a new technology called packet-switching.

In packet-switching, messages were chopped into small pieces, or packets, and sent through the network independently. This allowed messages to take any number of possible routes from sender to receiver, circumventing any damage that might be done to individual sections of the network.

The first test of RAND’s design was in 1957, when a team of graduate students at UCLA sent a message from one computer to another at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The message read simply: “Lo.” It was the first ever Internet communication.

In the 1960s, packet-switching technology was adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense for use in its own communications network, which came to be known as ARPANET. ARPANET’s original purpose was to link together military computers and share information between them. But as more and more universities and research laboratories were connected to ARPANET, it became clear that this new network had much wider implications. It was becoming a place where people could communicate and collaborate in ways never before possible.

In 1974, two computer scientists at Stanford University, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, laid the foundations for what would become the Internet’s governing protocol—the set of rules that allow different computer networks to talk to each other. Cerf and Kahn’s protocol, called TCP/IP, is still in use today.

In the 1980s, the Internet began to spread beyond the borders of the United States. Companies and individuals in other countries saw the potential of this new technology and started to build their own networks that connected to the Internet.

The 1990s saw a massive expansion of the Internet, as more and more people got online and new websites and services were created. The Internet was becoming a part of everyday life, used for everything from shopping to banking to staying in touch with friends and family.

The 21st century has seen even more dramatic changes, as the Internet has moved beyond the realm of computers and into the world of mobile devices. Nowadays, we access the Internet not just through our desktop or laptop computers, but also through our smartphones and tablets. And with the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we’re using the Internet to share photos, videos, and thoughts with friends and family all over the world.

The Internet has come a long way since its humble beginnings in post-nuclear America. It’s been used for everything from military communication to online shopping to staying in touch with friends and family. And it’s only going to keep growing and evolving in the years to come. So whatever your favorite Internet activity is, there’s no doubt that it will be even better in the future. Thanks for being part of the Internet’s History!

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History of the Internet

The historical context, the modern significance of the internet.

Before the internet came into place, communication (voice and data transfer) was limited to areas between stations covered by a small radius network. That was in the 1950s and the early 1960s. The term internet is used to mean a global link via the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). The earliest discoveries of the internet were first made in the United Kingdom; that was in the year 1858 which saw the first cable being laid but it was a technical failure, it only managed to work for days. Eight years later, a more advanced cable was laid which marked the greatest success in the sector.

The cable remained in use for over a century (Roberts et al, p.20). The internet, since its advent helped the world in the wake of globalization and it continues to be a vital tool in linking international borders. This paper will look at the internet in its historical context and analyze its significance in the modern world.

Those who came up with the technology of the internet saw the need to allow computers to share information for research work and development in the military and development fields. The first computers to be brought to the limelight were done in MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). The concept later advanced to packet switching which was to achieve some slight internet connection (Kahn, pp. 44-45).

The ground was however broken with the invention of the ARPANET which marked the real foundation of the internet. The chief objective of coming up with the internet technology was to provide a platform for communication to be carried out even if the most direct route was unavailable. It was to create alternative communication routes to be put into use by professionals like Engineers, Doctors, Scientists, Librarians, and Computer experts.

Further advancements saw the coming of E-mail, a discovery by Ray Tomlinson in 1972. He adopted the @ symbol to line the address and the username. Then there was the FTP protocol to enable the concerned parties to share data between internet sites. In the year1989, expert Tim Berners came up with a perfect interface for the distribution of information the world over. That was what was later known as the www (World Wide Web).

As the advent grew wider and wider, the earlier developers tried attempted to put their stamps to dictate how the web was supposed to operate, this threatened the sector and created a scene of unrelated protocols that required different software to be linked up (Kleinrock, pp.27-31). In the same context, international standards have been established by the www consortium to develop these standards for every browser. For the period that the internet has been in use, it has revolutionized communication via computers like nothing before.

The era of using land and airmail letters is now part of our history; what we are witnessing in the 21 st Century is a well-integrated computerized telegraph, radios, and telephones. The internet has offered the world a chance an easy mechanism to collaborate and disseminate information between parties that want to link ideas regardless of the geographical location. Four guidelines restricted the earlier discoveries in internet use; these included the following rules and regulations as laid down by Kahn (Kahn, pp.46-47).

The first rule was that communication would be based on the effort of the inventor. For instance, if a packet fails to reach its intended destination, it only had to be retransmitted from its source. The second rule called for independence and allowed for no internal changes in that particular network to get it connected to the internet. The third rule gave a provision for the use of a black box to connect the network (routers and gateways). To avoid complications and keep the gateways as simple as possible, the gateways were not supposed to be designed not to allow any storage of individual flows transmitted through them. Finally, the fourth rule called for no global control at the operation level.

The internet has managed to ease the transfer and sharing of information without being physically present, it has, in turn, ensured that a lot of important information is available online thus boosting the know-how of those who seek the knowledge. The paper has established that the first notable invention as far as the internet was concerned was done by J.C. Licklider of MIT which saw all the global computers interconnected to enable every user to access resources (programs and data) from selected sites (Keith, pp.11-14).

It was like we now have the modern internet. Internet experts have managed over the years to overcome a lot of hurdles but there still needs to be some factors that need to be addressed, for instance; the need to have all the nations coordinating to address internet matters as a unit. The researchers need to come up with a mechanism to control host to host flow, integrate and interface all operating systems by having a principle operating system.

Life is now practically unimaginable without the internet; some even believe that no viable work can be done in this 21 st Century without the internet. Some who are used to the internet even wonder how people used to survive without the technology. What now seems like a part and parcel of human life was only brought to the full limelight ten years ago. Thought its roots stretch back to the19 th Century but it was made public just the other day. Now individuals can work from the comfort of their homes and link with other players several miles away. Not only the research sector has gained through the internet, but also the business department has gathered massive benefits.

E-commerce has been at the center of debate for a long time now, but the hard-line stance of the critics has so far subsided. Modern internet use has seen the application in the business more than in the educational sector with the concept has been positively received the world over. “Embracing the internet concept has brought a lot of positive changes that have helped in the globalization” (Cerf et al. p.631). The new networking technologies that are taking root are keeping the world on track with technological advancement.

The concept only stands to be beneficial if the world’s major players realize that the internet is not for a single person, nor group of individuals, nor organization, company nor nation, but for all. To this effect, therefore, a standard measure has to be put in place to institutionalize or formalize rules to control every players’ acts. The rules, some of which were mentioned earlier in this research paper have brought about restrictions that ensure that all countries operate on a level arena and no company enjoys more privileges than the other. The rules, therefore, are administered to all countries to create fair competition. The internet, therefore, is one of the best latest technological interventions that will take the world places by sparing development.

Cerf, G. and Kahn, R. A protocol for packet network interconnection . IEEE Trans. Comm. Tech . Vol. COM-22, V 5. (1974). pp. 627-641.

Kahn, R. Communications Principles for Operating Systems . Internal BBN memorandum, (1972). Pp.44-47.

Keith, U. Harry, T. and Kahn, R. Proceedings of the IEEE . Special Issue on Packet Communication Networks, Volume 66, No. 11, (1978). Pp.11-14.

Kleinrock, L. Information Flow in Large Communication Nets . RLE Quarterly Progress Report, (1961). Pp.27-31.

Roberts, L. & Merrill, T. Toward a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers . Fall AFIPS Conf. (1966). Pp.20-22.

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Technology to defeat Ebola

Mathematics for a sustainable world, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, what is the purpose of music, featured author, latest book, how the internet has changed everyday life, what happened.

The Internet has turned our existence upside down. It has revolutionized communications, to the extent that it is now our preferred medium of everyday communication. In almost everything we do, we use the Internet. Ordering a pizza, buying a television, sharing a moment with a friend, sending a picture over instant messaging. Before the Internet, if you wanted to keep up with the news, you had to walk down to the newsstand when it opened in the morning and buy a local edition reporting what had happened the previous day. But today a click or two is enough to read your local paper and any news source from anywhere in the world, updated up to the minute.

The Internet itself has been transformed. In its early days—which from a historical perspective are still relatively recent—it was a static network designed to shuttle a small freight of bytes or a short message between two terminals; it was a repository of information where content was published and maintained only by expert coders. Today, however, immense quantities of information are uploaded and downloaded over this electronic leviathan, and the content is very much our own, for now we are all commentators, publishers, and creators.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Internet widened in scope to encompass the IT capabilities of universities and research centers, and, later on, public entities, institutions, and private enterprises from around the world. The Internet underwent immense growth; it was no longer a state-controlled project, but the largest computer network in the world, comprising over 50,000 sub-networks, 4 million systems, and 70 million users.

The emergence of  web 2.0  in the first decade of the twenty-first century was itself a revolution in the short history of the Internet, fostering the rise of social media and other interactive, crowd-based communication tools.

The Internet was no longer concerned with information exchange alone: it was a sophisticated multidisciplinary tool enabling individuals to create content, communicate with one another, and even escape reality. Today, we can send data from one end of the world to the other in a matter of seconds, make online presentations, live in parallel “game worlds,” and use pictures, video, sound, and text to share our real lives, our genuine identity. Personal stories go public; local issues become global.

The rise of the Internet has sparked a debate about how online communication affects social relationships. The Internet frees us from geographic fetters and brings us together in topic-based communities that are not tied down to any specific place. Ours is a networked, globalized society connected by new technologies. The Internet is the tool we use to interact with one another, and accordingly poses new challenges to privacy and security.

Information technologies have wrought fundamental change throughout society, driving it forward from the industrial age to the networked era. In our world, global information networks are vital infrastructure—but in what ways has this changed human relations? The Internet has changed business, education, government, healthcare, and even the ways in which we interact with our loved ones—it has become one of the key drivers of social evolution.

The changes in social communication are of particular significance. Although analogue tools still have their place in some sectors, new technologies are continuing to gain ground every day, transforming our communication practices and possibilities—particularly among younger people. The Internet has removed all communication barriers. Online, the conventional constraints of space and time disappear and there is a dizzyingly wide range of communicative possibilities. The impact of social media applications has triggered discussion of the “new communication democracy.”

The development of the Internet today is being shaped predominantly by instant, mobile communications. The mobile Internet is a fresh revolution. Comprehensive Internet connectivity via smartphones and tablets is leading to an increasingly mobile reality: we are not tied to any single specific device, and everything is in the cloud.

People no longer spend hours gazing at a computer screen after work or class; instead, they use their mobile devices to stay online everywhere, all the time.

Anyone failing to keep abreast of this radical change is losing out on an opportunity.

Communication Opportunities Created by the Internet

The Internet has become embedded in every aspect of our day-to-day lives, changing the way we interact with others. This insight struck me when I started out in the world of social media. I created my first social network in 2005, when I was finishing college in the United States—it had a political theme. I could already see that social media were on the verge of changing our way of communicating, helping us to share information by opening up a new channel that cuts across conventional ones.

That first attempt did not work out, but I learned from the experience.I get the feeling that in many countries failure is punished too harshly—but the fact is, the only surefire way of avoiding failure is to do nothing at all. I firmly believe that mistakes help you improve; getting it wrong teaches you how to get it right. Creativity, hard work, and a positive attitude will let you achieve any goal.

In 2006, after I moved to Spain, I created Tuenti. Tuenti (which, contrary to widespread belief, has nothing to do with the number 20; it is short for “tu entidad,” the Spanish for “your entity”) is a social communication platform for genuine friends. From the outset, the idea was to keep it simple, relevant, and private. That’s the key to its success.

I think the real value of social media is that you can stay in touch from moment to moment with the people who really matter to you. Social media let you share experiences and information; they get people and ideas in touch instantly, without frontiers. Camaraderie, friendship, and solidarity—social phenomena that have been around for as long as humanity itself—have been freed from the conventional restrictions of space and time and can now thrive in a rich variety of ways.

Out of all the plethora of communication opportunities that the Internet has opened up, I would highlight the emergence of social media and the way they have intricately melded into our daily lives. Social media have changed our personal space, altering the way we interact with our loved ones, our friends, and our sexual partners; they have forced us to rethink even basic daily processes like studying and shopping; they have affected the economy by nurturing the business startup culture and electronic commerce; they have even given us new ways to form broad-based political movements.

The Internet and Education

The Internet has clearly impacted all levels of education by providing unbounded possibilities for learning. I believe the future of education is a networked future. People can use the Internet to create and share knowledge and develop new ways of teaching and learning that captivate and stimulate students’ imagination at any time, anywhere, using any device. By connecting and empowering students and educators, we can speed up economic growth and enhance the well-being of society throughout the world. We should work together, over a network, to build the global learning society.

The network of networks is an inexhaustible source of information. What’s more, the Internet has enabled users to move away from their former passive role as mere recipients of messages conveyed by conventional media to an active role, choosing what information to receive, how, and when. The information recipient even decides whether or not they want to stay informed.

We have moved on from scattergun mass communication to a pattern where the user proactively selects the information they need.

Students can work interactively with one another, unrestricted by physical or time constraints. Today, you can use the Internet to access libraries, encyclopedias, art galleries, news archives, and other information sources from anywhere in the world: I believe this is a key advantage in the education field. The web is a formidable resource for enhancing the process of building knowledge.

I also believe the Internet is a wonderful tool for learning and practicing other languages—this continues to be a critical issue in many countries, including Spain, and, in a globalized world, calls for special efforts to improve.

The Internet, in addition to its communicative purposes, has become a vital tool for exchanging knowledge and education; it is not just an information source, or a locus where results can be published, it is also a channel for cooperating with other people and groups who are working on related research topics.

The Internet and Privacy and Security

Another key issue surrounding Internet use is privacy. Internet users are becoming more sensitive to the insight that privacy is a must-have in our lives.

Privacy has risen near the top of the agenda in step with an increasing awareness of the implications of using social media. Much of the time, people started to use social media with no real idea of the dangers, and have wised up only through trial and error—sheer accident, snafus, and mistakes. Lately, inappropriate use of social media seems to hit the headlines every day. Celebrities posting inappropriate comments to their profiles, private pictures and tapes leaked to the Internet at large, companies displaying arrogance toward users, and even criminal activities involving private-data trafficking or social media exploitation.

All this shows that—contrary to what many people seem to have assumed—online security and privacy are critical, and, I believe, will become even more important going forward. And, although every user needs privacy, the issue is particularly sensitive for minors—despite attempts to raise their awareness, children still behave recklessly online.

I have always been highly concerned about privacy. On Tuenti, the default privacy setting on every user account is the highest available level of data protection. Only people the user has accepted as a “friend” can access their personal details, see their telephone number, or download their pictures. This means that, by default, user information is not accessible to third parties. In addition, users are supported by procedures for reporting abuse. Any user can report a profile or photograph that is abusive, inappropriate, or violates the terms of use: action is taken immediately. Security and privacy queries are resolved within 24 hours.

We need to be aware that different Internet platforms provide widely different privacy experiences. Some of them are entirely open and public; no steps whatsoever are taken to protect personal information, and all profiles are indexable by Internet search engines.

On the other hand, I think the debate about whether social media use should be subject to an age requirement is somewhat pointless, given that most globally active platforms operate without age restrictions. The European regulatory framework is quite different from the United States and Asian codes. Companies based in Europe are bound by rigorous policies on privacy and underage use of social media. This can become a competitive drawback when the ground rules do not apply equally to all players—our American and Japanese competitors, for instance, are not required to place any kind of age constraint on access.

Outside the scope of what the industry or regulators can do, it is vital that users themselves look after the privacy of their data. I believe the information is the user’s property, so the user is the only party entitled to control the collection, use, and disclosure of any information about him or herself. Some social networks seem to have forgotten this fact—they sell data, make it impossible to delete an account, or make it complex and difficult to manage one’s privacy settings. Everything should be a lot simpler and more transparent.

Social networks should continue to devote intense efforts to developing self-regulation mechanisms and guidelines for this new environment of online coexistence to ensure that user information is safe: the Internet should be a space for freedom, but also for trust. The main way of ensuring that social media are used appropriately is awareness. But awareness and user education will be of little use unless it becomes an absolute requirement that the privacy of the individual is treated as a universal value.

The Internet and Culture

As in the sphere of education, the development of information and communication technologies and the wide-ranging effects of globalization are changing what we are, and the meaning of cultural identity. Ours is a complex world in which cultural flows across borders are always on the rise. The concepts of space, time, and distance are losing their conventional meanings. Cultural globalization is here, and a global movement of cultural processes and initiatives is underway.

Again, in the cultural arena, vast fields of opportunity open up thanks to online tools. The possibilities are multiplied for disseminating a proposal, an item of knowledge, or a work of art. Against those doomsayers who warn that the Internet is harming culture, I am radically optimistic. The Internet is bringing culture closer to more people, making it more easily and quickly accessible; it is also nurturing the rise of new forms of expression for art and the spread of knowledge. Some would say, in fact, that the Internet is not just a technology, but a cultural artifact in its own right.

In addition to its impact on culture itself, the Internet is enormously beneficial for innovation, which brings progress in all fields of endeavor—the creation of new goods, services, and ideas, the advance of knowledge and society, and increasing well-being.

The Internet and Personal Relationships

The Internet has also changed the way we interact with our family, friends, and life partners. Now everyone is connected to everyone else in a simpler, more accessible, and more immediate way; we can conduct part of our personal relationships using our laptops, smart phones, and tablets.

The benefits of always-online immediate availability are highly significant. I would find a long-distance relationship with my life partner or my family unthinkable without the communication tools that the network of networks provides me with. I’m living in Madrid, but I can stay close to my brother in California. For me, that is the key plus of the Internet: keeping in touch with the people who really matter to me.

As we have seen, the Internet revolution is not just technological; it also operates at a personal level, and throughout the structure of society. The Internet makes it possible for an unlimited number of people to communicate with one another freely and easily, in an unrestricted way.

Just a century ago, this was unimaginable. An increasing number of couples come together, stay together, or break up with the aid—or even as a consequence—of social communication tools. There are even apps and social networks out there that are purposely designed to help people get together for sex.

Of course, when compared to face-to-face communication, online communication is severely limited in the sense impressions it can convey (an estimated 60 to 70 percent of human communication takes place nonverbally), which can lead to misunderstandings and embarrassing situations—no doubt quite a few relationships have floundered as a result. I think the key is to be genuine, honest, and real at all times, using all the social media tools and their many advantages. Let’s just remember that a liar and a cheat online is a liar and a cheat offline too.

The Internet and Social and Political Activism

Even before the emergence of social media, pioneering experiments took place in the political sphere—like  Essembly , a project I was involved in. We started to create a politically themed platform to encourage debate and provide a home for social and political causes; but the social networks that have later nurtured activism in a new way were not as yet in existence.

Research has shown that young people who voice their political opinions on the Internet are more inclined to take part in public affairs. The better informed a citizen is, the more likely they will step into the polling booth, and the better they will express their political liberties. The Internet has proved to be a decisive communication tool in the latest election campaigns. It is thanks to the Internet that causes in the social, welfare, ideological, and political arenas have been spoken up for and have won the support of other citizens sharing those values—in many cases, with a real impact on government decision making.

The Internet and Consumer Trends

New technologies increase the speed of information transfer, and this opens up the possibility of “bespoke” shopping. The Internet offers an immense wealth of possibilities for buying content, news, and leisure products, and all sorts of advantages arise from e-commerce, which has become a major distribution channel for goods and services. You can book airline tickets, get a T-shirt from Australia, or buy food at an online grocery store. New applications support secure business transactions and create new commercial opportunities.

In this setting, it is the consumer who gains the upper hand, and the conventional rules and methods of distribution and marketing break down. Consumers’ access to information multiplies, and their reviews of their experience with various products and services take center stage. Access to product comparisons and rankings, user reviews and comments, and recommendations from bloggers with large followings have shaped a new scenario for consumer behavior, retail trade, and the economy in general.

The Internet and the Economy

The Internet is one of the key factors driving today’s economy. No one can afford to be left behind. Even in a tough macroeconomic framework, the Internet can foster growth, coupled with enhanced productivity and competitiveness.

The Internet provides opportunities for strengthening the economy: How should we tackle them? While Europe—and Spain specifically—are making efforts to make the best possible use of the Internet, there are areas in which their approach needs to improve. Europe faces a major challenge, and risks serious failure if it lets the United States run ahead on its own. The European Commission, in its “Startup Manifesto,” suggests that the Old World be more entrepreneur-friendly—the proposal is backed by companies like Spotify and Tuenti. Europe lacks some of the necessary know-how. We need to improve in financial services and in data privacy, moving past the obsolete regulatory framework we now have and making a bid to achieve a well-connected continent with a single market for 4G mobile connections. We need to make it easier to hire talent outside each given country.

The use of e-commerce should be encouraged among small and medium-sized enterprises so that growth opportunities can be exploited more intensely. Following the global trend of the Internet, companies should internalize their online business. And much more emphasis should be placed on new technologies training in the academic and business spheres.

Modern life is global, and Spain is competing against every other country in the world. I do not believe in defeatism or victim culture. Optimism should not translate into callousness, but I sincerely believe that if you think creatively, if you find a different angle, if you innovate with a positive attitude and without fear of failure, then you can change things for the better. Spain needs to seize the moment to reinvent itself, grasping the opportunities offered up by the online world. We need to act, take decisions, avoid “paralysis through analysis.” I sometimes feel we are too inclined to navel-gazing: Spain shuts itself off, fascinated with its own contradictions and local issues, and loses its sense of perspective. Spain should open up to the outside, use the crisis as an opportunity to do things differently, in a new way—creating value, underlining its strengths, aspiring to be something more.

In the United States, for instance, diving headfirst into a personal Internet-related startup is regarded as perfectly normal. I’m glad to see that this entrepreneurial spirit is beginning to take hold here as well. I believe in working hard, showing perseverance, keeping your goals in view, surrounding yourself with talent, and taking risks. No risk, no success. We live in an increasingly globalized world: of course you can have a Spain-based Internet startup, there are no frontiers.

We need to take risks and keep one step ahead of the future. It is precisely the most disruptive innovations that require radical changes in approach and product, which might not even find a market yet ready for them—these are the areas providing real opportunities to continue being relevant, to move forward and “earn” the future, creating value and maintaining leadership. It is the disruptive changes that enable a business, product, or service to revolutionize the market—and, particularly in the technology sector, such changes are a necessity.

The Future of Social Communications, Innovation, Mobile Technologies, and Total Connectivity in Our Lives

The future of social communications will be shaped by an  always-online  culture.  Always online  is already here and will set the trend going forward. Total connectivity, the Internet you can take with you wherever you go, is growing unstoppably. There is no turning back for global digitalization.

Innovation is the driving force of growth and progress, so we need to shake up entrenched processes, products, services, and industries, so that all of us together—including established businesses, reacting to their emerging competitors—can move forward together.

Innovation is shaping and will continue to shape the future of social communications. It is already a reality that Internet connections are increasingly mobile. A survey we conducted in early 2013 in partnership with Ipsos found that 94 percent of Tuenti users aged 16 to 35 owned cell phones, 84 percent of users connected to the Internet using their phones, and 47 percent had mobile data subscriptions for connecting to the Internet. A total of 74 percent of users reported connecting to the Internet from their phone on a daily basis, while 84 percent did so at least weekly. Only 13 percent did not use their phones to connect to the Internet, and that percentage is decreasing every day.

Mobile Internet use alters the pattern of device usage; the hitherto familiar ways of accessing the Internet are changing too. The smartphone activities taking up the most time (over three hours a day) include instant messaging (38%), social media use (35%), listening to music (24%), and web browsing (20%). The activities taking up the least time (under five minutes a day) are: SMS texting (51%), watching movies (43%), reading and writing e-mail (38%), and talking on the phone (32%). Things are still changing.

Smartphones are gaining ground in everyday life. Many of the purposes formerly served by other items now involve using our smartphones. Some 75 percent of young people reported having replaced their MP3 player with their phone, 74 percent use their phone as an alarm clock, 70 percent use it as their camera, and 67 percent use it as their watch.

We have been observing these shifts for a while, which is why we decided to reinvent ourselves by placing smartphones at the heart of our strategy. I want to use this example as a showcase of what is happening in the world of social communication and the Internet in general: mobile connectivity is bringing about a new revolution. Tuenti is no longer just a social network, and social media as a whole are becoming more than just websites. The new Tuenti provides native mobile apps for Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Phone, as well as the Firefox OS app and the mobile version of the website, m.tuenti.com. Tuenti is now a cross-platform service that lets users connect with their friends and contacts from wherever they may be, using their device of choice. A user with a laptop can IM in real time with a user with a smartphone, and switch from one device to another without losing the thread of the conversation. The conversations are in the cloud, so data and contacts are preserved independently of the devices being used. This means the experience has to be made uniform across platforms, which sometimes involves paring down functionalities, given the processing and screen size limitations of mobile devices. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on are all evolving to become increasingly cross-platform experiences. But Tuenti is the first social network that has also developed its own Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO)—the company is an Internet service provider over the mobile network. Tuenti is an MVNO with a social media angle, and this may be the future path of telecommunications.

Social media are evolving to become something more, and innovation must be their hallmark if they are to continue being relevant. Tuenti now embraces both social communications and telecom services provision, offering value added by letting you use the mobile app free of charge and without using up your data traffic allowance, even if you have no credit on your prepaid card—this is wholly revolutionary in the telecom sector. The convergence of social media with more traditional sectors is already bringing about a new context for innovation, a new arena for the development and growth of the Internet.

Just about everything in the world of the Internet still lies ahead of us, and mobile communications as we know them must be reinvented by making them more digital. The future will be shaped by innovation converging with the impact of mobility. This applies not just to social media but to the Internet in general, particularly in the social communications field. I feel that many people do not understand what we are doing and have no idea of the potential development of companies like ours at the global level. Right now, there may be somebody out there, in some corner of the world, developing the tool that will turn the Internet upside down all over again. The tool that will alter our day-to-day life once more. Creating more opportunities, providing new benefits to individuals, bringing more individual and collective well-being. Just ten years ago, social media did not exist; in the next ten years, something else radically new will emerge. There are many areas in which products, processes, and services can be improved or created afresh. The future is brimming with opportunities, and the future of the Internet has only just begun.

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A Concise History of the Internet—I

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In this two-part article, I trace the history of the Internet. The Internet started in 1969 as an experiment by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense to use packet switching on leased telephone lines to connect four mainframe computers. Email was invented in 1971 and it became a “killer application” as it promoted easy interaction among its users. By 1972, fifty computers were connected using leased telephone lines to form what was known as the ARPANET which was successfully demonstrated at an international conference — ICCC 72. ARPANET was followed by Packet Radio Network (PRNET), which connected mobile computers, and Satellite Network (SATNET), which connected computers in Europe with those in the US. A protocol named Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was invented in 1973 to interconnect ARPANET, PRNET, and SATNET. The success of the TCP/IP protocol in connecting disparate networks paved the way for the development of the Internet.

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I thank Prof. P.C.P. Bhatt, Dr. N. Dayasindhu, and Dr. S. Ramani for reviewing this article and their critical comments which improved it.

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V. Rajaraman is at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Several generations of scientists and engineers in India have learnt computer science using his lucidly written textbooks on programming and computer fundamentals. His current research interests are parallel computing and history of computing.

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Essays on the History and Politics of the Internet: Cyberpolitics

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This is a book about the politics and history of the Internet. The Internet has been in existence for over fifty years. The way we live our lives has changed considerably because of this new medium. As the Internet has become increasingly popular, it has been drawn into age-old struggles over censorship and freedom of expression. It has played an increasing role in commerce, and controversies have erupted over privacy, security, consumer rights, intellectual property rights, taxation, and other matters. With the rise of Internet-connected smartphones, the Internet has become part of daily life for billions of people.

One major theme explored in this book is the contrast between the dream and the reality of the Internet. Many of the creators of the Internet shared a vision of building a system that would empower individuals anywhere in the world to share their knowledge and creativity. This profoundly democratic dream came out of an age in which many pre-existing power structures were being questioned. This book argues that the Internet has actually resulted in the creation of new centers of power and influence, many of which are anti-democratic.

Jeffrey A. Hart is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, USA. He co-authored three editions of a textbook on international political economy with Joan Edelman Spero, The Politics of International Economic Relations. Since 1980, the majority of his research has been on the politics of international competitiveness in advanced industrial nations. His best-known work on that subject is Rival Capitalists: International Competitiveness in the United States, Japan, and Europe (1992). He collaborated with Stefanie Ann Lenway and Thomas P. Murtha on a book about the world flat panel display industry, Managing New Industry Creation (2001). That research was supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2004, he published a book on the politics of high-definition television (HDTV), and he collaborated with Aseem Prakash on three edited volumes about globalization.

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