Happy Birthday, Dear Internet

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Forwarded from: William Knowles <wk () c4i org>

http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57013,00.html

By Justin Jaffe  
December 31, 2002

> From its early days as a pet project in the Department of Defense to 
its infamous time nestled under Al Gore's wing, the history of the 
Internet is littered with dozens of so-called birthdays. 

But, as Gore can surely attest, not everyone agrees when they are. 

Wednesday is one of those days. 

Some historians claim the Internet was born in 1961, when Dr. Leonard 
Kleinrock first published a paper on packet-switching technology at 
MIT. 

Others cite 1969, when the Department of Defense commissioned the 
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, known as ARPANET, to 
research a communication and command network that could withstand a 
nuclear attack. 

The 1970s boast a slew of what could be pegged essential Internet 
milestones, including the advent of e-mail and the splintering off of 
ARPANET from military experiment to public resource. 

But perhaps the most famous of the lot is the acclaimed Jan. 1, 1983, 
switch from Network Control Protocol to Transmission Control Protocol 
and Internet Protocol. 

The transition from NCP to TCP/IP may not have been the sexiest moment 
in Internet history, but it was a key transition that paved the way 
for today's Internet. 

Call it one small switch for man, but one giant switch for 
mankind.com. 

Protocols are communication standards that allow computers to speak to 
one another over a network. Just as English speakers of different 
dialects and accents can often understand one another, protocols 
provide a lingua franca for all the different kinds of computers that 
hook into the Internet. 

Until that fateful moment 20 years ago, the fewer than 1,000 computers 
that connected to ARPANET used the primitive Network Control Protocol, 
which was useful for the small community despite some limitations. 

"NCP was sufficient to allow some Internetting to take place," said 
Kleinrock, now a computer science professor at UCLA. "It was not an 
elegant solution, but it was a sufficient solution. 

"They saw a more general approach was needed." 

Indeed, as ARPANET continued its exponential growth into the 1980s, 
the project's administrators realized they would need a new protocol 
to accommodate the much larger and more complicated network they 
foresaw as the Internet's future. 

Vint Cerf, who is credited with co-designing the TCP/IP protocol with 
Robert Kahn, said, "It was designed to be future-proof and to run on 
any communication system." 

The switch was "tremendously important," according to Rhonda Hauben, 
co-author of Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the 
Internet. 

"It was critical because there was an understanding that the Internet 
would be made up of lots of different networks," Hauben said. "Somehow 
the Internet infrastructure had to be managed in a way to accommodate 
a variety of entities." 

But despite the need to take ARPANET to the next level, the decision 
to switch to TCP/IP was controversial. 

Like the current Windows versus Linux debate, there were factions of 
the community that wanted to adopt different standards, most notably 
the Open Systems Interconnection protocol. 

"A lot of people in the community -- even though we had given them six 
months' to a year's notice -- they didn't really take it seriously," 
Kahn said. 

"We had to jam it down their throats," Cerf said. 

It was worth the jamming, Hauben said. 

"They had the vision," she said. "They understood that this was going 
to be something substantial, and that's what they provided for in a 
very special way." 



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"Communications without intelligence is noise;  Intelligence
without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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