Chartered O The Internet Activities Board Name example essay topic

... censors (IMP's), and today are generally referred to as routers. June Lawrence Roberts publishes the first design paper on ARPANET entitled Multiple Computer Networks and Inter computer Communication at ACM's Gatlinburg conference. 1968 o The first WAN to use packet switching is tested at the National Research Laboratory (NRL) in Great Britain. o The final standard for ASCII is published. (An earlier version that included only upper-case letters was released in 1961.) April Joseph Lick lider and Robert Taylor publish The Computer as a Communications Device. August Larry Roberts of ARPA releases a Request for Quotation (RFQ) looking for bids to constructing a network of 4 IMPs, with possible growth to 19.

Many large companies like ATT and IBM do not submit bits, saying that such a network was not possible. December small consulting company called Bolt Ber anek and Newman (BBN) located in Cambridge wins the ARPA IMP contract. The group, headed by Frank Heart, would have $1 million and less than a year to turn theory into a working system. 1969'Sometime in March " Honeywell delivers the first IMP prototype (IMP 0) to BBN. The unit was a modified version of Honeywell's rugged 516 computer.

Unfortunately it didn't work correctly, Ben Barker would spend several weeks rewiring it by hand into the correct configuration. April 7th Steve Crocker creates the first Request for Comment (RFC) document titled 'Host Software' (RFC 1). It outlined the interface between hosts and BNN's IMP devices, each site would be responsible for creating the host software that connected their computers to the ARPANET's IMPs. The name RFC was chosen to avoid sounding too self-righteous, Crocker hoped to create an environment in which everyone felt comfortable participating - a spirit which would help the network to thrive in the coming decades. July 20th Apollo 11 lands on the Moon.

Neil Armstrong becomes the first man on the Moon. Buzz Aldrin becomes the second man. They spend 21.5 hours on the lunar surface, including 2.5 hours outside their lunar excursion module while millions watch from the earth. September 2nd " The IMP Guys' from BNN finish installing the first ARPANET IMP node (IMP 1) at UCLA, it is attached to the school's SDS Sigma-7 without a hitch. October 1 stThe ARPANET's second node is set up at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), connecting to their SDS 940. After a bit of tweaking the first connection was made from UCLA to the SRI machine over the 50 Kbps circuit.

November 1 stamp number three is installed at the University of California at Santa Barbara. December The fourth node is installed at the University of Utah. 1970 o Norman Abrahamson of the University of Hawaii develops ALOHA net with funding from ARPA. It carried data at a lowly 4.8 Kbps, but would lay the groundwork for Ethernet several years later. MarchThe fifth ARPANET node is installed at BBN's headquarters.

December ARPANET hosts start using Network Control Protocol (NCP) created by the Network Working Group (NW) headed by Steve Crocker. 1971 o The ARPANET now has 15 sites (23 total hosts): UCLA, SRI, UCSB, U of Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND, SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UI (C), CWRU, CMU, NASA / Ames and averages about 700,000 packets per day. o Project Gutenberg is started by Michael Hart. Its first text is the US Declaration of Independence. o In a Honeywell Computer Journal editorial titled 'What's the Date?' Bob Be mer publishes the first warning about the Y 2 K bug. June 23rd RFC 172 is released establishing the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) SeptemberThe first Terminal Interface Processor (TIP) is deployed on the ARPANET, which enabled computer terminals to connect directly into the ARPANET for the first time. 1972 MarchBBN's Ray Tomlinson creates the first software (SNG MSG and READ MAIL) that allows email to be sent between computers, email quickly becomes the network's most popular application.

March 23 ndARPA's name is changed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is established as a separate defense agency under the Office of the Secretary of Defense. April 3rd Jon Postel creates the 1st Telnet specification (RFC 318) entitled: 'Ad how Telnet Protocol'. Octobero Bob Kahn organizes a demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines at the International Conference on Computer Communications. o The Inter-Networking Group (IN WG) is created to develop standards for the ARPANET. Vinton Cerf is named the chairman. 1973 o First international connections to the ARPANET: University College of London in England and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway. o ARPANET traffic grows to more than 3 million packets per day. March Vinton Cerf sketches his gateway architecture on back of envelope while sitting in a hotel lobby, building on Bob Kahn's ideas for an improved version of NCP.

May 22nd Robert Metcalfe writes a 13 page description of what will become Ethernet as part of his Harvard PhD thesis. He and David Boggs would later create the first ethernet network (running at 2.944 Mbps) between computers named Michelson and Morley, scientists who proved ether didn't exist in the 19th century. Metcalfe would later start 3 Com Corporation in June 1979. October 15th-17 then Thompson and Dennis Ritchie presented their first paper on UNIX at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles at Purdue University. 1974 May Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish 'A Protocol for Packet Network Internetworking', which established the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

This is also the first time the term Internet was used. JuneThe ARPANET has 62 computers attached to it. 1975 o Raphael Finkel first releases the Jargon File while at Stanford. JulyThe ARPANET was transferred by DARPA to the Defense Communications Agency (now the Defense Information Systems Agency) as an operational network.

November In RFC 706 - On the Junk Mail Problem Jon Postel notes that the design of most mail systems made it difficult to block junk mail, for sight the would prove correct when spam began's to fill user's mail boxes twenty years later. 1976 o UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs. It is distributed with UNIX one year later. o Leonard Klein rock publishes the first book about ARPANET technologies: 'Queueing Systems Volume II - Computer Applications' which helped packet switching gain wide-spread acceptance. o The CCITT (now the ITU) defines the X. 25 protocol for public packet switched networks. o Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale use e-mail every day during their campaign to coordinate itineraries. A Single message costs $4. February Queen Elizabeth II of England becomes the first head of state to send an e-mail message. 1977 January 3 r dApple Computer was incorporated in the state of California by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Marcho The ARPANET has 111 computers attached to it. o The first Cray-1 computer is shipped to Los Alamos National Laboratory. The computer was designed by Seymour Cray and had 8 megabytes of memory, a peak speed of 160 megaflops, and a price tag of $8.8 million. April Dennis C. Hayes sells his first modem products to computer hobbyists. He goes on to create the Hayes Standard AT command set in June 1981, which becomes the de facto standard for modem interfaces. July Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and others demonstrate the first gateway system connecting packet radio and the ARPANET.

1978 o The Aspen Movie Map is shown at MIT, it is the first hypermedia videodisc. o Vint Cerf, Steve Crocker, and Danny Cohen create a plan to separate TCP's routing functions into a separate protocol called the Internet Protocol (IP), error handling and data gram functions would remain a part of TCP. o The University of California at Berkeley releases Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX based on version 7 of ATT's UNIX. 1979 o DARPA establishes the Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB) to help the process of creating the gateways between hosts and the network. o The first MUD is created by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw at the University of Essex. o USENET is created by Tom Tru scott, Steve Bel lovin, and Jim Ellis using UUCP between Duke and UNC. o While at UC Berkeley Eric Allman writes Deliver mail, which will evolve into Sendmail during the early 1980's. April 12th Kevin MacKenzie sends the first ever emoticon in a message to the Msg Group. The first is -) meaning tongue-in-cheek.

1980 October 27 thThe ARPAnet stops functioning for several hours when the routing processes in all of the IMPs crash after one of them corrupts the network's routing tables. 1981 o Ted Nelson conceptualizes 'Xanadu', a central, pay-per-document hypertext database encompassing all written information. o BITNET is created by Ira Fuchs and Grey don Freeman. The 'Because It's Time NETwork's tarted as a cooperative network at the City University of New York, with the first outside connection being to Yale. August 12 thIB M releases its IBM Personal Computer. It retailed for between $1500 and $4500 and sold more than 65,000 in the first 4 months.

September 1st RFC 791 which defines Internetwork Protocol version 4 (IPv 4) is released. 1982 o The number of hosts breaks 200. o The Defense Data Network is created (soon to become the Milne t). March military directive is issued by Richard De Lauer, the United State Under Secretary of Defense. It establishes the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite for ARPANET (and all military networks). The cut over date is set for January 1st 1983. JuneThe first PC LAN is demonstrated at the National Computer Conference by Drew Major, Kyle Powell, and Dale Nei baur.

Their software would eventually become Novell's Netware. October Eric Rosen finishes the External Gateway Protocol (RFC 827) specification. September 19th Scott E Fahlman proposes the ubiquitous Smiley: -) to indicate humor in message board posts. 1983 o The number of hosts breaks 500. o The Internet becomes reality when the ARPANET is split into Military and Civilian sections. o UC Berkeley releases BSD Unix version 4.2 c, which included TCP / IP. o Internet Activities Board (IAB) established, replacing the Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB). Dave Clark continues to act as the chairman and a number of task forces were created to handle specific technological issues including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). January 1 stThe entire ARPANET switches from NCP to IP.

The transition is said to have went smoothly, although buttons were distributed saying 'I survived the TCP / IP transition. ' Jon Postel documented the plan in RFC 801, Dan Lynch of USC ISI handled much of the logistics (and went on to start Interop in 1988), and UCLA student David Small berg documented the transition in 15 RFCs in the range of RFC 842 - RFC 876. November Paul Mockapetris of USC's Information Sciences Institute publishes RFCs 882 and 883 which outline the Domain Name Service. Paul's first implementation of a DNS server was called JEEVES.

Kevin Dunlap and later Paul Vixie would soon write BIND, which is by far the most common implementation today. December Mike Muss writes Ping while at the US Army Ballistics Research Laboratory. 1984 o The number of Internet hosts breaks 1000. o William Gibson coins the term 'cyberspace' in the novel 'Neuromancer'. o The Modified Final Judgement provides consumers with more choices for long distance services by 'breaking up' ATT. o JANET is created to serve higher-education in Britian. o Richard Stallman starts the GNU Project, and would later start the Free Software Foundation.'s pring " Fido Net is developed by Tom Jennings, with the node 2 belonging to John Ma dill. 1985 April 1st Whole Earth 'Electronic Link (WELL) is started by Larry Brilliant of Networking Technologies International and Stewart Brand of the Point Foundation, with Matthew McClure as director.

Customers are charged $8 per month plus $2 per hour. May Quantum Computer Services is founded, in November its first online service Q-Link, launches on Commodore Business Machines. The company would become American Online in October 1991.1986 o The number of Internet hosts breaks 5000. o BSD Unix 4.3 is released. o Larry Wall creates the Practical Extraction And Reporting Language, Pearl. (it's name would soon be shortened to simply Perl) o The Cleveland Freenet comes on-line. January Mail Exchanger (MX) records are described by Craig Partridge in RFC 974 joining mail records and DNS. February RFC 977 is released by Brian Kantor and Phil Laps ley. It describes Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), which was created in an effort to make Usenet news faster and more efficient.

JulyThe National Science Foundation establishes 5 super-computing centers to provide high-computing power for all (JVC at Princeton, PSC at Pittsburgh, SDSC at UCSD, NCSA at UIUC, Theory Center at Cornell). The NSFNET is created to connect the sites with a backbone speed of 56 Kbps. August Dan Lynch organizes the first TCP / IP Implementor's Workshop (which would become Interop in a few years), and holds it in Monterey. 1987 o The number of Internet hosts breaks 10,000. o The NSF signs an agreement to manage the NSFNET backbone with Merit Network, Inc. Augusto Apple Computer introduces Hyper Card, the first widely available personal hypermedia authoring system. o Jeff Case, Mark Fedor, Martin Schoffstall, and James Davin show off their Simple Gateway Monitoring Protocol (S GMP). Amazingly a major Internet outage occurred during the presentation, showing just how badly the system was needed.

Their protocol would later evolve into SNMP. August 1 stThe 1000th RFC 'Request for Comments Reference Guide' is published. December 9 thThe Christmas Virus finds its way onto BITNET, causing many mail servers to crash because of the overload. Eventually much of the network is shutdown for a time to stop its spread. 1988 o The first transatlantic fiber-optic cable linking North America and Europe is completed, it can handle 40,000 telephone calls simultaneously. o Van Jacobson writes trace route while at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs after a conversation with Steve Deering of Stanford University. o Bernard Danes creates the first Ethernet switch to add Ethernet support to Northern Telecom carrier-class telephone switches. JulyThe NSFNET backbone is upgraded to DS-1 (1.544 Mbps) links, it handles more than 75 million packets a day.

August Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is written by Jarkko Oikarinen at the University of Oulu, Finland. November 2 ndThe Internet Worm is released by Robert Morris Jr., affecting about 6,000 of the 60,000 hosts on the Internet. CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) is later formed by DARPA in response to concerns raised by the Worm. 1989 o The number of Internet hosts breaks 100,000. o The IAB consolidates its growing list of task forces into two groups, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). The IETF (one of the original 10 Task Forces) was given near-term responsibility for developments and standards while the smaller IRTF focused on longer-range research. Steering, Working, and Research groups are all formed under the IETF and IRTF. o The first gateways between private electronic mail carriers and the Internet are established.

Compuserve is connected through Ohio State University and MCI is connected through the Corporation for National Research Initiative. o The Cuckoo's Egg is written by Clifford Stoll. The book tells the real-life tale of a German cracker group who infiltrated numerous US facilities, and how Cliff traced and caught him after finding a 75 cent accounting error. March First Web Project proposal is distributed by CERN's Tim Berners-Lee. His proposal was for a 'hypertext system' to aid the sharing of information between teams of researchers in the High Energy Physics community. NovemberThe first specification for Point to Point Protocol ( ) is released in RFC 1134. Today almost all dial-up Internet users use to connect.

November 13 thThe 'Make Money Fast' pyramid scheme is posted to UseNet for the first time, making Dave Rhodes infamous. 1990 o Archie is released by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emt age, and Bill Heel an at McGill. o The Internet Toaster, developed by Simon Hackett and John Rom key makes appearances at Interop. o Patrick Naughton sends an angry resignation letter to the CEO of Sun Microsystems detailing the woeful state of the company's operating systems. The company commissions Naughton, Bill Joy, James Gosling, and three others to create a solution to the problem. They would create a simple object-oriented programming language named Oak, which would evolve into Java a few years later. MarchThe ARPANET ceases to exist.

July 10 thThe Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is announced by Mitchell Kap or and John Perry Barlow. NovemberThe first World-Wide Web software is created by Tim Berners-Lee. December Peter Scott introduces. 1991 o The number of Internet hosts breaks 600,000. o The NSFNET backbone is upgraded to DS-3 (44.736 Mbps) as traffic passes 1 trillion bytes and 10 billion packets per month. o Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) is invented by Brewster Kahle. o Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is released by Philip Zimmerman. o The Trojan Room Coffee Machine makes its debut, several years later it will become the first webcam. Marcho Line mode browser ( ) released to limited audience on priam vax, rs 6000, and sun vs. 4. o The National Science Foundation changes the acceptable use policy for the NSFNET backbone to allow commercial traffic.

June 12 thCERN has a computer seminar on. August 6 thLine mode browser ( ) is announced on alt. hypertext. Later that month it is released on comp. says. next, comp. text. sgml, and comp. mail. multi-media. September 10 tho Gopher is announced by Paul Lindner and Mark P. Mc Cahill from the University of Minnesota.

October The mailing lists -interest (now -announce) are started. October 5th Linus Torvalds announces Linux version 0.02. December 2 n dApple Computer releases Quick Time version 1.01992 o The number of Internet hosts breaks 1 million. o The term Netizen is coined in an article by Michael Haben entitled The Net and Netizen's: The Impact the Net Has on People's Lives. Januaryo The Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered. o The Internet Activities Board name is changed to the Internet Architecture Board as it starts operating as a part of the Internet Society. January 12 thThe Line Mode Browser vs. 1.1 ( ) is made available by anonymous FTP.

February 12 thLine mode vs. 1.2 announced on alt. hypertext, comp. info systems, comp. mail. multi-media, cern. sting, comp. archives. admin, and several mailing lists. June The term 'Surfing the Net' is coined by Jean Armour Polly. o The Internet Activities Board (IAB) meets and decides to build a new version of IP out of CLIP. JulyThe first IAB IPv 6 draft is withdrawn during an IETF meeting. SeptemberThe Internet Hunt contest is started by Rick Gates. November 17th Veronica, a gopher space search tool, is released by the University of Nevada. 1993 o The number of Internet hosts breaks 2 million. o ISO 10646 - Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set is released. o The White House and United Nations come on-line. o Robert Hayden creates the first version of The Geek Code.

Januaryo Win Sock 1.1 is released. Win Sock standardized APIs used to create Windows-based TCPIP applications. It was started by Geoff Arnold and Martin Hall during Interop in 1991. o NCSA releases the first version of Marc Andreessen's 'Mosaic for X'. o There are about 50 HTTP servers. February 22nd DARPA is re designated as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in President Clinton's strategy paper, 'Technology for America's Economic Growth, A New Direction to Build Economic Strength'. Marcho (Port 80 HTTP) traffic measures 0.1% of NSF backbone traffic. o presented at Online Publishing 93 in Pittsburgh. April International Workshop on Hypermedia and Hypertext Standards is held in Amsterdam.

Mayo The NSF awards Network Solutions the InterNIC contract worth $5.9 million a year until March 31, 1998 when the contract expires. They begin registering domains at the rate of almost 400 per month. May 14th Gleason Sack mann creates the Net-happenings list serv to distribute announcements about the latest Internet resources. July 5th Peter Steiner's famous 'On the Internet, nobody knows you " re a dog. ' cartoon appears on page 61 of The New Yorker (Vol. 69 (LXIX) no. 20) August The first World-Wide Web developers' conference is held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. September NCSA Mosaic is released for Macintosh and Windows. o Web (http - tcp port 80) traffic takes 1% of NSF backbone bandwidth. October There are over 500 known HTTP servers.

Decembero Marc Andressen leaves the NCSA to work for a small software company. He soon forms a partnership with SGI founder Jim Clark that will become Netscape Communications Corp. o FreeBSD 1.0 is released. 1994 o The web grows at a 341,634% annual growth, Gopher grows at 997%. o The NSFNET backbone is upgraded to OC-3 (155 m bps) links as traffic passes 10 trillion bytes per month. o The first, 'First Virtual', opens. March Marc Andressen and Jim Clark form Mosaic Communications Corp. (now Netscape Communications). April 12th Arizona lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel 'spam' 6000 usenet groups with postings advertising green card lottery services, many Internet users fight back.

May 25 thThe first international conference is held at CERN in Geneva. It is heavily oversubscribed and known as the 'Woodstock of the Web'. July The number of Internet hosts breaks 3 million. o The final specifications for IPv 6 are released by IAB, they recommend 128 bit addresses, enough to number 1 quadrillion computers connected through 1 trillion networks. August The International Conference Committee (IW 3 C 2) is created by CERN and the NCSA.

September 1 stThe Internet / ARPANET celebrates its 25th anniversary. Octobero Network Solutions Inc. reports that it is registering domain names at the rate of 2,000 per month. o The second international Conference is held in Chicago and is called 'Mosaic and the Web'. October 10th Mosaic Communications Corporation (now called Netscape Communications) announces the first version of it's Netscape web browser (version 0.9 Beta). November VRML 1.0 Draft is released by Gavin Bell, Tony Parisi, and Mark Pesce. Decembero National Science Foundation advisory committee recommends moving to a user-fee system for registering domain names as soon as possible. December 14 thThe first meeting of the World-Wide Web Consortium (W 3 C) is held in Cambridge.

W 3 C had been created by Tim Berners-Lee and Al Vez za. December 16 thCERN gets funding for the Large Hadron Collider and decides to discontinue development en order to refocus on particle physics. CERN hands projects over to INRIA. 1995 o The first macro virus is found in a Microsoft Word Document. JanuaryThe number of Internet hosts breaks 4 million. Marcho HTTP (web) packets pass FTP traffic to be largest volume Internet protocol. o The Apache web server project is started.

April 30 thThe National Science Foundation stops funding the NSFNET backbone and establishes the very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBN S) to serve the research community. Mayo Sun Microsystems introduces its Hot Java Web browser and the Java programming language, created five years earlier by Jim Gosling. o Scientific Applications International Corp. (SAIC) of San Diego acquires Network Solutions Inc. as a wholly owned subsidiary. September 14 thThe NSF and NSI announce that domain registration will no longer be free of charge effective immediately. According to the plan new registrants will pay a $100 fee for a two-year registration; and thereafter will pay $50 per year. Organizations registered prior to September 14, 1995 will be charged the $50 annual fee on the anniversary of their initial registration.

EDU domains are still paid for by the NSF. October 24 thThe Federal Networking Council (FNC) unanimously passes a resolution defining the term Internet. December RFC 1883 - 'Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv 6) Specification is released, detailing how IPv 6 should work. 1996 o The Telecommunications Reform Act is passed, opening local and long distance markets to full competition.

The act also included a provision called the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which would be declared unconstitutional because of its vague wording in 1997. o In response to the CDA the EFF launches its famous Blue Ribbon Campaign. JanuaryThe number of Internet hosts breaks 9 million. Larry Page and Sergey Brin begin work on a search engine called Back Rub, named for its unique ability to analyze the 'back links' pointing to a given website. The search engine was soon renamed 'Google', and Google Inc. opened its doors on September 7, 1998. February 10th United Stated Public Law 104-106 directs ARPA to change its name to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). April MCI upgrades its backbone to 622 Mbps.

June 24th After repeated threats via email and snail mail Network Solutions drops 9272 domain names from its DNS tables for failure to pay their domain name fees. 1997 JanuaryThe number of Internet hosts breaks 16 million. The NCSA's Software Development Group halts work on NCSA Mosaic. February The 2000th RFC titled 'Internet Official Protocol Standards' is released.

March 6 thThe Bonny View Cottage Furniture company registers the one millionth Internet domain name (bonny view. com) at 12: 07: 51 pm. May 1 stThe I AHC is dissolved. June 26 thThe Communications Decency Act (part of the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act) is declared unconstitutional in the case of Reno vs. ACLU. July 17th Human error at Network Solutions causes DNS tables for. net and. com to become corrupted leaving most domain names unreachable while clean databases are distributed.

December 22 ndThe American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) begins operation. 1998 January 30 thThe US Commerce Department releases its Green Paper proposal, intended to clarify how the domain name registration system should be handled. January 22nd Netscape Communications Corporation announces plans to make the source code for Netscape Communicator client software available for free licensing on the Internet. February 6 thThe International Telecommunication Union announces that technical standards have been agreed upon for the V. 90 protocol used in 56 K modems. May 4 thThe two millionth domain name (voyagers travel. com) is registered. June 29 thThe Gigabit Ethernet Alliance announces that the I has ratified 802.3 z as the Gigabit Ethernet standard.

October 26 thThe Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) if formed and establishes it's initial board of directors. November 6 thThe three millionth domain name (lizzy bee. com) is registered. November 24th America Online, Inc. announces that it would acquire Netscape Communications Corporation in a stock transaction valued at $4.2 billion. 1999 o Online retailers rack up 5.3 billion in sales. March 9 thThe four millionth domain name (. com) is registered. March 26 thThe Melissa macro virus quickly spreads across the network.

May 29 thThe five millionth domain name (. com) is registered. June ISOC approves the formation of the Internet Societal Task Force (IETF), Vint Cerf serves as first chair. The organization was originally proposed by Sascha Ignjatovic to address societal issues and concerns relating to the Internet. October 1 stThe original Cleveland Freenet closes. 2000 o 304 million people have internet access. April The ten millionth domain name is registered.

November 16th ICANN selects seven new top level domain names: . aero, . biz, . coop, . info, . museum, . name, . pro Short History of the Internet by Bruce F&SF Science Column #5'Internet's ome thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, America's foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war? Post nuclear America would need a command-and-control network, linked from city to city, state to state, base to base. But no matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would reduce any conceivable network to tatters.

And how would the network itself be commanded and controlled? Any central authority, any network central citadel, would be an obvious and immediate target for an enemy missile. The center of the network would be the very first place to go. RAND mulled over this grim puzzle in deep military secrecy, and arrived at a daring solution. The RAND proposal (the brainchild of RAND staffer Paul Baran) was made public in 1964.

In the first place, the network would have no central authority. Furthermore, it would be designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters. The principles were simple. The network itself would be assumed to be unreliable at all times.

It would be designed from the get-go to transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at some other specified destination node. Each packet would wind its way through the network on an individual basis.

The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant. Only final results would count. Basically, the packet would be tossed like a hot potato from node to node to node, more or less in the direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If big pieces of the network had been blown away, that simply wouldn't matter; the packets would still stay airborne, lateral led wildly across the field by whatever nodes happened to survive.

This rather haphazard delivery system might be 'inefficient' in the usual sense (especially compared to, say, the telephone system) -- but it would be extremely rugged. During the 60's, this intriguing concept of a decentralized, blast proof, packet-switching network was kicked around by RAND, MIT and UCLA. The National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain set up the first test network on these principles in 1968. Shortly afterward, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency decided to fund a larger, more ambitious project in the USA. The nodes of the network were to be high-speed supercomputers (or what passed for supercomputers at the time). These were rare and valuable machines which were in real need of good solid networking, for the sake of national research-and-development projects.

In fall 1969, the first such node was installed in UCLA. By December 1969, there were four nodes on the infant network, which was named ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor. The four computers could transfer data on dedicated high-speed transmission lines. They could even be programmed remotely from the other nodes. Thanks to ARPANET, scientists and researchers could share one another's computer facilities by long-distance. This was a very handy service, for computer-time was precious in the early '70's.

In 1971 there were fifteen nodes in ARPANET; by 1972, thirty-seven nodes. And it was good. By the second year of operation, however, an odd fact became clear. ARPANET's users had warped the computer-sharing network into a dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidized electronic post- office. The main traffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing. Instead, it was news and personal messages.

Researchers were using ARPANET to collaborate on projects, to trade notes on work, and eventually, to downright gossip and schmooze. People had their own personal user accounts on the ARPANET computers, and their own personal addresses for electronic mail. Not only were they using ARPANET for person-to-person communication, but they were very enthusiastic about this particular service -- far more enthusiastic than they were about long-distance computation. It wasn't long before the invention of the mailing-list, an ARPANET broadcasting technique in which an identical message could be se.