Internet from 1960's

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You might not believe it, but the Net's roots are in the 1960s, the time of the Beatles, of Flower-Power and Hippies. In 1964, the RAND proposal was put forward. Written by Paul Baran, this proposal stated that the principles of a new networkm which was to be built robustness and felxibility. This new network would have no central authority.

Besides, it would be designed to operate while in tatters. The principles of this network were: All the nodes would be equal in status, each could send and receive messages.

All the messages would be sent in packets, each with its own address. These packets would be sent at one node and would arrive at another one. This may seem rather obvious, but what was new was that the way the packets went through the net was not important. That means that if one node was destroyed, the rest of the nodes would still be able to communicate. This is of course inefficient and rather slow, but extremely reliable. The Internet still uses this method nowadays, and there has been only one collective crash so far.

The first test network built on these principles was installed in National Research Laboratory in Great Britain in 1968. Shortly afterwards, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) wanted to installed a more advanced network based on the same principles in the USA. The network consisted of four high speed computers. In 1969, the first node was installed in UCLA.

Technology	Year Invented
Internet	1969
Email	1971
Mailing Lists	1972
MUD's	1979
Usenet	1980
IRC	1988
Web	1990

There were 23 nodes on ARPANET: The first node (1969) was in UCLA, other nodes were in the Stanford Research Institute, the University of Utah and the UCSB.

ARPANET was constructed because computer time was precious and expensive at that time and the ARPANET offered the scientists possibilities to share their computers using long distance computing. This is nearly unbelievable nowadays, for instance a normal PC has 16 Megabytes of RAM today. This is very sharp contrast to the University of Utah's computer. This Honeywell 516 mini computer had 12 Kilobytes of RAM!

1972 was a key year. Ray Tomlinson of BBN invented the first e-mail program. But why is this that important? Over the years, an odd fact became clear. Instead of using the ARPANET for long distance computing, the scientists used it for communicating with each other, of course for sharing results of their experiments or something, but also mainly for gossiping! (Each user had his/her own e-mail address.)

The first international nodes were set up. These were located in England and Norway. The growth of ARPANET was possible because you could use any platform to connect to it. (This is still the case with today's Internet.)
One year later Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published "A protocol for Packet Network Internetworking" which specified the design of a TCP.

The ARPANET goes international with connections to University College in London, England and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway.

Bolt, Beranek & Newman opens Telenet, the first commercial version of the ARPANET.

Queen Elizabeth goes online with the first royal email message. & UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) was released.

Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, two grad students at Duke University, and Steve Bellovin at the University of North Carolina establish the first USENET newsgroups. Users from all over the world join these discussion groups to talk about the net, politics, religion and thousands of other subjects.

The TCP/IP protocol was established for ARPANET. This protocol became standard (instead of NCP) on 1st January

ARPANET split into ARPANET and the military segment, MILNET. MILNET became integrated with the Defense Data Network created the previous year. The new protocol standard and even more the split-up were important cut-overs for ARPANET, keeping in mind that it was originally created for military purposes.
Thanks to TCP/IP and its decentralised structure, ARPANET grew and grew during the early eighties.
The Name Server was developed at the University of Wisconsin.

William Gibson coins the term "cyberspace" in his novel "Neuromancer." The number of Internet hosts exceeds 1,000.The Domain Name System (DNS) was introduced.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) wanted to make supercomputers useable for research projects, so they decided to link five super-computing centres. First they wanted to use ARPANET for connecting the computers, but ARPANET's bureaucracy and shortage of staff kept NSF from using this solution.

So they built their own network using the IP-protocol of ARPANET. NSF linked the five centres. (56 kps). But apparently they could not link the universities with this network, simply because they didn't have enough money for building cables to every university.

The solution: The schools and universities of one region were linked together and this network was linked to one of the supercomputers.The "traffic" in this network increased steadily and so the computers and the lines were soon to slow to handle the massive amount of data.

Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio creates the first "Freenet" for the Society for Public Access computing.

NSF signed a contract with Merit Networks to increase the performance of the network. The computing centres and lines have been upgraded ever since. The number of Internet hosts exceeds 10,000.

The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is formed to address security concerns raised by the Worm. .Internet worm unleashed

System administrator turned author, Clifford Stoll, catches a group of Cyberspies, and writes the best-seller "The Cuckoo's Egg." The number of Internet hosts exceeds 100,000.

ARPANET ceased to exist, but its users scarcely noticed that because ARPANET's functions were continued.

Files were available for download on four newsgroups (alt.hypertext, comp.sys.next, comp.text.sgml and comp.mail.multi-media) . October -There were mailing lists, namely www-interest@info.cern.ch and www-talk@info.cern.ch. WAIS and Gopher were released.

On 15th , the first line mode browser was available by anonymous FTP. WWW was released by CERN and the number of hosts broke 1.000.000.

One year later, the first browser, Mosaic, was released. The growth rate of Internet was an incredible 341% and it stills grows and grows now. It is a valuable source of information for anyone and on any topic, and also a new, exciting way of communicating with people thousands of kilometres away. The WWW measured 0.1% of the NSFNET backbone traffic.

From 25th - 27th, there was the first International WWW Conference, also known as "The Woodstock of the Web". VRML was conceived there.
August
The IW3C2 (International WWW Conference Committee) was founded by NCSA and CERN in Boston.
September
The European Commission and CERN propose the WebCore project. This is for the development of the Web core technology in Europe.
October
In Chicago, there was the Second International WWW conference titled "Mosaic and the Web".
December
On 14th, the first W3 Consortium meeting was held in Cambridge (USA). On 16th, CERN decides not to continue WWW development due to budget conditions and transfers the WebCore project to INRIA (Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, France).

The Third International WWW Conference "Tools and Applications" took place in Darmstadt (Germany) and was hosted by the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. The Web Society was founded in Graz (Austria) by the Technical University of Graz, CERN, the University of Minnesota and INRIA. NSFNET reverts back to a research project, leaving the Internet in commercial hands. The Web now comprises the bulk of Internet traffic. The Vatican launches www.vatican.va. James Gosling and a team of programmers at Sun Microsystems release an Internet programming language called Java, which radically alters the way applications and information can be retrieved, displayed, and used over the Internet.

Nearly 10 million hosts online. The Internet covers the globe. As the Internet celebrates its 25th anniversary, the military strategies that influenced its birth become historical footnotes. Approximately 40 million people are connected to the Internet. More than $1 billion per year changes hands at Internet shopping malls, and Internet related companies like Netscape are the darlings of high-tech investors.

Users in almost 150 countries around the world are now connected to the Internet. The number of computer hosts approaches 10 million.

Within 30 years, the Internet has grown from a Cold War concept for controlling the tattered remains of a post-nuclear society to the Information Superhighway. Just as the railroads of the 19th century enabled the Machine Age, and revolutionized the society of the time, the Internet takes us into the Information Age, and profoundly affects the world in which we live.

Today some people telecommute over the Internet, allowing them to choose where to live based on quality of life, not proximity to work. Many cities view the Internet as a solution to their clogged highways and fouled air. Schools use the Internet as a vast electronic library, with untold possibilities. Doctors use the Internet to consult with colleagues half a world away. And even as the Internet offers a single Global Village, it threatens to create a 2nd class citizenship among those without access. As a new generation grows up as accustomed to communicating through a keyboard as in person, life on the Internet will become an increasingly important part of life on Earth.

What can you say about the future of the Internet? One can only guess what it will look like in ten years. What is important that speed is enhanced greatly. If you ever tried to download a big file from a èserver in the USA (using a PC located in Austria), you know what I mean. Mass media is showing interest in the Net know and you can find articles on it nearly in every magazine out there. This sounds good, but it isn't indeed. How many articles are there about nazi or porno material on the Net, and how many columnists do cry out for censorship?