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Dave Farber +1 412 726 9889
..... Forwarded Message .......
From: Bob Drzyzgula <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Ip <ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2004 09:00:58 -0400
Subj: Wendy Grossman: Carbon-dating the Internet
http://www.theinquirer.net/Default.aspx?article=18978
| Carbon-dating the Internet
| net.wars
|
| By[1] Wendy M. Grossman: Friday 08 October 2004, 12:33
|
| THE DEMENTED three-year-old that rampages through all of
Microsoft's
| software - My Music; MY Pictures; MY COMPUTER - seems to have
been let
| loose on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Internet,
which
| is around now sometime. Or isn't. It depends whose publicity
| department you listen to.
|
| The year most people seem to be dating the Internet to is 1969,
when
| the ARPAnet was first connected up. It's certainly tempting to
set it
| then. That's the network that's generally agreed to be the most
| important precursor of the Internet. October 29 is the date
[2]UCLA
| has chosen for the official celebration. That's commemorating
| September 2, the day the first Internet message was sent from
Leonard
| Kleinrock's UCLA computer lab.
|
| That of course makes that date entirely correct as far as UCLA is
| concerned. But is that the [3]Big Bang that created the Internet?
| Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyons, in their 1996 book Where Wizards
Stay
| Up Late, document the efforts of Boston-based [4]Bolt Beranek
Newman
| to create the IMP machines that Kleinrock's lab used. BBN was
where,
| in 1971, Ray Tomlinson inaugurated person-to-person network email
and
| chose the now-ubiquitous @ symbol. But we can't take either 1969
or
| 1971 as the beginning of email itself, since that was first
created
| for the [5]time-sharing systems of the 1960s.
|
| We could go back a few years earlier, to when Paul Baran, working
at
| Rand Corporation, and Donald Davies, working at the UK's
[6]National
| Physical Laboratory independently came up with the idea of packet
| switching. That was a completely new way of looking at
transmitting
| data across a network, and is the heart of the way the Internet
as we
| know it operates.
|
| Thing is, packet-switching could have remained just an idea. The
| telephone network, still the biggest network in the world, doesn't
| work that way. The TCP/IP protocols that arguably define the
Internet
| weren't invented until 1974, by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. If you
want
| to go, say, from the publication of their paper, you could pick
May
| 1974, as Cerf mentions in a [7]recent column. That would make the
| Internet 30 years old. But obviously it would be more logical to
date
| from when the ARPAnet moved to using TCP/IP, which was 1983. In
which
| case - glory be! -- the Internet turned 21 years old in January.
That
| would mean it's newly an adult, although you'd never know it from
the
| behavior of some of the people on it. Perhaps they're still out
on the
| now obligatory American coming-of-age pub crawl.
|
| That year - 1983 - is a good pick for another reason. That's the
year
| the [8]domain name system as we now know it was designed and
deployed.
| Without that relatively user-friendly veneer email would have been
| slower to take off, and the commercial Web as we know it might not
| exist at all. The domain name system did as much or more to make
the
| Internet usable as graphical Web browsers did. Though 1969 can
answer
| that by pointing out that the first-ever RFC, the Requests for
| Comments that define Internet standards, is dated [9]April 7,
1969.
| That gives UCLA the right year, but puts it six months behind
| schedule.
|
| Of course, to most people the Internet means the Web and email
(and
| sometimes email also means the Web). In which case, you could go
for
| 1989, when [10]Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, invented it.
That's
| straightforward enough. Except that the Web didn't really take off
| until graphical browsers turned up, which is not, as Netscape
(now an
| AOL division) might like to claim, 1994, when the first version of
| Netscape was released, nor its precursor, [11]Mosaic, which came
out
| in 1993. When Mosaic came out, there were already a number of
browser
| projects competing for attention, of which the earliest were
[12]Viola
| and Erwise, which were released within a month of each other in
1992.
|
| There are still more dates you could consider: 1995, the year Bill
| Gates got net; 1979, the year Usenet was created; 1985, the year
the
| supercomputing centers were created and linked to form NSFnet,
which
| became an important Internet backbone; 1991, the year that
acceptable
| use policies were changed to allow commercial traffic on the
Internet;
| 1994, the year that the big online information services - AOL,
| CompuServe, Delphi - set up their Internet gateways.
|
| In 1998, I appeared at a conference called "Technological
Visions",
| hosted at the University of Southern California, and as part of
the
| exercise felt required to produce some predictions. The papers
| eventually appeared earlier this year - ah, Internet time - in a
| [13]book. Six years is of course long enough to look really
silly, but
| one prediction seems clearly to have come true. I said that it
would
| take constant vigilance to ensure that history did not record that
| Bill Gates invented the Internet. I think the general reaction
was,
| "Nah, nah, come on, these people are still alive, and this stuff
is
| all written down."
|
| Yes. By PR departments. Who take the view that the Internet
started
| when their company made its memorable contribution. In which
case, I
| say to hell with it, the Internet is 13 years and four months old,
| because I got online in June 1991. So there. µ
|
| Wendy M. Grossman's [14]Web site has an extensive archive of her
| books, articles, and music, and an [15]archive of all the earlier
| columns in this series. She has an [16]intermittent blog. Readers
are
| welcome to post there or to send email, but please turn off HTML.
|
| References
|
| 1. mailto:netwars@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
| 2. http://www.internetanniversary.com/
| 3. http://www.internethistory.info/
| 4. http://www.bbn.com/
| 5. http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Email
| 6. http://www.npl.co.uk/
| 7. http://global.mci.com/us/enterprise/insight/cerfs_up/
| 8. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1591.html
| 9. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1591.html
| 10. http://www.w3c.org/
| 11.
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/NCSAMosaicHome.html
| 12. http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~wei/viola/violaHome.html
| 13. http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1686_reg.html
| 14. http://www.pelicancrossing.net
| 15. http://www.pelicancrossing.net/nwcols.htm
| 16. http://www.livejournal.com/~wendyg
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