The internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The internet is at once a world wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location.

Essay Papers The Sociological Perspective

The internet represents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of sustained investment and commitment to research and development of information infrastructure. Beginning with the early research in packet switching, the government, industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying this exciting new technology. Today, terms like [email protected] and this is intended to be a brief, necessarily cursory and incomplete history. Much material currently exists about the internet, covering history, technology, and usage. A trip to almost any bookstore will find shelves of material written about the internet. 2 in this paper, 3 several of us involved in the development and evolution of the internet share our views of its origins and history. There is the technological evolution that began with early research on packet switching and the arpanet and related technologies , and where current research continues to expand the horizons of the infrastructure along several dimensions, such as scale, performance, and higher level functionality.

There is the operations and management aspect of a global and complex operational infrastructure. There is the social aspect, which resulted in a broad community of internauts working together to create and evolve the technology. And there is the commercialization aspect, resulting in an extremely effective transition of research results into a broadly deployed and available information infrastructure.

How to Write a Better Narrative Essay

The internet today is a widespread information infrastructure, the initial prototype of what is often called the national or global or galactic information infrastructure. Its history is complex and involves many aspects technological, organizational, and community. And its influence reaches not only to the technical fields of computer communications but throughout society as we move toward increasing use of online tools to accomplish electronic commerce, information acquisition, and community operations.

The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by j.c.r. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at darpa, 4 starting in october 1962. While at darpa he convinced his successors at darpa, ivan sutherland, bob taylor, and mit researcher lawrence g. Leonard kleinrock at mit published the first paper on packet switching theory in july 1961 and the first book on the subject in 1964. Kleinrock convinced roberts of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits, which was a major step along the path towards computer networking. To explore this, in 1965 working with thomas merrill, roberts connected the tx 2 computer in mass.

To the q 32 in california with a low speed dial up telephone line creating the first however small wide area computer network ever built. The result of this experiment was the realization that the time shared computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine, but that the circuit switched telephone system was totally inadequate for the job. In late 1966 roberts went to darpa to develop the computer network concept and quickly put together his plan for the arpanet. At the conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the uk by donald davies and roger scantlebury of npl.

Scantlebury told roberts about the npl work as well as that of paul baran and others at rand. The rand group had written a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964. It happened that the work at mit 1961 1967 , at rand 1962 1965 , and at npl 1964 1967 had all proceeded in parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the other work. 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.

5 in august 1968, after roberts and the darpa funded community had refined the overall structure and specifications for the arpanet, an rfq was released by darpa for the development of one of the key components, the packet switches called interface message processors imp's. The rfq was won in december 1968 by a group headed by frank heart at bolt beranek and newman bbn. As the bbn team worked on the imp's with bob kahn playing a major role in the overall arpanet architectural design, the network topology and economics were designed and optimized by roberts working with howard frank and his team at network analysis corporation, and the network measurement system was prepared by kleinrock's team at ucla. 6 due to kleinrock's early development of packet switching theory and his focus on analysis, design and measurement, his network measurement center at ucla was selected to be the first node on the arpanet. All this came together in september 1969 when bbn installed the first imp at ucla and the first host computer was connected. Doug engelbart's project on augmentation of human intellect which included nls, an early hypertext system at stanford research institute sri provided a second node. Sri supported the network information center, led by elizabeth jake feinler and including functions such as maintaining tables of host name to address mapping as well as a directory of the rfc's.

One month later, when sri was connected to the arpanet, the first host to host message was sent from kleinrock's laboratory to sri. These last two nodes incorporated application visualization projects, with glen culler and burton fried at ucsb investigating methods for display of mathematical functions using storage displays to deal with the problem of refresh over the net, and robert taylor and ivan sutherland at utah investigating methods of 3 d representations over the net. Thus, by the end of 1969, four host computers were connected together into the initial arpanet, and the budding internet was off the ground. Even at this early stage, it should be noted that the networking research incorporated both work on the underlying network and work on how to utilize the network. Computers were added quickly to the arpanet during the following years, and work proceeded on completing a functionally complete host to host protocol and other network software. Crocker finished the initial arpanet host to host protocol, called the network control protocol ncp.

As the arpanet sites completed implementing ncp during the period 1971 1972, the network users finally could begin to develop applications. In october 1972, kahn organized a large, very successful demonstration of the arpanet at the international computer communication conference ic. This was the first public demonstration of this new network technology to the public. It was also in 1972 that the initial hot application, electronic mail, was introduced. In march ray tomlinson at bbn wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of the arpanet developers for an easy coordination mechanism.