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The Internet: 40 Years of Breathtaking Innovation
By: Roy Mark
2009-10-31
Article Rating:    / 3
There are 5 user comments on this IT Infrastructure story.
What has become the Internet was started 40 years ago when computer scientists at UCLA made the first host-to-host connection to the Stanford Research Institute. From there, there's been no looking back.It was October 1969 and
Paul McCartney was not dead. He even said so in a press conference. The
100-to-1 shot New York Mets won the World Series. The cold war between Russia and the United States was anything but with nuclear testing
continuing unabated by both sides. The United States, though, was riding high in the
space race after successfully landing two men on the moon earlier in the
summer.
Buoyed by the national interest in the space race, U.S. science and technology programs
were blossoming throughout the country, with the best and brightest high school
grads flocking to college science and computer majors. They could be spotted on
campuses as the ones with shoe boxes full of punch cards to be fed into
university mainframes.
Unknown except to a select few at the time, the Internet was also born in
October 1969, when scientists at UCLA made the first host-to-host
connection to the Stanford Research Institute. It failed to connect the first
time, and but the scientistsincluding young Vint Cerfwere successful the
second time. The experiment on something called ARPANET was little noted but is
now recognized as a seminal moment in science and technology.
As Cerf once noted, "Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And
certainly not on the Internet."
What followed was 40 years of breathtaking innovation. With generous help from
the Computer History Museum, below is a brief timeline from the
beginning of the Internet to its emergence in the 1990s as a commercial force.
1970: Nodes are added to the ARPANET at the rate of one per month, and
by the end of the year scientists have put the finishing touches on a host-to-host
protocol called the NCP (Network Control Protocol).
1973: Work begins to interconnect ARPANET with other networks using a
net-to-net connection protocol. Cerf and Robert Kahn present a paper on the new
TCP
(Transmission Control Protocol).
1977: Cerf
and Kahn present a demonstration using the term "internetting" to
describe the traffic moving among the Packet Radio net, SATNET, and the
ARPANET. Messages go from a van in the Bay Area across the U.S. on
ARPANET, then to University College London and back via satellite to Virginia, and
back through the ARPANET to the University of Southern
Californias Information Sciences
Institute. This shows its applicability to international deployment.
1979: Computer scientists begin discussing the
possibility of building a Computer Science Research Network to be called CSNET.
By
November, the group submits a $3 million, five-year proposal to the National
Science Foundation to fund a consortium of 11 universities. NSF says no.
1983: Numbering the Internet hosts and keeping tabs on the host names
fail to scale with the growth of the Internet. In November, Jon Postel and Paul
Mockapetris of USC/ISI and Craig Partridge of BBN develop the Domain Name
System (DNS) and recommend the use of the now familiar user@host.domain
addressing system.
1984: Novelist
William Gibson coins the term "cyberspace" in "Neuromancer,"
a book that adds a new genre to science fiction and fantasy. The newly
developed DNS is introduced across the Internet, with the now familiar domains
of .gov, .mil, .edu, .org, .net and .com.
1986: TCP/IP is
available on workstations and PCs. Ethernet is becoming accepted for wiring
inside buildings and across campuses. Each of these developments drives the
introduction of terms such as "bridging" and "routing" and
the need for readily available information on TCP/IP in
workshops and manuals. Companies such as Proteon, Synoptics, Banyan, Cabletron,
Wellfleet and Cisco emerge with products to feed this explosion.
1987: The NSF, realizing the rate and commercial significance of the
growth of the Internet, signs a cooperative agreement with Merit Networks,
which is assisted by IBM and
MCI. Rick Adams co-founds UUNET to provide commercial access to UUCP and the
USENET newsgroups, which are now available for the PC. BITNET and CSNET also
merge to form CREN.
1988: The
Morris WORM burrows on the Internet into 6,000 of the 60,000 hosts now on the
network. This is the first worm experience, and DARPA forms the Computer
Emergency Response Team (CERT) to deal with future such incidents.
1989: Commercial
e-mail relays start between MCIMail through CNRI and Compuserve through Ohio State. Tim
Berners-Lee addresses the issue of the constant change in the currency of
information and the turnover of people on projects. Instead of a hierarchical
or keyword organization, Berners-Lee proposes a hypertext system that will run
across the Internet on different operating systems. This was the World Wide
Web.
1990: ARPANET
formally shuts down. In 20 years, the Internet has grown from four to more than
300,000 hosts. Several search tools, such as ARCHIE, Gopher and WAIS, start to
appear. Institutions like the National Library of Medicine, Dow Jones and
Dialog are now online. More worms burrow on the Net, with as many as 130
reports leading to 12 real ones. This is a further indication of the transition
to a wider audience.
1992: Students
at NCSA in Champagne-Urbana modify Berners-Lees hypertext proposal. In a few
weeks, MOSAIC is born within the campus. Jim Clark sees MOSAIC and founds
Netscape. The WWW bursts
into the world, and the growth of the Internet explodes. What had been doubling
each year now doubles in three months.
| | Reader Comments: The Internet: 40 Years of Breathtaking Innovation | | >>> Post your comment now!
| | A user comment on this articleI think music-on-demand was also something in 1990, as well as the efforts of video-dialtone that came a few years afterwards, to spark some... Posted At: 11-19-09 By: Anonymous | | | | | | LOLOn that first transmission-
Trying to send "LOGIN", the first two letters, L O, were transmitted successfully, then it crashed trying to send the... Posted At: 11-05-09 By: Anonymous | | | | | | Good as far as it goesThis article was a cute little human interest piece but stops way short of the real history of the Internet which didn't begin until January 1, 1996... Posted At: 11-04-09 By: Bob Cancilla | | | | | | The Next 40 years!To all interested,
The next 40 years will be even more extraordinary as the free and open Internet is more widely adopted. This progress will... Posted At: 11-04-09 By: Albert L. Wellstein, M CIW D | | | | | | Didn't see it.Back in 1972, I enrolled at Delaware State College. I thought that I had enrolled in a math course but it was a programming course (basic... Posted At: 10-31-09 By: Manuel R. Vela | | | | | | >>> Post your comment now! | | | | | |
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