GETTING CONNECTED
THE IDEA OF A NETWORK which spans the entire world is not a new one by any means. As far back as 1900, Nikola Tesla was dreaming of wireless power and message transmission, though sadly despite his claims, the chances are the wireless power part of the system would never have worked.
Thinkers and theorists kicked the idea around for much of the early 20th century, coming up with ways that information could be stored and accessed long before the technology to build them was actually available. MIT computer scientist and later ARPA office head, JCR Licklider, put forward the somewhat optimistic idea of an ‘intergalactic computer network’ in the early 1960s, but his work did a lot to ground the idea in reality instead of science-fiction. His ideas about an all-encompassing computer network contain almost everything the internet is today, including the cloud, simple user interfaces, AI, and ‘time sharing’—the idea of a central server accessed via several terminals at the same time.
Another concept is that of packet switching, breaking a stream of data down into parts, each with a header detailing where it’s going, that allows network hardware to make sure it ends up in the right place. This allows multiple computers to communicate on a single network, the data passing through routers that can decide the best route. This again came about in the 1960s, as part of research into fault-tolerant networking at the RAND Corporation, funded by the US Department of Defense, and through independent work by British scientist Donald Davies, who coined the term ‘packet switching’.
Only once all these concepts are in place do you have the origins of the ARPANET, the precursor to today’s internet. In 1966, at the United States Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA—better known today as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Projects Agency—a project was initiated to allow access to remote computers. Much of the work was carried out at UCLA and Stanford Universities.
Today, we have a network of networks, known as internetworking, but it took until 1969 to connect the first two computers. Work continued on protocols, culminating in the Network Control Program, led by Steven Crocker. NCP was the predecessor to TCP/IP, which was proposed by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn in the early 1970s. The document setting out its initial specification contains the first use of the word ’internet’. Other protocols developed by Crocker’s Network Working Group include TELNET, FTP, and SMTP. Finally, in 1983, ARPANET transitioned to using TCP/IP, and the modern internet age began, capped off by the invention of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1990.
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