M.A.D. Internet roots

[pynchonoid]

--- Jasper Fidget <jasper at hatguild.org> wrote:
> 
> Corollary: The Aegis Destroyer evolved from the
> concept of the canoe,
> therefore the canoe was designed with the Aegis
> Destroyer in mind.

Talk about gross oversimplification.  Of course, if
the Aegis Destroyer was built by expanding upon the
framework of the original canoe (as the Internet built
on ARPAnet), your "Corollary" would be pretty
accurate.

<http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml>

[...] 
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, 4 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.
Kleinrock's conviction of the need for packet
switching was confirmed.

In late 1966 Roberts went to DARPA to develop the
computer network concept and quickly put together his
plan for the "ARPANET", publishing it in 1967. At the
conference where he presented the paper, there was
also a paper on a packet network concept from the UK
by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL.
Scantlebury told Roberts about the NPL work as well as
that of Paul Baran and others at RAND. The RAND group
had written a paper on packet switching networks for
secure voice in the military in 1964. It happened that
the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and
at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel
without any of the researchers knowing about the other
work. The word "packet" was adopted from the work at
NPL and the proposed line speed to be used in the
ARPANET design was upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps.
5

In August 1968, after Roberts and the DARPA funded
community had refined the overall structure and
specifications for the ARPANET, an RFQ was released by
DARPA for the development of one of the key
components, the packet switches called Interface
Message Processors (IMP's). The RFQ was won in
December 1968 by a group headed by Frank Heart at Bolt
Beranek and Newman (BBN). As the BBN team worked on
the IMP's with Bob Kahn playing a major role in the
overall ARPANET architectural design, the network
topology and economics were designed and optimized by
Roberts working with Howard Frank and his team at
Network Analysis Corporation, and the network
measurement system was prepared by Kleinrock's team at
UCLA. 6

Due to Kleinrock's early development of packet
switching theory and his focus on analysis, design and
measurement, his Network Measurement Center at UCLA
was selected to be the first node on the ARPANET. All
this came together in September 1969 when BBN
installed the first IMP at UCLA and the first host
computer was connected. Doug Engelbart's project on
"Augmentation of Human Intellect" (which included NLS,
an early hypertext system) at Stanford Research
Institute (SRI) provided a second node. SRI supported
the Network Information Center, led by Elizabeth
(Jake) Feinler and including functions such as
maintaining tables of host name to address mapping as
well as a directory of the RFC's. One month later,
when SRI was connected to the ARPANET, the first
host-to-host message was sent from Kleinrock's
laboratory to SRI. Two more nodes were added at UC
Santa Barbara and University of Utah. These last two
nodes incorporated application visualization projects,
with Glen Culler and Burton Fried at UCSB
investigating methods for display of mathematical
functions using storage displays to deal with the
problem of refresh over the net, and Robert Taylor and
Ivan Sutherland at Utah investigating methods of 3-D
representations over the net. Thus, by the end of
1969, four host computers were connected together into
the initial ARPANET, and the budding Internet was off
the ground. Even at this early stage, it should be
noted that the networking research incorporated both
work on the underlying network and work on how to
utilize the network. This tradition continues to this
day.

Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the
following years, and work proceeded on completing a
functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and other
network software. In December 1970 the Network Working
Group (NWG) working under S. Crocker finished the
initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the
Network Control Protocol (NCP). As the ARPANET sites
completed implementing NCP during the period
1971-1972, the network users finally could begin to
develop applications.

In October 1972 Kahn organized a large, very
successful demonstration of the ARPANET at the
International Computer Communication Conference
(ICCC). This was the first public demonstration of
this new network technology to the public. It was also
in 1972 that the initial "hot" application, electronic
mail, was introduced. In March Ray Tomlinson at BBN
wrote the basic email message send and read software,
motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an
easy coordination mechanism. In July, Roberts expanded
its utility by writing the first email utility program
to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond
to messages. From there email took off as the largest
network application for over a decade. This was a
harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World
Wide Web today, namely, the enormous growth of all
kinds of "people-to-people" traffic. [...] 



> > In "our" 1984, after all, the integrated circuit
> chip
> > was less than a decade old, and almost
> embarrassingly
> > primitive next to the wonders of computer
> technology
> > circa 2003, most notably the internet, a
> development
> > that promises social control on a scale those
> quaint
> > old 20th-century tyrants with their goofy
> moustaches
> > could only dream about.
> > -Thomas Pynchon, Foreword to _1984_
> > 


I agree with Pynchon.  



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