Internet TechnologyITCS373

A Brief History Of The Internet

Abdulla Al-Asaadi

1866:" In the beginning was the Cable..."

• The Atlantic cable of 1858 was established to carry instantaneous communications across the ocean for the first time. Although the laying of this first cable was seen as a landmark event in society, it was a technical failure. It only remained in service a few days.  

• Subsequent cables laid in 1866 were completely successful and compare to events like the moon landing of a century later... the cable ... remained in use for almost 100 years.

1957

• The Soviet Union launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. In response, the United States forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military.

Cont. … 18 months

• The organization united some of America's most brilliant people, who developed the United States' first successful satellite in 18 months. Several years later ARPA began to focus on computer networking and communications technology.

• “There has to be some way of facilitating communication among people wit bout bringing them together in one place. ”

• The Computer as a Communication Device by  J.C.R. Licklider, Robert W. Taylor, Science and Technology, April 1968. Online republish by Systems Research Center of DEC, p.29

1961

• 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

1962

• RAND Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control of nuclear arms for a counter-attack.

1964

• Baran's finished document described several ways to accomplish this. His final proposal was a packet switched network.

"Packet switching is the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator."

1968

• ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. BBN had selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuits

1969• The plan was unprecedented: Kleinrock, a pioneering computer

science professor at UCLA, and his small group of graduate students hoped to log onto the Stanford computer and try to send it some data.They would start by typing "login," and seeing if the letters appeared on the far-off monitor.

 • "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"...

Yet a revolution had begun"...

1972

• 1972 there was to be an International Conference on Computer Communications, so Larry asked Bob Kahn at BBN to organize a public demonstration of the ARPANET.

• It took Bob about a year to get everybody far enough along to demonstrate a bunch of applications on the ARPANET. The idea was that we would install a packet switch and a Terminal Interface Processor or TIP in the basement of the Washington Hilton Hotel, and actually let the public come in and use the ARPANET, running applications all over the U.S ....

• The demo was a roaring success

1972

• The first e-mail program was created by Ray Tomlinson of BBN.

• The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was renamed The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA)

• ARPANET was currently using the Network Control Protocol or NCP to transfer data. This allowed communications between hosts running on the same network.

Network Control Protocol• The Network Control Protocol (NCP) was the first standard

networking protocol on the ARPANET. NCP was finalized and deployed in December 1970 by the Network Working Group (NWG), led by Steve Crocker, also the inventor of the Request For Comments.

• NCP standardized the ARPANET network interface, making it easier to establish, and enabling more and more DARPA sites to join the network. In October 1971, every site on the ARPANET logged into every other site (with one exception) over NCP at a meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• By the end of 1971 there were fifteen sites using NCP on the young Internet:

Bolt Baranek and Newman (BBN)

Carnegie Mellon University

Case Western Reserve University

Harvard University

Lincoln Laboratories

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

NASA at AMES

Stanford University

System Development Corporation

University of California at Los Angeles

University of California of Santa Barbara

University of Illinois at Urbana

University of UTAH

RAND Corporation

Stanford Research Institute

1973

• Development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP, it was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.

• 1974 First Use of term Internet by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in paper on Transmission Control Protocol

1976

• Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe develops Ethernet, which allowed coaxial cable to move data extremely fast. This was a crucial component to the development of LANs.

• The packet satellite project went into practical use. SATNET, Atlantic packet Satellite network, was born. This network linked the United States with Europe. Surprisingly, it used INTELSAT satellites that were owned by a consortium of countries and not exclusively the United States government

1981 )213 hosts(

• National Science Foundation created backbone called CSNET 56 Kbps network for institutions without access to ARPANET. Vinton Cerf proposed a plan for an inter-network connection between CSNET and the ARPANET.

1983 )562 hosts(

• On January 1st, every machine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP. TCP/IP became the core Internet protocol and replaced NCP entirely.

The University of Wisconsin created Domain Name System (DNS). This allowed packets to be directed to a domain name, which would be translated by the server database into the corresponding IP number. This made it much easier for people to access other servers, because they no longer had to remember numbers.

1984 )1024 hosts(

• The ARPANET was divided into two networks: MILNET and ARPANET. MILNET was to serve the needs of the military and ARPANET to support the advanced research component, Department of Defense continued to support both networks.

Upgrade to CSNET was contracted to MCI. New circuits would be T1 lines,1.5 Mbps which is twenty-five times faster than the old 56 Kbps lines. IBM would provide advanced routers and Merit would manage the network. New network was to be called NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network), and old lines were to remain called CSNET

• 1985 The National Science Foundation began deploying its new T1 lines, which would be finished by 1988.

• 1987 BITNET and CSNET merged to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN), another work of the National Science Foundation. Hosts: 28,174

• 1988 Soon after the completion of the T1 NSFNET backbone, traffic increased so quickly that plans immediately began on upgrading the network again.

Hosts: 56,000

1990 )313,000 hosts(

• Merit, IBM and MCI formed a not for profit corporation called ANS, Advanced Network & Services, which was to conduct research into high speed networking. It soon came up with the concept of the T3, a 45 Mbps line.

NSF quickly adopted the new network and by the end of 1991 all of its sites were connected by this new backbone.

• Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva implements a hypertext system to provide efficient information access to the members of the international high-energy physics community.

1992 )1,136,000 hosts(

• Internet Society is chartered.

World-Wide Web released by CERN.

• NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps)

1993 )2,056,000 hosts(

• InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific Internet services: directory and database services (by AT&T), registration services (by Network Solutions Inc.), and information services (by General Atomics/CERFnet).

• 1994 : 3,864,000 hosts

• 1996 : Over 15,000,000 hosts

References• http://www.netvalley.com/intval/07262/main.htm?sdf=1

• http://www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history.shtml

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

• The Computer as a Communication Device by  J.C.R. Licklider, Robert W. Taylor, Science and Technology, April 1968. Online republish by Systems Research Center of DEC, p.29

• Sacramento Bee, May 1, 1996, p.D1

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_switching

• http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml