Sept 22nd, 1997
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In 1967, Lawrence Roberts of ARPA, published his "Plan for the ARPANet" computer network, which built upon the ideas of packet-switching for a worldwide network. In July 1968, ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) released a request for a communication system to connect together a few geographically dispersed computers over a shared network. Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) was awarded this contract. BBN became a backbone/service provider and in August 1997 GTE Corp. acquired the company. In the fall of 1969, right after the summer of love, ARPANet began with the successful linking of four computers known as Interface Message Processors (IMPS). 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. 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. The other two nodes were added at UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah. 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. The next few years were spent developing core protocols for ARPANet. Steve Crocker, a graduate student at UCLA, wound up leading the effort to develop the procedures that computers use to communicate with each other over the ARPANET. He led what was called the Network Working Group on the development of "host protocols." Network Control Protocol (NCP) was the first such protocol. NCP supported symmetrical host-to-host communications which is the connection of host machines running on the same network. Steve Crocker was a high school friend of Vinton Cerf who was at SRI, Stanford's Research Institute. What ARPANet now needed was a protocol that supported not only computer-to-computer connections but also network-to-network connections. 1971 - I was born. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, a scientist from Massachusetts, sends himself an email between two computers in his office. Doesn't sound too interesting today, but those were the first email messages. The initial "hot" application, electronic mail, was introduced in 1972. In March Ray Tomlinson wrote the basic email message send and read software. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. In October 1972 Kahn organized a large, very successful demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC). This was the first public demonstration of this new network technology, including email, to the public. Vinton Cerf at Stanford and Robert Kahn head of ARPA's IPTO in 1973, met and discussed the current protocol problems. In September 1973, they presented in a meeting at University of Sussex, England the proposals that come out of their discussions. They published a paper in May 1974 in the Transactions on Communications of the IEEE, that specified what became the core Internet protocols. In that paper they described the architecture of the system which became the Internet. ARPANet goes international in 1973, opening up connections to University College in London, England and the Royal Establishment in Norway. Also in 1973, a graduate student at Harvard outlined the first ideas for Ethernet in his thesis. That student was Bob Metcalfe, who went to work for Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, and developed Ethernet technologies. Metcalfe went on to start a company which would bastardize Candlestick Park with its name, 3COM. During 1973-1978 researchers led by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn developed TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol) which solved the network connection problems. Together TCP/IP supported the interoperability and interconnection of diverse computer networks. For that Vinton Cerf has been labeled the "Father of the Internet", though I don't think he feels the label is appropriate. TCP/IP became the core protocol, it is what's used today, and in 1983 replaced NCP entirely. The TCP/IP and NCP split also divided ARPANet into MILNET and ARPANet, MILNET was used for US Military. In 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 is released, which was the first personal computer. Two young guys from Harvard decide to move to across the street from MITS, live in a Motel next to drug dealers and prostitutes so they could stay up all night writing code for the Altair. Sound foolish, those guys were Paul Allen and Bill Gates. But that is another story.
Please write if you wish to comment on these articles. e-mail: Marcus Kazmierczak, marcus@mkaz.com |
