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Understanding the Internet

A new communications technology was developed that allowed people to communicate almost instantly across great distances, in effect shrinking the world faster and further than ever before. A worldwide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionised business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information.. . . Attitudes toward everything from news gathering to diplomacy had to be completely rethought. Meanwhile, out on the wires, a technological subculture with its own customs and vocabulary was establishing itself.

So, we're talking about an earth-changing, almost instantaneous communication system that suddenly allowed people and governments all over the world to send and receive messages about politics, war, illness, and family events. The government has tried and failed to control it, and its revolutionary nature is trumpeted loudly by its backers.

Whoops, wait a minute; that's from Tom Standage Walker's book, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers. We're supposed to be looking at the history of the Internet, not the telegraph.

The Internet has a rich and exciting history, founded on mental illness, violence and international intrigue, merged together with the innovative new technology of the telegraph system, but it wasn't really designed to withstand a nuclear war.

Huh?

Here's the story of legend: The Internet actually owes its beginnings to paranoia and the Cold War. The US government needed a way to communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear war. At that time, much of the government's secure communication was "point to point": information goes from one point to another in a relatively straight line, such as when you string a wire between the two places trying to talk.

Unfortunately, with point to point communication, if any part of the network between the two points was destroyed, so was communication. What was needed was a network where data could find alternative routes even if a portion of that network got blown to smithereens.

The trouble is, it didn't really happen that way. It is true that the RAND Corporation published a series of studies starting in 1960, about secure communications technologies that could enable a military communications network to withstand a nuclear attack . They described two key ideas that worked their way into our online lives: first, use of a decentralized network with multiple paths between any two points; and second, dividing complete user messages into message blocks before sending them into the network. This first allowed the elimination of single points of failure, and enabled the network to automatically and efficiently work around any failures.

Meanwhile, in 1969, the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) developed a thing which they eventually called ARPANET. It was supposed to allow ARPA-sponsored researchers in various locations to use various computers which ARPA was providing, and its other main purpose was to quickly make new software and other results widely available. This network used a system called "packet switching". With packet switching, information is split up into packets. Even if direct communication was cut off, these "smart packets", each with its own addressing information ,could still find their way to their final destination. Previously, data communication used circuit switching, as in the old typical telephone circuit, where a dedicated circuit is tied up for the duration of the call and communication is only possible with the single party on the other end of the circuit.

At first the ARPANET was used by scientist and researchers at government-funded institutions. It slowly grew in popularity and began to evolve into the modern-day Internet, with the addition of inventions like email (in 1972) and TCP/IP (Transmission control protocol Internet Protocol, a set of protocols that allowed different networks to communicate with each other). As the modern-day Internet grew, the old ARPANET was decommissioned.

The Internet Society writes about the merger of technical ideas that produced the ARPANET in A Brief History of the Internet, and states in a note: "It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks."

The ARPANET was designed to survive network losses, but the main reason was actually that the switching nodes and network links were not highly reliable, even without any nuclear attacks.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics, developed an idea that was to become the World-Wide Web. Eventually, as commercial restrictions were lifted from the Internet, new developments made ease of use less of an issue, and the World-Wide Web took off, making it the everyday tool that it is today.

HOBBES' INTERNET TIMELINE, http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline, gives a brief history of Internet milestones from 1957 to present. (Not to be confused with The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less .)

The Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org/, has saved actual content from the Internet over time. You can view Websites from 1995, re-live home video delivery from kozmo.com, and a lot more.

Much of the above history comes via the APRANET history section of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.