Everything has a “start". The Internet, as we know it today, also
had a very humble but interesting beginning.
J C R Licklider of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) envisioned the Internet as far back as August 1962 in a series
of memos written by him that talked about social interactions
that could be enabled through networking, a concept that he
termed his “Galactic Network".
According to this concept, all computers across the planet
would be interconnected and by this, everyone could quickly
access data and programs from any ‘site’. This is what actually happens
today. J C R Licklider joined DARPA (Defence Advanced
Research Projects Agency http://www.darpa.mil/) in October 1962
and was its first research head. In due course at DARPA, he convinced
his successors, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT
researcher Lawrence G Roberts, of the importance of this networking
concept.
In late 1966, MIT researcher Lawrence G Roberts went to DARPA
to develop the computer network concept and quickly put together
his plan for the “ARPANET” (Advanced Research Projects Agency
Network related to the US Department of Defence) publishing it in
1967. Roberts presented his paper at a conference, where, incidentally,
Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL (National
Physical Laboratory) from the UK presented a paper on a packet
network concept.
Earlier during his research, Leonard Kleinrock at MIT convinced
Roberts of the feasibility of using packets rather than circuits
to transfer data, which, by itself was a major leap forward in
the area of computer networking. To prove this, Roberts, with
Thomas Merrill in 1965, connected the TX-2 computer in
Massachusetts to the Q-32 computer in California using an
extremely low-speed dial-up telephone line creating the first
(though small) wide-area computer network ever built.
This confirmed Kleinrock’s theory of the need for packet
switching since the circuit-switched telephone system was insufficient
for the job. This also proved another aspect, which was that
time-shared computers could work well together and running programs
or retrieving data could be carried out without any issues.
The word “packet” was adopted from the work at NPL and the
proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design was upgraded
from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps.
This was just the start. By August 1968, Roberts and DARPA
funded community refined the overall structure and specifications
for ARPANET. This led to a release of a ‘Request For
Quotation’ by DARPA to manufacture packet switches called
Interface Message Processors, which, was fulfilled by a firm called
BBN. Bob Kahn from BBN worked on the IMP’s while Roberts
worked on and optimised the network topology and economics. At
the same time, Kleinrock’s team at UCLA prepared a network
measurement system.
Kleinrock’s Network Measurement Center at the University of
California at Los Angeles (UCLA) was selected to be the first node
on the ARPANET. All this finally came together in September 1969
when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and the first host computer
was connected.
Stanford Research Institute was selected as the second node
and when SRI was connected to the ARPANET, the first host-to-host
message was sent from Kleinrock’s laboratory to SRI. Two more
nodes were added at UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah and
at the end of 1969 four host computers were connected into the
initial ARPANET, and the fledgling Internet came into existence.
Bob Kahn organised a large and successful demonstration of
the ARPANET in October 1972 at the International Computer
Communication Conference (ICCC) which was also the first time
that this completely new networking technology was demonstrated
in front of the general public. In the same year, the electronic
mail or e-mail, as we know it, was introduced. Ray Tomlinson from
BBN wrote a very basic e-mail ‘read and send’ software that was
later developed further by Roberts. The development was driven by
the need of ARPANET developers to coordinate amongst themselves
but by the next decade, e-mail became the largest network
application to have ever hit the internet.
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