A Brief History of the Internet

1
A Brief History of the Internet

• Gabriel Ciobanu ltgabriel_at_infoiasi.rogthttp//www.i
  nfoiasi.ro/gabriel

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Origins of the Internet

• Development and evolution of the Internet
  revolves around 4 distinct aspects -
  technological evolution began with early
  research on packet switching and the ARPANET (and
  related technlogies) infrastructure,
• - operational and management aspect of a global
  and complex operational infrastructure,
• - social aspect a broad community of
  Internauts working together to create and evolve
  the technology,
• - commercialization aspect an extremely
  effective transition of information.
• Internet widespread information infrastructure
• Origins
• - 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,
• - 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.

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Origins of the Internet (cont.)

• 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 Lawrence 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.

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Origins of the Internet (cont.)

• 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.
• 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.

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Origins of the Internet (cont.)

• 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.
• In October 1972 Robert 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.
• The idea of open-architecture networking was
  first introduced by Kahn shortly after having
  arrived at DARPA in 1972. This work was
  originally part of the packet radio program, but
  subsequently became a separate program in its own
  right. At the time, the program was called
  "Internetting". Key to making the packet radio
  system work was a reliable end-end protocol that
  could maintain effective communication in the
  face of other radio interference, or withstand
  intermittent blackout such as caused by being in
  a tunnel or blocked by the local terrain. Kahn
  first contemplated developing a protocol local
  only to the packet radio network, since that
  would avoid having to deal with the multitude of
  different operating systems, and continuing to
  use NCP.

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Origins of the Internet (cont.)

• Kahn decided to develop a new version of the
  protocol which could meet the needs of an
  open-architecture network environment. This
  protocol would eventually be called the
  Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
  (TCP/IP). While NCP tended to act like a device
  driver, the new protocol would be more like a
  communications protocol.
• In the spring of 1973, after starting the
  internetting effort, Kahn asked Vint Cerf (then
  at Stanford) to work with him on the detailed
  design of the protocol. Cerf had been intimately
  involved in the original NCP design and
  development and already had the knowledge about
  interfacing to existing operating systems. So
  armed with Kahn's architectural approach to the
  communications side and with Cerf's NCP
  experience, they teamed up to spell out the
  details of what became TCP/IP.
• The original Cerf/Kahn paper on the Internet
  described one protocol, called TCP, which
  provided all the transport and forwarding
  services in the Internet. Kahn had intended that
  the TCP protocol support a range of transport
  services, from the totally reliable sequenced
  delivery of data (virtual circuit model) to a
  datagram service in which the application made
  direct use of the underlying network service,
  which might imply occasional lost, corrupted or
  reordered packets.

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Origins of the Internet (cont.)

• DARPA let three contracts to Stanford (Cerf), BBN
  (Ray Tomlinson) and UCL (Peter Kirstein) to
  implement TCP/IP (it was simply called TCP in the
  Cerf/Kahn paper but contained both components).
  The Stanford team, led by Cerf, produced the
  detailed specification and within about a year
  there were three independent implementations of
  TCP that could interoperate.
• This was the beginning of long term
  experimentation and development to evolve and
  mature the Internet concepts and technology.
  Beginning with the first three networks (ARPANET,
  Packet Radio, and Packet Satellite) and their
  initial research communities, the experimental
  environment has grown to incorporate essentially
  every form of network and a very broad-based
  research and development community. With each
  expansion has come new challenges.
• A major shift occurred as a result of the
  increase in scale of the Internet and its
  associated management issues. To make it easy for
  people to use the network, hosts were assigned
  names, so that it was not necessary to remember
  the numeric addresses. Originally, there were a
  fairly limited number of hosts, so it was
  feasible to maintain a single table of all the
  hosts and their associated names and addresses.
  The shift to having a large number of
  independently managed networks (e.g., LANs) meant
  that having a single table of hosts was no longer
  feasible, and the Domain Name System (DNS) was
  invented by Paul Mockapetris of USC/ISI. The DNS
  permitted a scalable distributed mechanism for
  resolving hierarchical host names (e.g.
  www.acm.org) into an Internet address.

8
A Brief History of the Internet and Related
Networks

• In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research
  Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research
  program to investigate techniques and
  technologies for interlinking packet networks of
  various kinds. The objective was to develop
  communication protocols which would allow
  networked computers to communicate transparently
  across multiple, linked packet networks. This was
  called the Internetting project and the system of
  networks which emerged from the research was
  known as the "Internet." The system of protocols
  which was developed over the course of this
  research effort became known as the TCP/IP
  Protocol Suite, after the two initial protocols
  developed Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
  and Internet Protocol (IP).
• In 1986, the U.S. National Science Foundation
  (NSF) initiated the development of the NSFNET
  which, today, provides a major backbone
  communication service for the Internet. With its
  45 megabit per second facilities, the NSFNET
  carries on the order of 12 billion packets per
  month between the networks it links. The National
  Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and
  the U.S. Department of Energy contributed
  additional backbone facilities in the form of the
  NSINET and ESNET respectively. In Europe, major
  international backbones such as NORDUNET and
  others provide connectivity to over one hundred
  thousand computers on a large number of networks.
  Commercial network providers in the U.S. and
  Europe are beginning to offer Internet backbone
  and access support on a competitive basis to any
  interested parties.

9
A Brief History of the Internet and Related
Networks

• "Regional" support for the Internet is provided
  by various consortium networks and "local"
  support is provided through each of the research
  and educational institutions. Within the United
  States, much of this support has come from the
  federal and state governments, but a considerable
  contribution has been made by industry. In Europe
  and elsewhere, support arises from cooperative
  international efforts and through national
  research organizations. During the course of its
  evolution, particularly after 1989, the Internet
  system began to integrate support for other
  protocol suites into its basic networking fabric.
  The present emphasis in the system is on
  multiprotocol interworking, and in particular,
  with the integration of the Open Systems
  Interconnection (OSI) protocols into the
  architecture.
• Both public domain and commercial implementations
  of the roughly 100 protocols of TCP/IP protocol
  suite became available in the 1980's. During the
  early 1990's, OSI protocol implementations also
  became available and, by the end of 1991, the
  Internet has grown to include some 5,000 networks
  in over three dozen countries, serving over
  700,000 host computers used by over 4,000,000
  people.

10
Internet Technical Evolution

• Over its fifteen year history, the Internet has
  functioned as a collaboration among cooperating
  parties. Certain key functions have been critical
  for its operation, not the least of which is the
  specification of the protocols by which the
  components of the system operate. These were
  originally developed in the DARPA research
  program mentioned above, but in the last five or
  six years, this work has been undertaken on a
  wider basis with support from Government agencies
  in many countries, industry and the academic
  community. The Internet Activities Board (IAB)
  was created in 1983 to guide the evolution of the
  TCP/IP Protocol Suite and to provide research
  advice to the Internet community.
• During the course of its existence, the IAB has
  reorganized several times. It now has two primary
  components the Internet Engineering Task Force
  and the Internet Research Task Force. The former
  has primary responsibility for further evolution
  of the TCP/IP protocol suite, its standardization
  with the concurrence of the IAB, and the
  integration of other protocols into Internet
  operation (e.g. the Open Systems Interconnection
  protocols). The Internet Research Task Force
  continues to organize and explore advanced
  concepts in networking under the guidance of the
  Internet Activities Board and with support from
  various government agencies.

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Internet Technical Evolution

• A secretariat has been created to manage the
  day-to-day function of the Internet Activities
  Board and Internet Engineering Task Force. IETF
  meets three times a year in plenary and its
  approximately 50 working groups convene at
  intermediate times by electronic mail,
  teleconferencing and at face-to-face meetings.
  The IAB meets quarterly face-to-face or by
  videoconference and at intervening times by
  telephone, electronic mail and computer-mediated
  conferences.
• Two other functions are critical to IAB
  operation publication of documents describing
  the Internet and the assignment and recording of
  various identifiers needed for protocol
  operation. Throughout the development of the
  Internet, its protocols and other aspects of its
  operation have been documented first in a series
  of documents called Internet Experiment Notes
  and, later, in a series of documents called
  Requests for Comment (RFCs). The latter were used
  initially to document the protocols of the first
  packet switching network developed by DARPA, the
  ARPANET, beginning in 1969, and have become the
  principal archive of information about the
  Internet. At present, the publication function is
  provided by an RFC editor.

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Internet Technical Evolution

• The recording of identifiers is provided by the
  Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) who
  has delegated one part of this responsibility to
  an Internet Registry which acts as a central
  repository for Internet information and which
  provides central allocation of network and
  autonomous system identifiers, in some cases to
  subsidiary registries located in various
  countries. The Internet Registry (IR) also
  provides central maintenance of the Domain Name
  System (DNS) root database which points to
  subsidiary distributed DNS servers replicated
  throughout the Internet. The DNS distributed
  database is used, inter alia, to associate host
  and network names with their Internet addresses
  and is critical to the operation of the higher
  level TCP/IP protocols including electronic mail.
  
• There are a number of Network Information Centers
  (NICs) located throughout the Internet to serve
  its users with documentation, guidance, advice
  and assistance. As the Internet continues to grow
  internationally, the need for high quality NIC
  functions increases. Although the initial
  community of users of the Internet were drawn
  from the ranks of computer science and
  engineering, its users now comprise a wide range
  of disciplines in the sciences, arts, letters,
  business, military and government administration.