Sept 21st, 1997
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Sept 21st, 1997 |
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Paul Baran and his colleagues at the Rand Corporation came up with one of the crucial ideas behind the Internet, packets. They did not call them packets, and did not develop the technology, but they had the idea. The idea was to break up the transmissions into a discrete number of pieces. These pieces, each of which contain information on where it is supposed to go, would then be sent out through a network of phone lines connecting numerous computers. Since each piece contained the directions on where it was supposed to go, it did not matter what route it took to get there, and thus did not matter if some computers were down in between. The packets once arriving at their destination are reassembled into the original transmission. This idea, called "packet-switching" was also independently invented by Prof. Leonard Kleinrock at MIT in July 1961, and Dr. Donald W. Davies at the National Physical Laboratory in England in 1965. The word packets was adopted from the NPL work. Remember this was just an idea, and nothing had been built, yet. The foundation was now just being laid. J.C.R. Licklider was the head of Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) at the United States Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In 1963, Licklider wrote his historic memo addressed to "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network." The memo outlined Licklider's thoughts that computer can help researchers share information, and Licklider had the vision of a day when communities of people with common interest would be able to discuss them all on-line. Licklider was not the only visionary of the times, Lawrence Roberts also foresaw a future in which networking computers together would encourage 'a community use of computers'. In 1965, Roberts linked his TX-2 computer at MIT's Lincoln Lab to his colleague, Thomas Marill's Q-32 computer at System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, CA using a dedicated phone line. (Wow! Talk about a long distance bill for that!) In 1966, Bob Taylor asked a couple of important questions, which had some profound impacts. Taylor was a psychologist working at IPTO under Licklider. Taylor was lucky to be one of the researchers who had use of ARPA's computer resources to collaborate with 17 computer facilities across the nation. Bob Taylor had three computers in his office, each with a different phone line which connected them to other computers across the country. One to MIT, One to Berkeley, and one to Santa Monica. Taylor pondered this and asked: Why do I need three computers? Why wasn't there one terminal that could talk to all the computers across the country, or a network to link them? Why couldn't one central terminal do it all?
Please write if you wish to comment on these articles. e-mail: Marcus Kazmierczak, marcus@mkaz.com |
