In 1969 Apollo 11 took man to the moon, Woodstock rocked, Sesame Street debuted, Wendy’s was founded and the Internet was born and crashed. On October 29, 1969, at 10:30 pm Pacific Time. The first use of the proto-Internet was attempted by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline. He was trying to log in to a system at Stanford.
Only 2 characters were sent before the entire fledgling Internet crashed. About an hour later, after debugging a code translation problem caused by the UCLA computer using EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) and the SRI computer using ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), the first actual remote connection between two computers was established over what would someday evolve into the modern Internet.
ARPANET
The proto-Intenet was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (the predecessor of DARPA). It is commonly believed that ARPANET was built to explore technologies related to building a military command-and-control network that could survive a nuclear attack. However, Charles Herzfeld, the ARPA director who would oversee most of the initial work to build ARPANET told ars Technica:
ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack … clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA’s mission to do this … ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators … were geographically separated from them.
In its infancy, ARPANET had only four “nodes”:
- Node 1 – A SDS Sigma 7 computer at the University of California-Los Angeles‘ Network Measurement Center;
- Node 2 – A SDS 940 computer at Stanford Research Institute‘s Network Information Center, running NLS;
- Node 3 – An IBM 360/75 running OS/MVT at the University of California, Santa Barbara‘s Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center; and
- Node 4 – A Digital Equipment Corp PDP-10 running the TENEX OS at the University of Utah School of Computing.
Internet routers
Rather than being directly connected, physicist Wesley Clark suggested the mainframe computers connect to ARPNET via another device to off-load the connections. These devices were called Interface Message Processors (IMPs). IMP’s were the first network routers and built by BBN which used Honeywell DDP-516 mini-computers with 12K of memory. The early-ARPANET connected the nodes with AT&T 50kbps lines. This would allow additional systems to be added as nodes to the network at each site as it evolved and grew.
Some of the major innovations that occurred on ARPANET include;
- Email (1971),
- Telnet (1972)
- File transfer protocol (1973).
As ARPANET grew interoperability grew as an issue. The solution proposed by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1982 was TCP/IP. The evolution of TCP/IP allowed organizations of all sizes to began using Local Area Networks or LANs. A standard network protocol like TCP/IP then allowed one LAN to connect with other LANs.
NSFnet
ARPANET was slowly replaced by NSFnet (National Science Foundation Network) beginning in 1986. NSFnet first linked together with the five national supercomputer centers, then every major university. ARPANET was finally shut down in 1990. NSFnet formed the backbone of what we call the Internet today.
When ARPANET was shut down, Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the modern Internet, wrote a poem in ARPANET’s honor:
It was the first, and being first, was best,
but now we lay it down to ever rest.
Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.
For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years
of faithful service, duty done, I weep.
Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.
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Len Kleinrock, a UCLA professor since 1963 who was present at the birth of the Internet, described the attitude of the early Internet for NBC News, “Allow that open access, and a thousand flowers bloom … One thing about the Internet you can predict is you will be surprised by applications you did not expect.”
That openness of the early Internet has given way to growing concern that the Internet has become centralized by a few major companies, compromised by governments, and monetized by the collecting and sharing of private data.
ars Technica notes that the first three characters ever transmitted over the precursor to the Internet were L, O, and L. Without ARPANET, there would have been no Internet.
The Internet is still laughing out loud at us.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
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