Wendy Grossman: Carbon-dating the Internet

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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 ..... Forwarded Message .......
From: Bob Drzyzgula <bob () drzyzgula org>
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: Ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2004 09:00:58 -0400
Subj: Wendy Grossman: Carbon-dating the Internet


http://www.theinquirer.net/Default.aspx?article=18978

|    Carbon-dating the Internet
|    net.wars
| 
|    By[1] Wendy M. Grossman: Friday 08 October 2004, 12:33
| 
|    THE DEMENTED three-year-old that rampages through all of Microsoft's
|    software - My Music; MY Pictures; MY COMPUTER - seems to have been let
|    loose on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Internet, which
|    is around now sometime. Or isn't. It depends whose publicity
|    department you listen to.
| 
|    The year most people seem to be dating the Internet to is 1969, when
|    the ARPAnet was first connected up. It's certainly tempting to set it
|    then. That's the network that's generally agreed to be the most
|    important precursor of the Internet. October 29 is the date [2]UCLA
|    has chosen for the official celebration. That's commemorating
|    September 2, the day the first Internet message was sent from Leonard
|    Kleinrock's UCLA computer lab.
| 
|    That of course makes that date entirely correct as far as UCLA is
|    concerned. But is that the [3]Big Bang that created the Internet?
|    Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyons, in their 1996 book Where Wizards Stay
|    Up Late, document the efforts of Boston-based [4]Bolt Beranek Newman
|    to create the IMP machines that Kleinrock's lab used. BBN was where,
|    in 1971, Ray Tomlinson inaugurated person-to-person network email and
|    chose the now-ubiquitous @ symbol. But we can't take either 1969 or
|    1971 as the beginning of email itself, since that was first created
|    for the [5]time-sharing systems of the 1960s.
| 
|    We could go back a few years earlier, to when Paul Baran, working at
|    Rand Corporation, and Donald Davies, working at the UK's [6]National
|    Physical Laboratory independently came up with the idea of packet
|    switching. That was a completely new way of looking at transmitting
|    data across a network, and is the heart of the way the Internet as we
|    know it operates.
| 
|    Thing is, packet-switching could have remained just an idea. The
|    telephone network, still the biggest network in the world, doesn't
|    work that way. The TCP/IP protocols that arguably define the Internet
|    weren't invented until 1974, by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. If you want
|    to go, say, from the publication of their paper, you could pick May
|    1974, as Cerf mentions in a [7]recent column. That would make the
|    Internet 30 years old. But obviously it would be more logical to date
|    from when the ARPAnet moved to using TCP/IP, which was 1983. In which
|    case - glory be! -- the Internet turned 21 years old in January. That
|    would mean it's newly an adult, although you'd never know it from the
|    behavior of some of the people on it. Perhaps they're still out on the
|    now obligatory American coming-of-age pub crawl.
| 
|    That year - 1983 - is a good pick for another reason. That's the year
|    the [8]domain name system as we now know it was designed and deployed.
|    Without that relatively user-friendly veneer email would have been
|    slower to take off, and the commercial Web as we know it might not
|    exist at all. The domain name system did as much or more to make the
|    Internet usable as graphical Web browsers did. Though 1969 can answer
|    that by pointing out that the first-ever RFC, the Requests for
|    Comments that define Internet standards, is dated [9]April 7, 1969.
|    That gives UCLA the right year, but puts it six months behind
|    schedule.
| 
|    Of course, to most people the Internet means the Web and email (and
|    sometimes email also means the Web). In which case, you could go for
|    1989, when [10]Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, invented it. That's
|    straightforward enough. Except that the Web didn't really take off
|    until graphical browsers turned up, which is not, as Netscape (now an
|    AOL division) might like to claim, 1994, when the first version of
|    Netscape was released, nor its precursor, [11]Mosaic, which came out
|    in 1993. When Mosaic came out, there were already a number of browser
|    projects competing for attention, of which the earliest were [12]Viola
|    and Erwise, which were released within a month of each other in 1992.
| 
|    There are still more dates you could consider: 1995, the year Bill
|    Gates got net; 1979, the year Usenet was created; 1985, the year the
|    supercomputing centers were created and linked to form NSFnet, which
|    became an important Internet backbone; 1991, the year that acceptable
|    use policies were changed to allow commercial traffic on the Internet;
|    1994, the year that the big online information services - AOL,
|    CompuServe, Delphi - set up their Internet gateways.
| 
|    In 1998, I appeared at a conference called "Technological Visions",
|    hosted at the University of Southern California, and as part of the
|    exercise felt required to produce some predictions. The papers
|    eventually appeared earlier this year - ah, Internet time - in a
|    [13]book. Six years is of course long enough to look really silly, but
|    one prediction seems clearly to have come true. I said that it would
|    take constant vigilance to ensure that history did not record that
|    Bill Gates invented the Internet. I think the general reaction was,
|    "Nah, nah, come on, these people are still alive, and this stuff is
|    all written down."
| 
|    Yes. By PR departments. Who take the view that the Internet started
|    when their company made its memorable contribution. In which case, I
|    say to hell with it, the Internet is 13 years and four months old,
|    because I got online in June 1991. So there. µ
| 
|    Wendy M. Grossman's [14]Web site has an extensive archive of her
|    books, articles, and music, and an [15]archive of all the earlier
|    columns in this series. She has an [16]intermittent blog. Readers are
|    welcome to post there or to send email, but please turn off HTML.
| 
| References
| 
|    1. mailto:netwars () skeptic demon co uk
|    2. http://www.internetanniversary.com/
|    3. http://www.internethistory.info/
|    4. http://www.bbn.com/
|    5. http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Email
|    6. http://www.npl.co.uk/
|    7. http://global.mci.com/us/enterprise/insight/cerfs_up/
|    8. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1591.html
|    9. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1591.html
|   10. http://www.w3c.org/
|   11. http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/NCSAMosaicHome.html
|   12. http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~wei/viola/violaHome.html
|   13. http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1686_reg.html
|   14. http://www.pelicancrossing.net
|   15. http://www.pelicancrossing.net/nwcols.htm
|   16. http://www.livejournal.com/~wendyg



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