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The Internet: You Didn't Build That |
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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 24 July 2012 12:32 |
 Here we go again with the spurious claims about the invention of the Internet. President Obama declared that we all owe government a great debt for inventing it. Previously Al Gore took credit. Then on Monday, Wall Street Journal columnist Gordon Crovitz gave credit to, among other people, Steve Jobs! And yesterday, Michael Hiltzik, author of a book about Xerox PARC, came back to the defense of the government's role in an article in the Los Angeles Times.
So what's the real story? There are elements of truth in each of these points of view, but strongly biased and selectively told. The early concepts of packet switching global networks were developed by Leonard Kleinrock of MIT (later UCLA), J.C.R. Licklider of BBN, Paul Baran of RAND Corp, and Lawrence Roberts of MIT in the early 1960s, but were independently developed simultaneously by quite a few others. It was a concept whose time had come, inspired by the telephone network (invented by Alexander Graham Bell and AT&T) and the need to send data between computers.
Licklider was appointed to the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, created in 1958) in 1962 and there he convinced some colleagues about the importance of his networking ideas. Licklider left ARPA, but the agency pursued his ideas primarily under Bob Taylor. An ARPA-sponsored study lead to a paper by MIT's Larry Roberts basically outlining an ARPANET plan in 1966.
1967 had Roberts discussing designs with ARPA. An Association of Computing Machinery symposium that year lead to the meeting of independent packet network teams from RAND Corp, the U.K.'s National Physical Laboratory (NPL), and ARPA. NPL that year created an experimental packet-switching network called NPL Data Network. NPL's Donald Davies coined the term "packet".
ARPA put out a Request for Quotation to build a packet switched network in 1968, and awarded the contract to BBN. BBN's ARPANET linked UCLA, Stanford, UCSB, and U of U -- each of which were independently working on networking research -- over leased AT&T lines in late 1969. This was a network, not an internetwork. Within about 6 months, MIT, Harvard, and BBN in Cambridge, Mass, were added, along with Systems Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica, which had previously connected to MIT via a direct (non-packet-switched) link.
 Throughout the 1970s, other universities and corporations connected to this network along with a few government nodes to help participate in computer & networking research. Remote login, email, file sharing, and other network applications were developed by various members of this research community.
In 1973, Stanford's Vint Cerf & BBN's Bob Kahn -- influenced by Hubert Zimmerman and Louis Pouzin's CYCLADES network in France and Xerox PARC's Pup protocol -- developed an internetworking protocol called TCP. The term "internet" is coined at this point. Further reasearch funded by DARPA at BBN, Stanford, and University College London created further refinements and iterations which became the TCP/IP protocol we use on the Internet today.
BBN created the first commercial packet-switched network, Telenet, in 1974. In 1977, AT&T Bell Labs released the Unix operating system with its own networking protocol, UUCP. In 1978, Apple released a serial interface card to communicate with acoustic coupler modems for dial-up access. In 1979, USENET was established using UUCP, with "newsgroup" message boards for various topics of interest. IBM distributed systems with NJE networking protocol, on which BITNET was built in 1981, providing "listserv" email message systems and file transfer. CSNET was established as an alternative research and student-access network for those without ARPANET access in 1981. EUnet was created in Europe using UUCP in 1982. Various other commercial and non-profit networks sprung up around the world around this time as well, variously using UUCP, BITNET, or TCP/IP.
The government and civilian nodes of ARPANET separated into distinct but inter-networked networks in 1983 when TCP/IP was fully implemented. Although this wasn't the first internetwork by far, it formed the basis of the Internet as we know it today because all other networks and internets wanted to be connected to this foundation of universities and corporations. In 1986, the National Science Foundation created a non-commercial, research-only cross-country 56kbps Internet backbone called NSFNet to which many other universities and corporations connected.
In 1987, commercial UUCP and Usenet access was made available by UUNET. In 1989, commercial email relay with the non-commercial Internet was established with MCI Mail and CompuServe. The same year, ARPANET was officially decommissioned, with non-commercial Internet traffic then mostly on the NSFNet backbone.
The World (world.std.com) launched the first commercial Internet dial-up access in 1990. Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) Association, Inc. was formed by General Atomics (CERFnet), Performance Systems International, Inc. (PSInet), and UUNET Technologies, Inc. (AlterNet), in 1991 to offer commercial Internet access as the NSF began lifting restrictions on commercial use of the NSFNet backbone. That same year, hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and the world-wide web (WWW) were released by CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee as a young student years before had made the first hypertext client-server communication. Also in 1991, Senator Al Gore introduced the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, signed into law by George Bush, allocating $600 million to accelerate development of gigabit networking. Throughout the early 1990s, multiple independent commercial networks grew to the point of internetworking independently of the NSFNet backbone and were able to offer cross-country commercial Internet services.  Businesses and media began taking notice of the Internet and Web in 1993 with the Mosaic web browser (created by Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois) and the first websites. Al Gore was a cheerleader of the "Information Superhighway" throughout this era, but did little to influence it aside from his bully pulpit.
In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a private, non-profit, industry-membership, international standards organization which helps to ensure the interoperability of the Web. By 1995, NSFNet was ended and all Internet traffic depended on commercial Internet backbones, with AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe offering dial-up residential Internet access. In 1996, 34 universities kicked off a replacement high-speed research-only network called Internet2 since now "the" Internet, i.e. Internet1, had become thoroughly commercial and launched into a dot-com bubble. The Internet subsequently included satellite links, cellular networks, and wireless mesh networks, and it continues growing as the technology and software and culture and usage patterns continue to evolve.
 So, who invented the internet? The global free-market economy, with for-profit and non-profit corporations, universities, and government research institutions all involved in some way. There was no single inventor. It was an idea whose time had come, and many people on the leading edge of their fields helped to make it happen. Lots of people can realistically claim to be among the founders and early adopters, but nobody can claim sole credit for the Internet. It was not an invention of the government, but the government played a role, as it does in all things these days. But it was in no sense dependent on government. The Internet would have come into being even without the government or any of several other key players. Someone else would have stepped up instead. Indeed they did. Nobody was the only game in town. Government provided some funding, but the profit motive provided much more. The Internet has diverse roots throughout the global economy, and we should be thankful that governments for the most part stayed out of its way. For that is the real distinction -- although governments did impose a few limitations here and there, for the most part, the history of the Internet is unique in that governments did not try to control and regulate it to death. At least not yet.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 24 July 2012 15:03 )
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