Three terminals
and an ARPA
A
fundamental pioneer in the call for a global network, J. C. R. Licklider, articulated the ideas in his January 1960 paper, Man-Computer
Symbiosis.
"A
network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band
communication lines [which provided] the functions of present-day libraries
together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and
[other] symbiotic functions."
In
August 1962, Licklider and Welden Clark published the paper "On-Line Man
Computer Communication", one of the first descriptions of a networked
future.
In
October 1962, Licklider was hired by Jack Ruina
as Director of the newly established Information
Processing Techniques Office (IPTO)
within DARPA, with
a mandate to interconnect the United
States Department of Defense's main computers
at Cheyenne Mountain, the Pentagon, and SAC HQ. There he formed an informal
group within DARPA to further computer research. He began by writing memos
describing a distributed network to the IPTO staff, whom he called
"Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network". As
part of the information processing office's role, three network terminals had
been installed: one for System
Development Corporation in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie
at the University
of California, Berkeley and one for
the Compatible
Time-Sharing System project at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT).
Licklider's identified need for inter-networking would be made obvious by the
apparent waste of resources this caused.
"For
each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So
if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone
I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C.
terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them.
[...] I said, it's obvious what to do (But I don't want to do it): If you have
these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you
want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the
ARPAnet."
Although
he left the IPTO in 1964, five years before the ARPANET went live, it was his
vision of universal networking that provided the impetus that led his
successors such as Lawrence
Roberts and Robert
Taylor to further the ARPANET
development. Licklider later returned to lead the IPTO in 1973 for two years.
Packet switching
At
the tip of the problem lay the issue of connecting separate physical networks
to form one logical network. During the 1960s, Paul Baran (RAND Corporation), produced a
study of survivable networks for the US military. Information transmitted
across Baran's network would be divided into what he called 'message-blocks'.
Independently, Donald Davies (National
Physical Laboratory, UK), proposed
and developed a similar network based on what he called packet-switching, the
term that would ultimately be adopted. Leonard Kleinrock (MIT) developed mathematical theory behind this technology.
Packet-switching provides better bandwidth utilization and response times than
the traditional circuit-switching technology used for telephony, particularly
on resource-limited interconnection links.
Packet
switching is a rapid store-and-forward networking design that divides messages
up into arbitrary packets, with routing decisions made per-packet. Early
networks used message switched
systems that required rigid routing
structures prone to single point of
failure. This led Tommy Krash and
Paul Baran's U.S. military funded research to focus on using message-blocks to
include network redundancy, which in turn led to the widespread urban legend
that the Internet was designed to resist nuclear attack.
Networks
that led to the Internet
ARPANET
Promoted
to the head of the information processing office at DARPA, Robert Taylor intended to realize Licklider's ideas
of an interconnected networking system. Bringing in Larry
Roberts from MIT, he initiated a
project to build such a network. The first ARPANET link was established between
the University
of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research
Institute on 22:30 hours on October
29, 1969.
"We
set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI ...",
Kleinrock ... said in an interview: "We typed the L and we asked on the
phone,
"Do you see the L?"
"Yes, we see the L,"
came the response.
We typed the O, and we asked,
"Do you see the O."
"Yes, we see the O."
Then we typed the G, and the
system crashed ...
By
December 5, 1969, a 4-node network was connected by adding the University of Utah and the University
of California, Santa Barbara.
Building on ideas developed in ALOHAnet,
the ARPANET grew rapidly. By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a
new host being added approximately every twenty days.[11][12]
ARPANET
became the technical core of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool
in developing the technologies used. ARPANET development was centered around
the Request for
Comments (RFC) process, still used
today for proposing and distributing Internet Protocols and Systems. RFC 1, entitled "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker
from the University
of California, Los Angeles, and
published on April 7, 1969. These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing.
International
collaborations on ARPANET were sparse. For various political reasons, European
developers were concerned with developing the X.25 networks. Notable
exceptions were the Norwegian Seismic
Array (NORSAR) in 1972, followed in 1973 by Sweden with satellite
links to the Tanum Earth Station and Peter Kirstein's research group in
the UK, initially at the Institute of Computer Science, London University and
later at University
College London.
NPL
In
1965, Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom) proposed a national data network based on
packet-switching. The proposal was not taken up nationally, but by 1970 he had
designed and built the Mark I packet-switched network to meet the needs of the
multidisciplinary laboratory and prove the technology under operational
conditions.[14]
By 1976 12 computers and 75 terminal devices were attached and more were added
until the network was replaced in 1986.
Merit Network
The
Merit Network was formed in 1966 as the Michigan Educational
Research Information Triad to explore computer networking between three of
Michigan's public universities as a means to help the state's educational and
economic development.[16]
With initial support from the State of Michigan and the National
Science Foundation (NSF), the
packet-switched network was first demonstrated in December 1971 when an
interactive host to host connection was made between the IBM mainframe computer systems at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor
and Wayne State
University in Detroit. In October 1972 connections to the CDC mainframe at Michigan State
University in East Lansing completed the
triad. Over the next several years in addition to host to host interactive
connections the network was enhanced to support terminal to host connections,
host to host batch connections (remote job submission, remote printing, batch
file transfer), interactive file transfer, gateways to the Tymnet and Telenet public data networks, X.25 host attachments, gateways to X.25 data networks, Ethernet
attached hosts, and eventually TCP/IP and
additional public universities in Michigan
join the network.[ All of this set the stage for Merit's role in the NSFNET project starting in
the mid-1980s.
CYCLADES
The
CYCLADES
packet switching network was a French research network designed and directed by
Louis Pouzin.
First demonstrated in 1973, it was developed to explore alternatives to the
initial ARPANET design and to support network research generally. It was the
first network to make the hosts responsible for the reliable delivery of data,
rather than the network itself, using unreliable datagrams and associated end-to-end protocol mechanisms.
X.25 and public data networks
Based
on ARPA's research, packet switching network standards were developed by the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the
form of X.25 and related standards. While using packet switching, X.25 is built on the concept of virtual circuits emulating
traditional telephone connections. In 1974, X.25 formed the basis for the
SERCnet network between British academic and research sites, which later became
JANET. The
initial ITU Standard on X.25 was approved in March 1976.
The
British
Post Office, Western Union International and Tymnet collaborated to create
the first international packet switched network, referred to as the International
Packet Switched Service (IPSS), in
1978. This network grew from Europe and the US to cover Canada, Hong Kong and
Australia by 1981. By the 1990s it provided a worldwide networking
infrastructure.[22]
Unlike
ARPANET, X.25 was commonly available for business use. Telenet
offered its Telemail electronic mail service, which was also targeted to
enterprise use rather than the general email system of the ARPANET.
The
first public dial-in networks used asynchronous TTY terminal
protocols to reach a concentrator operated in the public network. Some
networks, such as CompuServe, used X.25 to multiplex the terminal sessions into
their packet-switched backbones, while others, such as Tymnet, used proprietary
protocols. In 1979, CompuServe became the first service to offer electronic mail capabilities
and technical support to personal computer users. The company broke new ground
again in 1980 as the first to offer real-time chat
with its CB Simulator. Other major dial-in networks were America Online
(AOL) and Prodigy that also provided communications, content, and
entertainment features. Many bulletin board
system (BBS) networks also provided
on-line access, such as FidoNet which was popular amongst hobbyist computer users,
many of them hackers and amateur radio
operators.[citation needed]
UUCP and Usenet
In
1979, two students at Duke University,
Tom Truscott
and Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of using simple Bourne shell
scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line UUCP connection with nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Following public release of the software, the mesh
of UUCP hosts forwarding on the Usenet news rapidly expanded. UUCPnet, as it
would later be named, also created gateways and links between FidoNet and
dial-up BBS hosts. UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs
involved, ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET
connections, and the lack of strict use policies (commercial organizations who
might provide bug fixes) compared to later networks like CSnet and Bitnet. All connects were
local. By 1981 the number of UUCP hosts had grown to 550, nearly doubling to
940 in 1984. – Sublink Network, operating since 1987 and officially founded in Italy
in 1989, based its interconnectivity upon UUCP to redistribute mail and news
groups messages throughout its Italian nodes (about 100 at the time) owned both
by private individuals and small companies. Sublink Network
represented possibly one of the first examples of the internet technology
becoming progress through popular diffusion.[23]
Merging the networks and creating the Internet
(1973–90)
TCP/IP
With
so many different network methods, something was needed to unify them. Robert E. Kahn
of DARPA and ARPANET
recruited Vinton Cerf of Stanford University to work with him on the problem. By 1973, they had
worked out a fundamental reformulation, where the differences between network
protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork
protocol, and instead of the network
being responsible for reliability, as in the ARPANET, the hosts became
responsible. Cerf credits Hubert Zimmerman, Gerard LeLann and Louis Pouzin
(designer of the CYCLADES network) with important work on this design.
The
specification of the resulting protocol, RFC 675 – Specification of Internet Transmission Control
Program, by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and
Carl Sunshine, Network Working Group, December 1974, contains the first
attested use of the term internet,
as a shorthand for internetworking;
later RFCs repeat this use, so the word started out as an adjective
rather than the noun it is
today.
A Stanford
Research Institute
packet radio van, site of the first three-way internetworked transmission.
With
the role of the network reduced to the bare minimum, it became possible to join
almost any networks together, no matter what their characteristics were,
thereby solving Kahn's initial problem. DARPA agreed to fund development of
prototype software, and after several years of work, the first demonstration of
a gateway between the Packet Radio network in the SF Bay area and the ARPANET was
conducted by the Stanford Research Institute. On November 22, 1977 a three network demonstration
was conducted including the ARPANET, the Packet Radio Network and the Atlantic
Packet Satellite network.[25][26]
Stemming
from the first specifications of TCP in 1974, TCP/IP
emerged in mid-late 1978 in nearly final form. By 1981, the associated
standards were published as RFCs 791, 792 and 793 and adopted for use. DARPA sponsored
or encouraged the development of TCP/IP implementations for many operating
systems and then scheduled a migration of all hosts on all of its packet
networks to TCP/IP. On January 1, 1983, known as flag day, TCP/IP protocols became the only approved protocol
on the ARPANET, replacing the earlier NCP protocol.[27]
ARPANET to the
federal wide area networks: MILNET, NSI, ESNet, CSNET, and NSFNET
BBN
Technologies TCP/IP
internet map early 1986
After
the ARPANET had been up and running for several years, ARPA looked for another
agency to hand off the network to; ARPA's primary mission was funding cutting
edge research and development, not running a communications utility.
Eventually, in July 1975, the network had been turned over to the Defense
Communications Agency, also part of
the Department
of Defense. In 1983, the U.S. military
portion of the ARPANET was broken off as a separate network, the MILNET. MILNET subsequently
became the unclassified but military-only NIPRNET, in
parallel with the SECRET-level SIPRNET and JWICS for TOP SECRET and
above. NIPRNET does have controlled security gateways to the public Internet.
The
networks based on the ARPANET were government funded and therefore restricted
to noncommercial uses such as research; unrelated commercial use was strictly
forbidden. This initially restricted connections to military sites and
universities. During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational
institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital
Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard,
which were participating in research projects or providing services to those
who were.
Several
other branches of the U.S. government,
the National
Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA),
the National
Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department
of Energy (DOE) became heavily
involved in Internet research and started development of a successor to
ARPANET. In the mid 1980s, all three of these branches developed the first Wide
Area Networks based on TCP/IP. NASA developed the NASA Science Network, NSF
developed CSNET and DOE evolved the Energy Sciences Network or ESNet.
NASA
developed the TCP/IP based NASA Science Network (NSN) in the mid 1980s,
connecting space scientists to data and information stored anywhere in the
world. In 1989, the DECnet-based Space Physics Analysis Network (SPAN) and the
TCP/IP-based NASA Science Network (NSN) were brought together at NASA Ames
Research Center creating the first multiprotocol wide area network called the
NASA Science Internet, or NSI. NSI was established to provide a totally
integrated communications infrastructure to the NASA scientific community for
the advancement of earth, space and life sciences. As a high-speed,
multiprotocol, international network, NSI provided connectivity to over 20,000
scientists across all seven continents.
In
1981 NSF supported the development of the Computer Science Network
(CSNET). CSNET connected with ARPANET using TCP/IP, and ran TCP/IP over X.25, but it also supported
departments without sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up
mail exchange. Its experience with CSNET lead NSF to use TCP/IP when it created
NSFNET, a
56 kbit/s backbone established in 1986, that connected the NSF supported
supercomputing centers and regional research and education networks
in the United States.[28]
However, use of NSFNET was not limited to supercomputer users and the
56 kbit/s network quickly became overloaded. NSFNET was upgraded to
1.5 Mbit/s in 1988. The existence of NSFNET and the creation of Federal
Internet Exchanges (FIXes) allowed
the ARPANET to be decommissioned in 1990. NSFNET was expanded and upgraded to
45 Mbit/s in 1991, and was decommissioned in 1995 when it was replaced by
backbones operated by several commercial Internet
Service Providers.
Transition
towards the Internet
The
term "internet" was adopted in the first RFC published on the TCP
protocol (RFC 675:[29]
Internet Transmission Control Program, December 1974) as an abbreviation of the
term internetworking and the
two terms were used interchangeably. In general, an internet was any network using TCP/IP. It was around the time
when ARPANET was interlinked with NSFNET in the late 1980s,
that the term was used as the name of the network, Internet, being a large and
global TCP/IP network.
As
interest in widespread networking grew and new applications for it were
developed, the Internet's technologies spread throughout the rest of the world.
The network-agnostic approach in TCP/IP meant that it was easy to use any
existing network infrastructure, such as the IPSS X.25 network, to carry Internet traffic. In 1984,
University College London replaced its transatlantic satellite links with
TCP/IP over IPSS.
Many
sites unable to link directly to the Internet started to create simple gateways
to allow transfer of e-mail, at that time the most important application. Sites
which only had intermittent connections used UUCP or FidoNet and
relied on the gateways between these networks and the Internet. Some gateway
services went beyond simple email peering, such as allowing access to FTP sites via UUCP or e-mail.
Finally,
the Internet's remaining centralized routing aspects were removed. The EGP routing protocol was replaced by a new protocol, the Border Gateway
Protocol (BGP). This turned the
Internet into a meshed topology and moved away from the centric architecture
which ARPANET had emphasized. In 1994, Classless
Inter-Domain Routing was introduced
to support better conservation of address space which allowed use of route aggregation to decrease the size of routing tables.[32]
TCP/IP goes global (1989–2000)
CERN, the European Internet, the link to the Pacific
and beyond
Between
1984 and 1988 CERN began
installation and operation of TCP/IP to
interconnect its major internal computer systems, workstations, PCs and an
accelerator control system. CERN continued to operate a limited self-developed
system CERNET internally and several incompatible (typically proprietary)
network protocols externally. There was considerable resistance in Europe
towards more widespread use of TCP/IP and
the CERN TCP/IP intranets remained isolated from the Internet until 1989.
In
1988 Daniel Karrenberg, from Centrum
Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam,
visited Ben Segal, CERN's TCP/IP Coordinator, looking for advice about the
transition of the European side of the UUCP Usenet network (much of which ran
over X.25 links) over to TCP/IP. In 1987, Ben Segal had met with Len Bosack
from the then still small company Cisco about
purchasing some TCP/IP routers for CERN, and was able to give Karrenberg advice
and forward him on to Cisco for the appropriate hardware. This expanded the
European portion of the Internet across the existing UUCP networks, and in 1989
CERN opened its first external TCP/IP connections. This coincided with the
creation of Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE), initially a group of
IP network administrators who met regularly to carry out co-ordination work
together. Later, in 1992, RIPE was formally registered as a cooperative
in Amsterdam.
The
Internet began to penetrate Asia in the late 1980s. Japan, which had built the
UUCP-based network JUNET in 1984, connected to NSFNET in 1989. It hosted the
annual meeting of the Internet Society, INET'92, in Kobe. Singapore
developed TECHNET in 1990, and Thailand
gained a global Internet connection between Chulalongkorn University and UUNET
in 1992.
Global digital
divide
While
developed countries with technological infrastructures were joining the
Internet, developing countries began to experience a digital divide separating them from the Internet. On an essentially
continental basis, they are building organizations for Internet resource
administration and sharing operational experience, as more and more
transmission facilities go into place.
Africa
At
the beginning of the 1990s, African countries relied upon X.25 IPSS and 2400 baud modem UUCP links for international and
internetwork computer communications.
In
August 1995, InfoMail Uganda, Ltd., a privately held firm in Kampala now known
as InfoCom, and NSN Network Services of Avon, Colorado, sold in 1997 and now
known as Clear Channel Satellite, established Africa's first native TCP/IP
high-speed satellite Internet services. The data connection was originally
carried by a C-Band RSCC Russian satellite which connected InfoMail's Kampala
offices directly to NSN's MAE-West point of presence using a private network
from NSN's leased ground station in New Jersey. InfoCom's first satellite
connection was just 64 kbit/s, serving a Sun host computer and twelve US
Robotics dial-up modems.
In
1996 a USAID funded
project, the Leland initiative, started work on developing full Internet connectivity for the
continent. Guinea,
Mozambique, Madagascar and Rwanda gained satellite earth
stations in 1997, followed by Côte d'Ivoire
and Benin in
1998.
Africa
is building an Internet infrastructure. AfriNIC,
headquartered in Mauritius, manages IP address allocation for the continent. As
do the other Internet regions, there is an operational forum, the Internet
Community of Operational Networking Specialists.
There
are a wide range of programs both to provide high-performance transmission
plant, and the western and southern coasts have undersea optical cable.
High-speed cables join North Africa and the Horn of Africa to intercontinental
cable systems. Undersea cable development is slower for East Africa; the
original joint effort between New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the East Africa Submarine System (Eassy) has
broken off and may become two efforts.[36]
Asia and Oceania
The
Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), headquartered in Australia, manages IP address
allocation for the continent. APNIC sponsors an operational forum, the
Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies
(APRICOT).
Latin America
As
with the other regions, the Latin American and Caribbean
Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC)
manages the IP address space and other resources for its area. LACNIC,
headquartered in Uruguay, operates DNS root, reverse DNS, and other key
services.
Opening the network to commerce
The
interest in commercial use of the Internet became a hotly debated topic.
Although commercial use was forbidden, the exact definition of commercial use
could be unclear and subjective. UUCPNet and the X.25 IPSS had
no such restrictions, which would eventually see the official barring of
UUCPNet use of ARPANET and NSFNET connections. Some UUCP
links still remained connecting to these networks however, as administrators
cast a blind eye to their operation.
During
the late 1980s, the first Internet
service provider (ISP) companies were
formed. Companies like PSINet, UUNET, Netcom, and Portal Software
were formed to provide service to the regional research networks and provide
alternate network access, UUCP-based email and Usenet News to the public.
The first commercial dialup ISP in the United States was The
World, opened in 1989.[39]
In
1992, Congress passed the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, 42
U.S.C. § 1862(g),
which allowed NSF to support access by the research and education communities
to computer networks which were not used exclusively for research and education
purposes, thus permitting NSFNET to interconnect with commercial networks.[40][41]
This caused controversy within the research and education community, who were
concerned commercial use of the network might lead to an Internet that was less
responsive to their needs, and within the community of commercial network
providers, who felt that government subsidies were giving an unfair advantage
to some organizations.
By
1990, ARPANET had been overtaken and replaced by newer networking technologies
and the project came to a close. New network service providers including PSINet, Alternet,
CERFNet, ANS CO+RE, and many others were offering network access to commercial
customers. NSFNET was
no longer the de facto backbone and exchange point for Internet. The Commercial
Internet eXchange (CIX), Metropolitan Area Exchanges (MAEs), and later Network Access
Points (NAPs) were becoming the
primary interconnections between many networks. The final restrictions on
carrying commercial traffic ended on April 30, 1995 when the National Science
Foundation ended its sponsorship of the NSFNET Backbone Service and the service
ended. NSF provided initial support for the NAPs and interim support to help
the regional research and education networks transition to commercial ISPs. NSF
also sponsored the very high speed Backbone Network
Service (vBNS) which continued to
provide support for the supercomputing centers and research and education in
the United States.
Internet Engineering Task Force
The
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a loosely self-organized group of
volunteers who contribute to the engineering and evolution of Internet
technologies. It is the principal body engaged in the development of new
Internet standard specifications. Much of the IETF's work is done in Working
Groups. It does not "run the Internet", despite what some people
might mistakenly say. The IETF does make standards that are often adopted by
Internet users, but it does not control, or even patrol, the Internet.[46][47]
The
IETF is unusual in that it exists as a collection of happenings, but is not a
corporation and has no board of directors, no members, and no dues. The closest
thing there is to being an IETF member is being on the IETF or a Working Group
mailing list. IETF volunteers come from all over the world and from many
different parts of the Internet community. The IETF works closely with and
under the supervision of the Internet
Engineering Steering Group (IESG)[48]
and the Internet
Architecture Board (IAB).[49]
The Internet
Research Task Force (IRTF) and the Internet
Research Steering Group (IRSG), peer
activities to the IETF and IESG under the general supervision of the IAB, focus
on longer term research issues.
Request for Comments
Request
for Comments (RFCs) are the main documentation for the work of the IAB, IESG,
IETF, and IRTF. RFC 1,
"Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker at UCLA in April 1969, well
before the IETF was created. Originally they were technical memos documenting
aspects of ARPANET development and were edited by the late Jon Postel,
the first RFC Editor.[46][51]
RFCs
cover a wide range of information from proposed standards, draft standards,
full standards, best practices, experimental protocols, history, and other
informational topics.[52]
RFCs can be written by individuals or informal groups of individuals, but many
are the product of a more formal Working Group. Drafts are submitted to the
IESG either by individuals or by the Working Group Chair. An RFC Editor,
appointed by the IAB, separate from IANA, and working in conjunction with the
IESG, receives drafts from the IESG and edits, formats, and publishes them.
Once an RFC is published, it is never revised. If the standard it describes
changes or its information becomes obsolete, the revised standard or updated
information will be re-published as a new RFC that "obsoletes" the
original.[46][51]
NIC, InterNIC, IANA and ICANN
The
first central authority to coordinate the operation of the network was the Network
Information Centre (NIC) at Stanford
Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. In 1972, management of these issues was
given to the newly created Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). In
addition to his role as the RFC Editor, Jon Postel
worked as the manager of IANA until his death in 1998.
As
the early ARPANET grew, hosts were referred to by names, and a HOSTS.TXT file
would be distributed from SRI International to each host on the network. As the network grew, this became
cumbersome. A technical solution came in the form of the Domain Name System, created by Paul Mockapetris. The Defense Data Network—Network Information Center (DDN-NIC) at SRI
handled all registration services, including the top-level domains (TLDs) of .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, .net, .com and .us, root nameserver administration and Internet number assignments under
a United
States Department of Defense
contract.[53]
In 1991, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) awarded the
administration and maintenance of DDN-NIC (managed by SRI up until this point)
to Government Systems, Inc., who subcontracted it to the small private-sector Network Solutions, Inc.
In
1998 both IANA and InterNIC were reorganized under the control of ICANN, a California non-profit
corporation contracted by the United
States Department of Commerce to
manage a number of Internet-related tasks. The role of operating the DNS system
was privatized and opened up to competition, while the central management of
name allocations would be awarded on a contract tender basis.
Globalization
and the 21st century
Since
the 1990s, the Internet's
governance and organization has been
of global importance to commerce. The organizations which hold control of
certain technical aspects of the Internet are both the successors of the old
ARPANET oversight and the current decision-makers in the day-to-day technical
aspects of the network. While formally recognized as the administrators of the
network, their roles and their decisions are subject to international scrutiny
and objections which limit them. These objections have led to the ICANN
removing themselves from relationships with first the University
of Southern California in 2000, and
finally in September 2009, gaining autonomy from the US government by the
ending of its longstanding agreements, although some contractual obligations
with the Department of Commerce continue until at least 2011.[58][59][60]
The history of the Internet will now be played out in many ways as a
consequence of the ICANN organization.
In
the role of forming standard associated with the Internet, the IETF continues
to serve as the ad-hoc standards group. They continue to issue Request for
Comments numbered sequentially from RFC 1 under the ARPANET project, for example, and the IETF
precursor was the GADS Task Force which was a group of US government-funded researchers
in the 1980s. Many of the group's recent developments have been of global necessity,
such as the i18n working
groups who develop things like internationalized
domain names. The Internet Society has helped to fund the IETF, providing limited oversight.
Futurology
The
first live Internet link into low earth orbit
was established on January 22, 2010 when astronaut T. J. Creamer posted the
first unassisted update to his Twitter account from the International
Space Station, marking the extension
of the Internet into space. (Astronauts at the ISS had used email and Twitter
before, but these messages had been relayed to the ground through a NASA data
link before being posted by a human proxy.) This personal Web access, which
NASA calls the Crew Support LAN, uses the space station's high-speed Ku band
microwave link. To surf the Web, astronauts can use a station laptop computer
to control a desktop computer on Earth, and they can talk to their families and
friends on Earth using Voice over IP
equipment.
Communication
with spacecraft beyond earth orbit has traditionally been over point-to-point
links through the Deep Space Network. Each such data link must be manually scheduled and
configured. In the late 1990s NASA and Google began working on a new network
protocol, Delay-tolerant
networking (DTN) which automates this
process, allows networking of spaceborn transmission nodes, and takes the fact
into account that spacecraft can temporarily lose contact because they move
behind the Moon or planets, or because space "weather" disrupts the
connection. Under such conditions, DTN retransmits data packages instead of
dropping them, as the standard TCP/IP internet protocol does. NASA conducted
the first field test of what it calls the "deep space internet" in
November 2008. This network technology is supposed to enable missions that
involve multiple spacecraft where reliable inter-vessel communication might
take precedence over vessel-to-earth downlinks.
Use
and culture
E-mail and Usenet
E-mail
is often called the killer application of the Internet. However, it actually predates the
Internet and was a crucial tool in creating it. Email started in 1965 as a way
for multiple users of a time-sharing
mainframe computer to communicate. Although the history is unclear,
among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.[63]
The
ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the evolution of e-mail.
There is one report[64]
indicating experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after
ARPANET's creation. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson
created what was to become the standard Internet e-mail address format, using
the @ sign to
separate user names from host names.
A
number of protocols were developed to deliver e-mail among groups of
time-sharing computers over alternative transmission systems, such as UUCP and IBM's VNET e-mail system. E-mail could be passed this way
between a number of networks, including ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNET, as well as to hosts
connected directly to other sites via UUCP. See the history of SMTP
protocol.
In
addition, UUCP allowed the publication of text files that could be read by many
others. The News software developed by Steve Daniel and Tom Truscott
in 1979 was used to distribute news and bulletin board-like messages. This
quickly grew into discussion groups, known as newsgroups,
on a wide range of topics. On ARPANET and NSFNET similar discussion groups
would form via mailing lists, discussing both technical issues and more culturally
focused topics (such as science fiction, discussed on the sflovers mailing list).
During
the early years of the Internet, e-mail and similar mechanisms were also
fundamental to allow people to access resources that were not available due to
the absence of online connectivity. UUCP was often used to distribute files
using the 'alt.binary' groups. Also, FTP e-mail gateways allowed people that lived outside the US and Europe to download files
using ftp commands written inside e-email messages. The file was encoded,
broken in pieces and sent by e-mail; the receiver had to reassemble and decode
it later, and it was the only way for people living overseas to download items
such as the earlier Linux versions using the slow dial-up connections available
at the time. After the popularization of the Web and the HTTP protocol such
tools were slowly abandoned.
From gopher to the WWW
As
the Internet grew through the 1980s and early 1990s, many people realized the
increasing need to be able to find and organize files and information. Projects
such as Gopher, WAIS, and the FTP Archive list attempted to create ways to
organize distributed data. Unfortunately, these projects fell short in being able
to accommodate all the existing data types and in being able to grow without
bottlenecks.
One
of the most promising user interface
paradigms
during this period was hypertext. The technology had been inspired by Vannevar Bush's
"Memex"[66]
and developed through Ted Nelson's research on Project Xanadu
and Douglas Engelbart's research on NLS.[67]
Many small self-contained hypertext systems had been created before, such as
Apple Computer's HyperCard (1987). Gopher became the first commonly-used
hypertext interface to the Internet. While Gopher menu items were examples of
hypertext, they were not commonly perceived in that way.
In
1989, while working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee
invented a network-based implementation of the hypertext concept. By releasing
his invention to public use, he ensured the technology would become widespread.[68]
For his work in developing the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee received the Millennium
technology prize in 2004.[69]
One early popular web browser, modeled after HyperCard,
was ViolaWWW.
A
potential turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction[70]
of the Mosaic web browser[71]
in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen.
Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance
Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by
the High Performance Computing
and Communication Act of 1991 also
known as the Gore
Bill.[72]
Indeed, Mosaic's graphical interface soon became more popular than Gopher,
which at the time was primarily text-based, and the WWW became the preferred
interface for accessing the Internet. (Gore's reference to his role in
"creating the Internet", however, was ridiculed in his
presidential election campaign. See
the full article Al
Gore and information technology).
Mosaic
was eventually superseded in 1994 by Andreessen's Netscape Navigator, which replaced Mosaic as the world's most popular browser. While it
held this title for some time, eventually competition from Internet Explorer and a variety of other browsers almost completely displaced it.
Another important event held on January 11, 1994, was The Superhighway Summit at UCLA's Royce Hall. This was
the "first public conference bringing together all of the major industry,
government and academic leaders in the field [and] also began the national
dialogue about the Information Superhighway and
its implications."
24 Hours in Cyberspace,
"the largest one-day online event" (February 8, 1996) up to that
date, took place on the then-active website, cyber24.com. It was headed by photographer Rick Smolan.
A photographic exhibition was unveiled at the Smithsonian
Institution's National
Museum of American History on January
23, 1997, featuring 70 photos from the project.
Search engines
Even
before the World Wide Web, there were search engines that attempted to organize
the Internet. The first of these was the Archie search
engine from McGill University in
1990, followed in 1991 by WAIS and Gopher. All three of those systems predated the
invention of the World Wide Web but all continued to index the Web and the rest
of the Internet for several years after the Web appeared. There are still
Gopher servers as of 2006, although there are a great many more web servers.
As
the Web grew, search engines and Web directories
were created to track pages on the Web and allow people to find things. The
first full-text Web search engine was WebCrawler
in 1994. Before WebCrawler, only Web page titles were searched. Another early
search engine, Lycos, was
created in 1993 as a university project, and was the first to achieve
commercial success. During the late 1990s, both Web directories and Web search
engines were popular—Yahoo! (founded 1994) and Altavista
(founded 1995) were the respective industry leaders. By August 2001, the
directory model had begun to give way to search engines, tracking the rise of Google (founded 1998), which
had developed new approaches to relevancy
ranking. Directory features, while
still commonly available, became after-thoughts to search engines.
On
June 3, 2009, Microsoft launched its new search engine, Bing.[79]
The following month Microsoft and Yahoo!
announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.[80]
Dot-com bubble
Suddenly
the low price of reaching millions worldwide, and the possibility of selling to
or hearing from those people at the same moment when they were reached,
promised to overturn established business dogma in advertising, mail-order
sales, customer
relationship management, and many
more areas. The web was a new killer app—it
could bring together unrelated buyers and sellers in seamless and low-cost
ways. Visionaries around the world developed new business models, and ran to
their nearest venture capitalist. While some of the new entrepreneurs had experience
in business and economics, the majority were simply people with ideas, and did
not manage the capital influx prudently. Additionally, many dot-com business
plans were predicated on the assumption that by using the Internet, they would
bypass the distribution channels of existing businesses and therefore not have
to compete with them; when the established businesses with strong existing
brands developed their own Internet presence, these hopes were shattered, and
the newcomers were left attempting to break into markets dominated by larger,
more established businesses. Many did not have the ability to do so.
The
dot-com bubble burst in March 2000, with the technology heavy NASDAQ Composite index
peaking at 5,048.62 on March 10[81]
(5,132.52 intraday), more than double its value just a year before. By 2001,
the bubble's deflation was running full speed. A majority of the dot-coms had
ceased trading, after having burnt through their venture capital
and IPO capital, often without ever making a profit. But despite this, the Internet continues to grow,
driven by commerce, ever greater amounts of online information and knowledge
and social networking.
Online population forecast
A
study conducted by JupiterResearch anticipates that a 38 percent increase in
the number of people with online access will mean that, by 2011, 22 percent of
the Earth's population will surf the Internet regularly. The report says 1.1
billion people have regular Web access. For the study, JupiterResearch defined
online users as people who regularly access the Internet from dedicated
Internet-access devices, which exclude cellular telephones.
Mobile phones and the Internet
The
first mobile phone with Internet connectivity was the Nokia 9000
Communicator, launched in Finland in
1996. The viability of Internet services access on mobile phones was limited
until prices came down from that model and network providers started to develop
systems and services conveniently accessible on phones. NTT DoCoMo
in Japan launched the first mobile Internet service, i-mode, in 1999 and this is
considered the birth of the mobile phone Internet services. In 2001 the mobile
phone email system by Research in Motion for their BlackBerry
product was launched in America. To make efficient use of the small screen and tiny keypad
and one-handed operation typical of mobile phones, a specific document and
networking model was created for mobile devices, the Wireless
Application Protocol (WAP). Most
mobile device Internet services operate using WAP. The growth of mobile phone
services was initially a primarily Asian phenomenon with Japan, South Korea and
Taiwan all soon finding the majority of their Internet users accessing
resources by phone rather than by PC.[citation needed]
Developing countries followed, with India, South Africa, Kenya, Philippines,
and Pakistan all reporting that the majority of their domestic users accessed
the Internet from a mobile phone rather than a PC. The European and North
American use of the Internet was influenced by a large installed base of
personal computers, and the growth of mobile phone Internet access was more
gradual, but had reached national penetration levels of 20–30% in most Western
countries. The cross-over occurred in 2008, when more Internet access devices
were mobile phones than personal computers. In many parts of the developing
world, the ratio is as much as 10 mobile phone users to one PC user.
Historiography
Some
concerns have been raised over the historiography
of the Internet's development. Specifically that it is hard to find
documentation of much of the Internet's development, for several reasons,
including a lack of centralized documentation for much of the early
developments that led to the Internet.
"The Arpanet period is
somewhat well documented because the corporation in charge – BBN – left a physical record. Moving
into the NSFNET era, it became an
extraordinarily decentralized process. The record exists in people's basements,
in closets. [...] So much of what happened was done verbally and on the basis
of individual trust.".
Sumber : Wikipedia
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