History
Of Internet
The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world
like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio,
and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of
capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting
capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for
collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers
without regard for geographic location. The Internet represents one of
the most successful examples of the benefits of sustained investment and
commitment to research and development of information infrastructure.
Beginning with the early research in packet switching, the government,
industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying this
exciting new technology. Today, terms like "bleiner@computer.org" and
"http://www.acm.org" trip lightly off the tongue of the random person on
the street.
This is intended to be a brief, necessarily cursory and incomplete
history. Much material currently exists about the Internet, covering
history, technology, and usage. A trip to almost any bookstore will find
shelves of material written about the Internet.
In this paper,
several of us involved in the development and evolution of the Internet
share our views of its origins and history. This history revolves
around four distinct aspects. There is the technological evolution that
began with early research on packet switching and the ARPANET (and
related technologies), and where current research continues to expand
the horizons of the infrastructure along several dimensions, such as
scale, performance, and higher-level functionality. There is the
operations and management aspect of a global and complex operational
infrastructure. There is the social aspect, which resulted in a broad
community of Internauts working together to create and evolve the
technology. And there is the commercialization aspect, resulting in an
extremely effective transition of research results into a broadly
deployed and available information infrastructure.
The Internet today is a widespread information infrastructure, the
initial prototype of what is often called the National (or Global or
Galactic) Information Infrastructure. Its history is complex and
involves many aspects - technological, organizational, and community.
And its influence reaches not only to the technical fields of computer
communications but throughout society as we move toward increasing use
of online tools to accomplish electronic commerce, information
acquisition, and community operations.
Origins of the Internet
The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos
written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his
"Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set
of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and
programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the
Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of the computer research
program at DARPA,
starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at
DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G.
Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.
Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published the first paper on packet switching theory in July 1961 and the first book on the subject
in 1964. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility of
communications using packets rather than circuits, which was a major
step along the path towards computer networking. The other key step was
to make the computers talk together. To explore this, in 1965 working
with Thomas Merrill, Roberts connected the TX-2 computer in Mass. to the
Q-32 in California with a low speed dial-up telephone line creating the
first (however small) wide-area computer network ever built.
The result of this experiment was the realization that the time-shared
computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving data
as necessary on the remote machine, but that the circuit switched
telephone system was totally inadequate for the job.
