An Internet history

On the 20th October 1969, the first Internet message was sent. Researchers at the University of California (Los Angeles) and the Stanford Research Institute (San Francisco) had connected together two large mainframe computers using 50kbps modem lines. They sent just two bytes (the letters “L” and “O”, the beginning of “LOGIN”) before the computers crashed. But the connection was made, and the Internet was born. By the end of the year, two more “nodes” were connected, at UCSB and Utah State University.

Computing power was expensive at this time—the nodes had only 12K of memory apiece—and sharing what power was available was important. The project had been funded by ARPA, the US Government's Advanced Research Project Agency, as a way of potentially connecting together military computing power, allowing calculations to be made collectively even if one computer was destroyed by nuclear attack—even then, computing power was critical for warfare.

In those days, no-one had coined the words “Internet” or “cyberspace”; the network that these researchers created was known as ARPAnet. It grew rapidly, with a further eleven nodes connecting by 1971, and twenty-two more in 1972. As the protocols that linked the computers were pushed to their full capacity, they were developed and improved into a reliable and robust means of transferring data. Efficiency was also uppermost in the designer's plans, as response speeds were critical on the new network.

In 1973 the network expanded outside the United States, into Europe. Links were established to NORSAR in Norway and to University College London. By this time, the details of the TCP/IP protocols were tried and tested, and international links were merely a case of using a satellite link rather than the usual “leased lines” over land.

One of the remarkable features of the development of the Internet has been the rate at which new hosts have been connecting to it. This growth rate shows no signs of slowing down yet, and continues exponentially, roughly doubling each year. This expansion has led to problems as well as benefits; network congestion, limits on host addresses and names, and the huge amount of trivial and outdated information all counteract the advantages of increasing ease of communication.

Intitially, applications were primitive. They operated in text mode, using a command language (often different for each tool) and simple transfer techniques. For example, to transfer a file using ftp, you would have to know the syntax for the commands for setting the file type (`asc' or `bin'), navigating to the correct directory (`cd <directory>'), listing the available files (`ls') and finally uploading or downloading files (`put' or `get'). Most of the commands were based around the UNIX operating system, which was designed to be a powerful and flexible toolkit for programmers, rather than a system for ordinary, everyday users to do simple tasks. Hence, the early tools were powerful, but difficult to learn.

The three major applications that were usually provided were:

There were other tools used to augment these basic services, such as finger and ph (both remote directory services), talk (a forerunner of chat and IRC, allowing you to communicate in real-time) and others. Many of these supplementary services provided the basis for new ways of using the Internet, and contributed partially to its success in the coming years.

And there were diagnostic tools, such as ping (for checking if a net-host is `alive') and traceroute (for finding out how your packets of data were travelling through the Internet). These two commands are still around—in a command prompt window (usually found in start > programs > accessories), you can type

  ping woozle.ex.ac.uk
            

to see if my desktop PC is switched on, and you can type

  tracert www.av.com
                

to see the route that information takes from AltaVista's server to your PC. Try it and see!

The introduction of WIMP-(Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers) -based tools made things easier to use, with graphical displays of files and folders on remote computers, user friendly email programs, and menu-driven access to data through a new `gopher' application, a forerunner of the web.

Tim Berners-Lee created HTML as a way to view the same data document on many different types of computer from anywhere in the world. His original idea was to facilitate researchers sharing scientific data, though he quickly realised that it could have uses for many types of document.. You can hear Berners-Lee describe his ideas and the developent of the web in The Web Weavers, an video, and in his book, Weaving the Web [Berners-Lee1999].

The primary features of HTML that make it so original an idea are:

Netscape formed by members of Mosaic team

Collaborative, co-operative, and free