BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: Chris Green
Date: 08 Oct 04 - 09:42 AM

Webfolk - I would if I could, mate! Unfortunately it appears that Michael Jackson bought the rights, so I don't want to get sued by a plastic-faced pervert. (allegedly).

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 08 Oct 04 - 09:07 AM

I remember the word 'telnet' - dunno what it is, maybe I knew it when I worked in the library of 2 Federal government scientific agencies (1973-89).

But I do remember when we got 'the computer.' It was far more interesting than the punch machines that sent data to the mysterious, never seen computer in Head Office.

sandra (yah for the World Wide Web)

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: GUEST,noddy
Date: 08 Oct 04 - 05:19 AM

Is it not about time then that someone got round to fixing it?

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: Bobert
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 09:17 PM

What, no Al Gore jokes yet?

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 08:04 PM

Poor Archie & Veronica - whatever happened to Jughead?

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: Bill D
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 06:53 PM

sure...newsgroups are alive & well.....but archie, veronica, telnet, irc, uudeview, are not in much use anymore..

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: Nerd
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 06:35 PM

Sandra, people often make that mistake. It's the World Wide Web that has only existed for a short time. Before that, though, there were other internet "spaces" such as...gopherspace. Anyone remember THAT?

And of course email and newsgroups and bulletinboards. I remember using them in the early 1980s when just a lad...

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: Bill D
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 02:44 PM

...so, those are guys I should sue for my lost productivity and bad habits in the last 8 years?

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: webfolk
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 11:55 AM

To duelling bazoukis, do you think you might be able to prnt the tab for the words you posted above, 'cos I'm not familiar with it.

Cheers

www.webfolk.net

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: Amos
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 11:31 AM

More interesting background from Peter J. Denning:


The four of us (Landweber, Farber, Hearn, and I) proposed CSNET
in 1980 because the ARPANET was closed and the few universities
connected were pulling way ahead of the others in terms of
research capability and contribution. We proposed CSNET as a
technology clone of ARPANET that would bring the functionality
to the entire CS research community. At the time the ARPANET
was closed, to about 180 DoD contractor nodes, a handful of
which were universities.

The NSF wanted to help but was very cautious. They insisted
that we be set up within the umbrellaship of UCAR, because they
wanted CSNET to become self supporting within 5 years and UCAR
had experience making university consortia work. We were funded
for $5M for 5 years with this mandate. By 1985 we had achieved
the primary goal of connecting all 120 CS PhD departments and
industry labs. We had a governance structure that was self
supporting. We created and provided several technologies to
make the network usable for the community: Phonenet (based on
MMDF and SMTP) that exchanged email by phone dialup; Telenet,
a version of TCP/IP that ran over X.25 on GTE Telenet, thus
providing the ARPANET protocols to those willing to pay the bill;
a nameserver; and a bridge to the ARPANET. We negotiated two
key deals between ARPA and NSF: (1) A policy statement that
declared NSF grantees within the CSNET to be authorized users
of ARPANET facilities; and (2) A policy statement that allowed
commercial companies such as IBM and HP to put traffic on CSNET
(and hence on ARPANET). These were the key policy statements
that opened up the network to non-DOD and to commercial members.

By 1985, the success of CSNET was quite visible within the NSF
communities. Many others started asking NSF to provide networking
for them as well -- connecting the supercomputing centers and giving
them network access to them and to each other. NSF responded by
creating committees to help it create and implement NSFNET. These
committees were initially populated by alumni of the CSNET project.
The NSFNET backbone became the Internet backbone and ... well,
"the rest is history". Thus CSNET was a critical driver in helping
NSF get into the networking area and making the transition to the
modern Internet. Without CSNET, the modern Internet would not
have developed, at least not in the way it did.

Curiously, with NSFNET, NSF abandoned its insistence that the
research community pay for its own networking. A generation of
graduate students grew up thinking networking is free and ought
to be free, an attitude that has become part of the spam problem.

So ... please put CSNET into your story book.

---

CS==Computer Science/Computational Science
TCP/IP are two protocols (ways of forming data from bits) that govern Internet transactions.
SMTP is a protocol for mail transactions.
NSF is the National Science Foundation.
DoD is the Department of Defense.
HP is Hewlett-Packard (company)
IBM is International Business Machines (company)
GTE TELNET was a commercial network run by General Telephone Equipment company via phone lines.

Amos

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 11:19 AM

Hippo Birdies Two Ewes!
Hippo Birdies Two Ewes!
Hippo Birdies, Hippo Birdies!
Hippo Birdies Two Ewes!

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: Amos
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 11:14 AM

While (D)ARPA is funded by the Department of Defense, it does a great deal of research and development that have little to do with military applications. That part comes later.

A

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: open mike
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 11:11 AM

the only reference i find to the term "ARPA" in english is: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the central research and
development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD). ...
so the contention that it has a military birthplace must be correct.

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: DMcG
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 10:32 AM

I first used it in 1979, having learnt about it at University in about '76. I didn't remember being such a latecomer!

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 10:30 AM

and there was me sneering at some journalist who asked our Information Centre for information comparing the internet today with 20 years ago. "Huh", I said, "The internet only started in the mid-late 90s"

Tho I wonder what this very young journalist would think of the info above!!

sandra

Subject: RE: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: Chris Green
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 10:08 AM

Altogether now....

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Internet
Happy birthday to you.

Subject: BS: The Internet is 35 Years Old
From: Amos
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 09:48 AM

It has been 35 years since ARPANet was built. For those of you who are as awestruck as I am by major technology breakthroughs, here is an email from the man wqho managed the project back in the 1960's, Bob Taylor, clarifying what happened when. It is from a   mailing list distribution:

From: Bob Taylor
Date: October 6, 2004 2:45:03 AM EDT

Subject: [IP] more on 35th Anniversary of the Internet (well the start
of the Arpanet anyway djf)

Hello Dave.  I agree with you that Rick Adams was "right to the
point".  Here is some more ARPAnet history background.

In February of 1966 I initiated the ARPAnet project.  I was Director
of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from late '65
to late '69.  There were only two people involved in the decision to
launch the ARPAnet:  my boss, the Director of ARPA Charles Herzfeld,
and me.

From 1962 to 1970, beginning with J.C.R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland,
and then me, IPTO funded several of the first projects devoted to the
creation of interactive computing -- then referred to as time-sharing. 
In '64 - '65, I witnessed that within each local site when users were
first connected by a time-sharing system, a community of people with
common interests began to discover one another and interact through the
medium of the computer.  I was struck by the fact that this was a
wonderfully new and powerful phenomenon. 

The next obvious step was to connect those sites with an interactive
network.  To me, computing was about communication, not arithmetic. 
Hence the ARPAnet.
This theme is elaborated in a paper Lick and I wrote in 1968 entitled,
"The Computer as a Communications Device".  Google can find it for
you.  On the last couple of pages there is a scenario that is
reminiscent of today's Internet.

Numerous untruths have been disseminated about events surrounding the
origins of the ARPAnet.  Here are some facts:
          The creation of the ARPAnet was not motivated by
considerations of war.  The ARPAnet was created to enable folks with
common interests to connect to one another through interactive
computing even when widely separated by geography.

          The singularly most important contribution to the
architectural design of the ARPAnet/Internet came from Wesley Clark: 
the interface message processor (IMP).  Wes is the designer of the LINC
which was arguably the first personal computer.  Wes' ARPAnet concept
ensured the critically valuable distributed architecture of the
ARPAnet.  Prior to Wes' contribution, Larry Roberts, whom I hired in
Dec '66 to be ARPAnet's program manager, was considering a single,
central ARPAnet control computer at a military base in Nebraska. 
Fortunately, Wes quickly disabused Roberts of this notion.


    The most significant role in actually building the ARPAnet was
played by Frank Heart and his Bolt, Beranek & Newman team:  Severo
Ornstein, Will Crowther, Bob Barker, Bernie Cosell, Dave Walden, and
Bob Kahn. 

    Two suspicious claims relating to the ARPAnet were an important
part of the case for awarding the 2001 Draper Prize to Kahn and
Kleinrock. 
     1. Kahn has claimed far and wide to be "responsible for the
systems design of the ARPAnet" while a member of the BB&N team.  Since no other team member agrees, I doubt the validity of this claim. 
    2.  Roberts and Kleinrock (close friends since college) began to
claim in 1995, more than 30 years after the fact, that Kleinrock
invented  packet switching.  Most of us believe that Donald Davies in
England and Paul Baran in the U.S. independently invented packet
switching in the early '60s.
I believe these two claims are false but they are recorded as facts on
the web sites of the National Academy of Engineering and the Computer
History Museum.  The worst property of self-promotion is that it takes
credit away from the people who actually made the contributions. 
Roberts, Kahn, and Kleinrock have, however, made other important
contributions.  These can only be tarnished by extravagant claims.

    Packet switching is an important part of modern networking, but it
is not the only key piece.  The multiplicity of the applications and
the openness of the standards also played critical roles in ARPAnet
development, as did Steve Crocker's initiation and management of the
RFC process.


          I believe the first internet was created at Xerox PARC, circa
'75, when we connected, via PUP, the Ethernet with the ARPAnet.  PUP
(PARC Universal Protocol) was instrumental later in defining TCP (ask
Metcalfe or Shoch, they were there). 

          For the internet to grow, it also needed a networked
personal computer, a graphical user interface with WYSIWYG properties,
modern word processing, and desktop publishing.  These, along with the
Ethernet, all came out of my lab at Xerox PARC in the '70s, and were
commercialized over the next 20 years by Adobe, Apple, Cisco,
Microsoft, Novell, Sun and other companies that were necessary to the
development of the Internet.


        The ARPAnet was not an internet.  An internet is a connection
between two or more computer networks.  The ARPAnet, with help from
thousands of people, slowly evolved into the Internet.  Without the
ARPAnet, the Internet would have been a much longer time in coming.


rwt

---

DEFINITION:

Packet Switching:

Refers to protocols in which messages are divided into packets before they are sent. Each packet is then transmitted individually and can even follow different routes to its destination. Once all the packets forming a message arrive at the destination, they are recompiled into the original message.

Most modern Wide Area Network (WAN) protocols, including TCP/IP, X.25, and Frame Relay, are based on packet-switching technologies. In contrast, normal telephone service is based on a circuit-switching technology, in which a dedicated line is allocated for transmission between two parties