The
History of the Internet According to Itself:
A Synthesis of Online Internet Histories Available at the Turn of the
Century
©
December 11, 1999 - All Rights Reserved
by
Part I: Introduction
Background
At the end of the 20th century, the Internet has emerged as the world's newest, and perhaps most unique, communication medium. As such, it has sparked the interest of communication scholars worldwide, many of whom equate the significance of its invention with that of the printing press. They see it impacting society and effecting our future with a profound power capable of ushering in a new era of communication like the world as never seen or dared to imagine. In essence, they stand in awe of the Internet marveling at its implications.
Yet, such romantic views can often indicate a need for pragmatism, a grounding in reality, a need for understanding, the kind of understanding that only comes as a result of familiarity. As lofty as the goal may seem, this paper attempts to provide that familiarity so that scholars from disciplines outside of computer science may better understand what the Internet is and, as a result, view it more realistically and interpret it more effectively. Hopefully, it will accomplish this goal through an historical account of the Internet's development.
Granted, such historical accounts have been done before, but this history of the development of the Internet is unique in as much as it only utilizes Internet sources as its historical artifacts. In this sense, while it is not the Internet's autobiography, it is the next closest thing. Like autobiographies of famous people where they tell their story to a writer who then presents it to the public, this account functions in much the same way. It allows the Internet to tell its own story through its own voices which are presented here in the form of a synthesis of those works.
By allowing online sources to provide the historical data, this approach allows the exhibition of principles from many different schools of historical thought and methodology from mass communication history. While the authors of the online histories are not professional mass communication historians, characteristics of traditional historical approaches and predispositions can be seen in their work. Consequently, their accounts incorporate characteristics of the Nationalist, Romantic, Developmental, Consensus, and Cultural approaches to mass communication history because basic principles of these historical schools can be seen at work throughout the online histories that served as sources.
The online histories resemble a Nationalist approach in that they often view the history of the Internet from an American perspective with an emphasis on "America as the advancing revelation of the nation's leadership role in mankind's improvement" and views the Internet as an opportunity for "greater and greater freedom and liberty" in the tradition of the United States' First Amendment (Startt 22). They also resemble the Romantic tradition in that many of the accounts were written by people who had "known their subjects or had participated in the episodes about which they wrote" (23). Their accounts also incorporate characteristics of the Developmental school in that they concentrate largely on the issues of the professional functions of the Internet, view the Internet as an instrument of progress, and document that progress from the viewpoint of the Internet professionals (25-28). In addition, these accounts also resemble the Consensus approach to communication history in that many of them operate "from the viewpoint that the media..." (in this case, the programmers and network specialists who created the new communication medium of the Internet) "...work with the public and government to solve problems rather than create divisions..." (32).
Consequently, this synthesis of online sources seeks to document Internet history with a primarily journalistic view toward allowing those sources to speak for themselves as much as possible and allowing their own characteristics, flavor, and voice to shine through. On the other hand, since the very act of searching for online sources can be a subjective endeavor by its very nature, it should be important to note the search methodology employed in finding those sources.
Collection of Sources
On November 29, 1999, a search was initiated by entering "history of the Internet" as a search string on numerous search engines and viewing the results. The AltaVista search engine appeared to produce the most relevant list of hypertext links; consequently, it was used as the primary tool for the search. The resulting list of sites produced by AltaVista was examined in sequential order until the list began to exhaust itself of relevant hypertext links (i.e.--links that were directly related to the subject matter). Sites that labeled themselves as histories but served as definitions or descriptions of the Internet were discarded, as were sites that were of a purely technical nature and obviously targeted only toward computer networking professionals by their extensive use of professional vocabulary and concepts. In addition, sites that offered historical information, but were extremely short in their presentation, were discarded when the information presented in those sites was redundant to more extensive sites that were already selected. Also, as each site was selected for use, all of the links to historical information from each of those sites was explored for more information, thus producing more sites to select from using the criteria above.
On December 4, 1999, this process was repeated once more on AltaVista using the search string "Internet history," but that search produced only two more useable sites based on the previously mentioned selection criteria. Finally, both search strings were entered on the Excite, Lycos, and Magellan search engines as well as on the Yahoo! directory in an attempt to find additional sites, but those searches yielded no new sites based on the selection criteria. Consequently, the sources referred to in this paper are by no means exhaustive, but it can be safely stated that they include the most significant online works available at the turn of the century which provided a substantive account of Internet history.
A Review of the Selected Sources
This search produced a myriad of sources, but most of them tended to be historical accounts written by computer networking professionals. As such, a number of them were not narrative at all, but annotated timelines of technological thresholds or watershed events in computer networking development that led to the formation and supported the function of the Internet. The sources' ease of use, absence of extensive technical jargon, and availability on the Internet reflected an intent on the part of the authors to communicate the networking history of the Internet to the masses, but they were obviously written from the point of view that defines the Internet from a strictly technological perspective.
In fact, one such source, Gregory R. Gromov's "History of the Internet and WWW" uses so many techniques of presentation that are unique to the World Wide Web, that he's included negative commentary on his site that remarks how difficult it is to use in the traditional sense. Perhaps he did this because many of those comments seem to unconsciously reflect an intention on his part: to present the history of the Internet on the Internet in a uniquely World Wide Web fashion where the presentation is not read in a traditional manner, but is browsed for bits and pieces of information that ultimately form a whole both textually and graphically.
As a result of these sources operating from a predominately technological perspective, most of them are conspicuously absent of interpretation of the Internet in terms of its significance and impact, except in terms of its size (i.e.--extensiveness of the actual networking) and its capabilities (i.e.--computer networking protocols in use, speed of the networks, etc.). If, however, one approaches these online histories of the Internet with this perspective in mind, then the sources can function in an autobiographical sense.
In fact, a significant portion of the sources are autobiographical...written by those who worked to establish the networks and those who created the programs that helped them function. Most of the other sources, while not autobiographical in nature, are written by computer networking professionals. Consequently, their online histories also function in an autobiographical sense as professional testimony from the computer networking industry regarding that industry's most phenomenal accomplishment...the Internet.
Beyond those sources written by computer networking professionals, the other sources are written with an obvious knowledge of computer networking, at least those networking issues that pertain to the Internet, and are written in much the same manner with a view toward documenting the watershed events of networking that helped create the Internet.
And there's good reason for this. "The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, and scientists. There was nothing friendly about it. There were no home or office personal computers in those days, and anyone who used it, whether a computer professional or an engineer or scientist, had to learn to use a very complex system" (Howe).
There are a few exceptions, though, in the sources utilized for this paper. Henry Edward Hardy's "The History of the Net" is a draft of his Master's Thesis presented to the School of Communications at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. As such, it deals with more scholarly aspects of the history of the Internet and does so from a communication perspective. In addition, R. T. Griffiths' "Internet for Historians, History of the Internet: The Development of the Internet" is unique in that it seeks to provide an Internet history from the viewpoint of an historian. As such, his narrative starts with an historical/critical context for examining technology, some background on the development of the computer, and a few brief commentaries are placed throughout his narrative regarding the socio-political context of the Internet's development. For the most part, though, his narrative, as well as Hardy's, concentrate primarily on the watershed events in computer networking that contributed to the creation and development of the Internet. So, in that sense, both authors do not differ much from the rest of the sources and approach the history of the Internet from a primarily technological perspective.
And this is appropriate. The Internet is, after all, a network of computer networks. To address this relatively new invention in almost purely technological terms is to accurately define how it was invented, to examine the technological processes and events that created it. Since it was the scientific community that gave birth to the Internet, it's appropriate that the collective voice of online Internet history at the turn of the century be a scientific voice, specifically the voice of computer networking. And, in many ways, it can be the only voice since much of the history of the Internet is the history of networking development, a history that is often only accurately understood by computer networking technicians and scholars.
In fact, Hardy says in "The History of the Net" that "interestingly, it seems that most of the material treating the Net from the historical perspective has come from those on the Net itself." Thus, online sources spoke the loudest in 1993 when he wrote his thesis and, in 1999...at the turn of the century, online sources still have plenty to say.
And one of those sources, "A Brief History of the Internet," written in collaboration by many of the Internet's founders, introduces this historical perspective better than any other.
The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location. (Leiner)
This same work categorizes Internet history into four periods: technological evolution, operations and management, socialization, and commercialization.
This history revolves around four distinct aspects. There is the technological evolution that began with early research on packet switching and the ARPANET (and related technologies), and where current research continues to expand the horizons of the infrastructure along several dimensions, such as scale, performance, and higher level functionality. There is the operations and management aspect of a global and complex operational infrastructure. There is the social aspect, which resulted in a broad community of Internauts working together to create and evolve the technology. And there is the commercialization aspect, resulting in an extremely effective transition of research results into a broadly deployed and available information infrastructure. (Leiner)
While their outline is more topical in nature, this paper will examine Internet history in four distinct chronological periods contained in Part II: In the Beginning, 1957-1969; ARPANET Lays the Foundation, 1970-1985. NSFNET and the Dominance of TCP/IP, 1986-1994; and the Internet at the Turn of the Century, 1994-1999.
Part II: The Internet's History According to Turn of the Century Online Sources
In the Beginning...
The most widely-known and recognized online Internet histories begin with the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 because it was then that the United States formed "the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense," also known as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), as a calculated response to establish a "US lead in science and technology applicable to the military" (Hobbes).
ARPA became the technological think-tank of the American defense effort, employing directly a couple of hundred top scientists and with a budget sufficient for sub-contracting research to other top American institutions. Although the advanced computing would come to dominate its work, the initial focus of ARPA's activities were on space, ballistic missiles and nuclear test monitoring. Even so, from the start ARPA was interested in communicating between its operational base and its sub-contractors, preferably through direct links between its various computers. (Griffiths)
Consequently, "in the early 1960s, computer scientists across the country began exploring ways of directly connecting remote computers and their users" (CosmosLink). In July 1961, Leonard Kleinrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) wrote "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets." It was the first paper on packet-switching theory, a concept where information is broken down into packets of data, each one addressed to the receiver, then transferred from point-to-point via a computer network to the receiver where the original information is then re-assembled from the packets.
A year later in 1962, J.C.R. Licklider and W. Clark, also of MIT, wrote a paper entitled "On-Line Man Computer Communication." This paper proposed the "Galactic Network" concept that envisioned computer networking "encompassing distributed social interactions" (Hobbes). This "would allow people to access data from any site connected through a vast network" (Anderberg).
Both papers were the theoretical beginning of the Internet since the later envisioned computer networking as a mass communication device and the theories of the former would make the Internet technologically possible (Hobbes).
This was followed in 1964 with a paper by Paul Baran of RAND entitled "On Distributed Communications Networks." This paper proposed packet-switching networks with no single outage point, the next step in packet-switching theory that would make the Internet possible (Hobbes). "Unlike point to point networks, the packet switching networks would have multiple paths to get from point A to point B" (Dreamscape). In addition, "this would give more flexibility than opening one line and sending the information through that alone. For example, the system would not be reliant on a single routing and, if files were broken-up before transfer, it would be more difficult to eavesdrop... both useful security advantages" (Griffiths).
Packet-switching is a method of fragmenting messages into sub-parts called packets, routing them to their destinations, and reassembling them. Packetizing information has several advantages. It facilitates allowing several users to share the same connection by breaking up the data into discrete units which can be routed separately. Because no transmission medium is 100% reliable, packet-switching allows one "bad" packet to be re-sent while other "good" packets are uninterrupted in their transmission. Packets may carry information about themselves, where they have been and where they are going. In addition, packets may be compressed for speed and size advantages or encrypted for security. Most packets carry some sort of internal check for consistency that helps to weed out bad packets. Packetizing data has advantages in overcoming certain inherent bandwidth and speed constraints, particularly in older network and modem-based communication. (Hardy)
However, there were concurrent developments within the computer industry during the early sixties that would have profound implications for development of the Internet later on. "In 1961 IBM introduced a 'Compatible Time Sharing System' into its 7090/94 series which allowed separate terminals in different offices to access the same hardware. The concept of 'remote access' to a 'host' computer had become reality. And if you could link to one computer from a desktop terminal, why not to another.... why not to all?" (Griffiths)
That kind of thinking was spreading in the early sixties and probably played a role in the development of the first wide area network. In 1965, "Thomas Merrill and Lawrence Roberts set up the first WAN (Wide Area Network) between MIT's Lincoln Lab TX-2 and System Development Corporation's Q-32 in California (Anderberg).
The result of this experiment was the realization that the time-shared computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine, but that the circuit switched telephone system was totally inadequate for the job. Kleinrock's conviction of the need for packet switching was confirmed. (Leiner)
Later Merrill and Roberts would write 'Toward a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers' describing" the experiment (Anderberg) and eventually a "Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computer at ARPA was added to form The Experimental Network" (Hobbes).
In the mid-to-late 60s, the United States government began to realize the impact computers would have on education and military research and development. So, the government decided to fund an experimental network that would allow remote research and development sites to exchange information. This network, funded by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency, was named the ARPANET. (CosmosLink)
In 1966, ARPA's Bob Taylor received "funding for a networking experiment that would tie together a number of Universities the agency was funding. With no formal requests and in under an hour Charles Herzfeld" agreed "to fund what three years later would become the ARPANET" (Anderberg).
This led to ARPANET design discussions in 1967 held by Larry Roberts, who published the first design paper on ARPANET previously that year: "Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communication" (Hobbes). "When these plans were published it became clear that independently of each other, and in ignorance of each other's work, teams at MIT, the National Physics Laboratory (UK) and by RAND Corporation had all been working on the feasibility of wide area networks, and their best ideas were incorporated into the ARPANET design" (Griffiths). This same year, "the three independent packet network teams: RAND, NPL, and ARPA," met together for the first time (Hobbes). This foreshadowed the cooperative effort that would characterize technological development of the Internet throughout the 20th century.
In late 1966 Roberts went to DARPA to develop the computer network concept and quickly put together his plan for the "ARPANET", publishing it in 1967. At the conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL. Scantlebury told Roberts about the NPL work as well as that of Paul Baran and others at RAND. The RAND group had written a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964. It happened that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the other work. The word "packet" was adopted from the work at NPL and the proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design was upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps. (Leiner)
In fact, it was at a meeting of "ARPA principal investigators" that Wesley Clark came up "with the idea of using dedicated hardware to perform network functions." The dedicated hardware "would eventually be called Interface Message Processors (IMP's)" and form an integral part of the Internet (Anderberg).
However, while discussions at this time were producing promising theory, the "National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England" had already developed the "NPL Data Network under Donald Watts Davies," who also coined "the term packet. The NPL network, an experiment in packet-switching, used 768kbps lines" and proved successful (Hobbes).
It was in this fomenting climate of research that ARPANET took off in 1968. The packet-switch network was presented to ARPA who requested proposals for ARPANET in August and received responses in September (Hobbes). "Many large companies like ATT and IBM" did not submit bids "saying that such a network was not possible" (Anderberg). Consequently, large companies were left out of the contract awards and the early formation of the Internet.
The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) was "awarded the Network Measurement Center contract in October" and Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) were "awarded the Packet Switch contract to build Interface Message Processors (IMPs)" (Hobbes). BBN, "headed by Frank Heart, would have $1 million and less than a year to turn theory into a working system" (Anderberg), so they "selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch" (Kristula). In addition, the "Network Working Group (NWG), headed by Steve Crocker, loosely organized to develop host level protocols for communication over the ARPANET" (Hobbes).
In order to encourage this activity and the involvement of the private sector, arguably the first miscommunication in Internet history occurred. "When Senator Ted Kennedy heard in 1968 that BBN had won the ARPA contract for an 'interface message processor (IMP),' he sent a congratulatory telegram to BBN for their ecumenical spirit in winning the 'interfaith message processor' contract" (Howe).
The following year, in 1969, the Department of Defense commissioned ARPANET "for research into networking" (Hobbes).
Like almost all of our technologies today, the Internet has a war time past. It is simply amazing that war, and the threat of war has given the world so much technology. The early 1960's, in the middle of the cold war, was possibly the closest this world has ever been to nuclear annihilation. The US Department of Defense wanted a network of computers which would allow them to continue to communicate even if partially damaged. (Kazmierczak)
Most online histories agree that the Department of Defense's motivation was an interest in the theoretical capability of a nationwide packet-switched network to serve as a communication infrastructure that was impervious to nuclear attack. The concept was that, in the event of a nuclear attack, many points within the network would cease to function, but enough would survive to enable electronic communication in a post-attack environment. Anthony Anderberg, however, is one of the few online sources that claims this was a popular, but false rumor. And there's good reason for that: the only other online source to agree Anderberg was written by the founders of the Internet.
It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks. (Leiner)
Consequently, it could be argued that both views are correct. There is no absolute confirmation of the Defense Department's motivation and, while development of the ARPANET was not to withstand nuclear attack, it obviously had that capability and one could assume such capability would've been recognized and of interest to the Department of Defense in the 1960s Cold War environment.
None the less, regardless of the motivation, the Defense Department had commissioned ARPANET and, as a result, nodes were established by BBN and AT&T provided 50kbps lines to make the initial network possible (Hobbes). On "September 2nd 'The IMP Guys' from BNN" finished "installing the first ARPANET IMP node (IMP1) at UCLA...attached to the school's SDS Sigma-7 without a hitch" and on October 1st, ARPANET's second node was "set up at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), connecting to their SDS 940. After a bit of tweaking the first connection was made from UCLA to the SRI machine over the 50Kbps circuit (Anderberg). The first packets were sent "by Charley Kline at UCLA as he tried logging into SRI. The first attempt resulted in the system crashing as the letter G of LOGIN was entered" (Hobbes).
IMP number three was "installed at the University of California at Santa Barbara" in November and in December the fourth node was "installed at the University of Utah" (Anderberg).
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. All this came together in September 1969 when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and the first host computer was connected. 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. SRI supported the Network Information Center, led by Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler and including functions such as maintaining tables of host name to address mapping as well as a directory of the RFC's. One month later, when SRI was connected to the ARPANET, the first host-to-host message was sent from Kleinrock's laboratory to SRI. Two more 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. Thus, by the end of 1969, four host computers were connected together into the initial ARPANET, and the budding Internet was off the ground. Even at this early stage, it should be noted that the networking research incorporated both work on the underlying network and work on how to utilize the network. This tradition continues to this day. (Leiner)
Here we have the first true computer network. Since it is all still fairly basic, it is worth considering the underlying principles have basically remained the same (even if they, mercifully, operate far faster and look much prettier). We start off with a passive terminal and an active host, a keyboard and a computer. They are linked together by a cable. By typing in commands recognized by a computer, you can use the programs stored in its computer, access its files (and modify them and print them out as desired). Most people can envisage this arrangement within a single building, or complex of buildings. In order to access another computer, at a completely different facility, we have first to reach it. This was usually done in these times over a (high speed) telephone line (or lines). Once you arrive at the new 'host' you have to convince it to treat you in the same way as someone behind a terminal within its own system. Hence the need of an interface message processor (IMP) and for the same IMP to be installed in both computers! Now you can access its files. Of course, in order to preserve confidentiality, all computers differentiated between 'open' files and those that were password protected. If you wanted to transfer a file or program to your own computer, the host computer uses a program to break it down into 'packages' attaching to each the address and its original position. It then sends them to your 'home' computer where a mirror program reassembles the message in the original order. (Griffiths)
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. (Kazmierczak)
While performing that research, Crocker also developed a new method for disseminating academic and professional information called Request for Comment, which was to become an Internet tradition. "The beginnings of the ARPANET and the Internet in the university research community promoted the academic tradition of open publication of ideas and results. However, the normal cycle of traditional academic publication was too formal and too slow for the dynamic exchange of ideas essential to creating networks" (Leiner).
Thus, the first Request for Comment (RFC) was sent by Steve Crocker on April 7, 1969 entitled "Host Software" (Hobbes). RFC1 "outlined the interface between hosts and BNN's IMP devices, each site would be responsible for creating the host software that connected their computers to the ARPANET's IMPs. The name RFC was chosen to avoid sounding too self-righteous, Crocker hoped to create an environment in which everyone felt comfortable participating - a spirit which would help the network to thrive in the coming decades" (Anderberg).
One of the originators of the Internet, Vinton Cerf, described the first RFC.
In April 1969, Steve issued the very first Request For Comment. He observed that we were just graduate students at the time and so had no authority. So we had to find a way to document what we were doing without acting like we were imposing anything on anyone. He came up with the RFC methodology to say, "Please comment on this, and tell us what you think." (Cerf "How...")
This was a critical development in the evolution of the Internet and remains a critical part of Internet engineering to this day.
The effect of the RFCs was to create a positive feedback loop, with ideas or proposals presented in one RFC triggering another RFC with additional ideas, and so on. When some consensus (or a least a consistent set of ideas) had come together a specification document would be prepared. Such a specification would then be used as the base for implementations by the various research teams. Over time, the RFCs have become more focused on protocol standards (the "official" specifications), though there are still informational RFCs that describe alternate approaches, or provide background information on protocols and engineering issues. The RFCs are now viewed as the "documents of record" in the Internet engineering and standards community. The open access to the RFCs (for free, if you have any kind of a connection to the Internet) promotes the growth of the Internet because it allows the actual specifications to be used for examples in college classes and by entrepreneurs developing new systems. (Leiner)
It was also in 1969 that the University of Michigan, Michigan State, and Wayne State University established a network for students, faculty, and alumni (Hobbes). This foreshadowed the educational and academic context that would characterize the history of Internet development in the coming years.
ARPANET Lays the Foundation
In March of 1970, the fifth ARPANET node was "installed at BBN's headquarters" (Anderberg). This paved the way for the "first cross-country link installed by AT&T between UCLA and BBN at 56kbps." This line was "later replaced by another between BBN and RAND" and a second line was added between MIT and Utah (Hobbes).
The "first publication of the original ARPANET Host-Host protocol: C.S. Carr, S. Crocker, V.G. Cerf, HOST-HOST Communication Protocol in the ARPA Network," was issued as well as the first report on ARPANET: "Computer Network Development to Achieve Resource Sharing." Then, in December, ARPANET hosts started using Network Control Protocol (NCP), the first host-to-host protocol (Hobbes).
While ARPANET was getting off the ground, "ALOHAnet, the first packet radio network, developed by Norman Abramson at the University of Hawaii," became operational in July of 1970 and was later "connected to the ARPANET in 1972" (Hobbes). "It carried data at a lowly 4.8Kbps, but would lay the groundwork for Ethernet several years later" (Anderberg).
That same year, RFC 172 was "released establishing the File Transfer Protocol (FTP)" that would enable Internet users to transfer files from one computer to another (Anderberg).
By 1971, ARPANET had "15 nodes (23 hosts): UCLA, SRI, UCSB, Univ of Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND, SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIU(C), CWRU, CMU, NASA/Ames" (Hobbes). In addition, BBN started building "IMPs using the cheaper Honeywell 316," but they were limited to 4 hosts, so BBN developed "a terminal IMP (TIP) that supports up to 64 hosts" (Hobbes).
This progress had been a long time coming and was very difficult, according to Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's lead developers.
Initially, progress was sluggish in getting the protocols designed and built and deployed. By 1971 there were about nineteen nodes in the initially planned ARPANET, with thirty different university sites that ARPA was funding. Things went slowly because there was an incredible array of machines that needed interface hardware and network software. We had Tenex systems at BBN running on DEC-10s, but there were also PDP8s, PDP-11s, IBM 360s, Multics, Honeywell... you name it. So you had to implement the protocols on each of these different architectures. In late 1971, Larry Roberts at DARPA decided that people needed serious motivation to get things going. In October 1972 there was to be an International Conference on Computer Communications, so Larry asked Bob Kahn at BBN to organize a public demonstration of the ARPANET. (Cerf "How...")
The "International Conference on Computer Communications (ICCC) was held at the Washington D.C.Hilton," and included a "demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines and the Terminal Interface Processor (TIP) organized by Bob Kahn." Vinton Cerf said "the demo was a roaring success, much to the surprise of the people at AT&T who were skeptical about whether it would work" (Cerf "How...").
It was also at this conference that the first computer-to-computer chat took place (Hobbes). But the conference also produced another watershed event in Internet history. The "International Network Working Group (INWG) formed in October as a result of a meeting at ICCC identifying the need for a combined effort in advancing networking technologies" and Vinton Cerf served as the first Chair (Hobbes). The InterNetworking Working Group became "the first of several standards-setting entities to govern the growing network" (PBS) and "this stimulated further research in the scientific community throughout the Western World" (Griffiths).
The Internet is as much a collection of communities as a collection of technologies, and its success is largely attributable to both satisfying basic community needs as well as utilizing the community in an effective way to push the infrastructure forward. This community spirit has a long history beginning with the early ARPANET. The early ARPANET researchers worked as a close-knit community to accomplish the initial demonstrations of packet switching technology described earlier. Likewise, the Packet Satellite, Packet Radio and several other DARPA computer science research programs were multi-contractor collaborative activities that heavily used whatever available mechanisms there were to coordinate their efforts, starting with electronic mail and adding file sharing, remote access, and eventually World Wide Web capabilities. Each of these programs formed a working group, starting with the ARPANET Network Working Group. Because of the unique role that ARPANET played as an infrastructure supporting the various research programs, as the Internet started to evolve, the Network Working Group evolved into Internet Working Group. (Leiner)
Yet, while 1971 witnessed the growth of ARPANET and the formation of communities to govern its development, it would also see the invention of email. Ray Tomlinson of BBN invented an "email program to send messages across a distributed network. The original program was derived from two others: an intra-machine email program (SENDMSG) and an experimental file transfer program (CPYNET)." A year later, in 1972, Tomlinson modified the "email program for ARPANET" and it became "a quick hit." It was at this time that "the @ sign was chosen from the punctuation keys on Tomlinson's Model 33 Teletype for its 'at' meaning." In addition, Larry Roberts wrote the "first email management program (RD) to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages" (Hobbes).
In March Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination mechanism. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. From there email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. This was a harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the enormous growth of all kinds of "people-to-people" traffic. (Leiner)
In "The History of the Net," Hardy quotes Licklider and Vezza's "Applications of Information Technology" to describe the nature and impact of this new electronic message system.
One of the advantages of the message system over letter mail was that, in an ARPANET message, one could write tersely and type imperfectly, even to an older person in a superior position and even to a person one did not know very well, and the recipient took no offense. The formality and perfection that most people expect in a typed letter did not become associated with network messages, probably because the network was so much faster, so much more like the telephone. Indeed, tolerance for informality and imperfect typing was even more evident when two users of the ARPANET linked their consoles together and typed back and forth in an alphanumeric conversation. Among the advantages of the network message services over the telephone were the fact that one could proceed immediately to the point without having to engage in small talk first, that the message services produced a preservable record, and that the sender and receiver did not have to be available at the same time. (Hardy)
It was also in 1972 that Louis Pouzin led "the French effort to build its own ARPANET," which they called CYCLADES (Hobbes) and the following year, in 1973, the "first international connections to the ARPANET" were made: the "University College of London in England and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway" (Anderberg).
At this time there were an estimated 2,000 users of the ARPANET and an ARPA study showed "email composing 75% of all ARPANET traffic" (Hobbes). That traffic had also grown "to more than 3 million packets per day" (Anderberg). In addition, the ARPANET News made its debut in March of 1973 and the Network Voice Protocol was designed enabling conference calls over ARPANET (Hobbes).
Also that year, Bob Metcalfe outlined his idea for Ethernet. "Ethernet, a protocol for many local networks, appeared in 1974, an outgrowth of Harvard student Bob Metcalfe's dissertation on 'Packet Networks.' The dissertation was initially rejected by the University for not being analytical enough. It later won acceptance when he added some more equations to it" (Howe). "The concept was tested on Xerox PARC's Alto computers," which led to "the first Ethernet network called the Alto Aloha System" (Hobbes). "He and David Boggs would later create the first ethernet network (running at 2.944 Mbps) between computers named Michelson and Morley, scientists who proved ether didn't exist in the 19th century" (Anderberg).
It was during this time that Bob Kahn started an "internetting research program at ARPA" and Vinton Cerf designed the gateway architecture (Hobbes). According to Cerf, "the very earliest work on the TCP protocols was done at three places. The initial design work was done in my lab at Stanford" (Cerf "How..."). Robert Cailliau said "its main characteristic is the automatic routing of information packets, circumventing the problem of network vulnerability through failure of single transmission nodes" (Cailliau).
As a result of this work, Cerf and Kahn presented "basic Internet ideas" at a conference later that year (Hobbes). Then, in May of 1974, Cerf and Kahn published "A Protocol for Packet Network Internetworking" which "established the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)." This was "also the first time the term Internet was used" (Anderberg).
"One of the major impacts of the ARPANET research, and the one that led to today's 'Internet,' was the development of the TCP/IP...network protocol, the language that computers connected to the network use to talk to one another. TCP/IP soon became the standard networking protocol for the ARPANET" (CosmosLink).
It was also at this time that BBN opened "Telenet, the first public packet data service (a commercial version of ARPANET)" (Hobbes). This advent of TCP and the first commercial network were critical in the development of the Internet because TCP is the foundation for the functioning of the Internet and the opening of the network to the commercial sector was a necessary first step in the formation of the modern Internet structure.
The development of TCP/IP marked a crucial stage in networking development, and it is important to reflect on the implications inherent in the design concepts... since it could all have turned out very differently. One crucial concept was that the system should have an 'open architecture', in fact implementing Licklider's original idea of a "Galactic Network." Each network should be able to work on its own, developing its own applications without restraint and requiring no modification to participate in the Internet. Within each network there would be a 'gateway', which would link it to the 'outside world'. This would be a larger computer (in order to handle the volume of traffic) with the necessary software to transmit and redirect any 'packages.' This gateway software would retain no information about the traffic passing through. This was designed to cut-down workload and to speed up the traffic, but it also removed a possible means of censorship and control. Packages would be routed through the fastest available route. If one computer was blocked or slow, the packages would be rerouted through the new until they eventually reached their destination. The gateways between the networks would always be open, and they would route the traffic without discrimination. Also implicit in the development was that the operating principles would be freely available to all the networks. This freeing of design information was an early an integral part of the research environment, and greatly facilitated subsequent technological advance. (Griffiths)
In July of 1975, "the ARPANET was transferred by DARPA to the Defense Communications Agency (now the Defense Information Systems Agency) as an operational network" (Anderberg).
1975, like other years in this explosion of networking development, was also a year of firsts. Satellite links crossed two oceans, from Hawaii to the United Kingdom to serve as networking links in the "first TCP tests...by Stanford, BBN, and UCL" (Hobbes).
In addition, the "first ARPANET mailing list, MsgGroup," was "created by Steve Walker. Einar Stefferud soon took over as moderator as the list was not automated at first. A science fiction list, SF-Lovers, was to become the most popular unofficial list in the early days" (Hobbes).
By the second year of operation, however, an odd fact became clear. ARPANET's users had warped the computer-sharing network into a dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidized electronic post- office. The main traffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing. Instead, it was news and personal messages. Researchers were using ARPANET to collaborate on projects, to trade notes on work, and eventually, to downright gossip and schmooze. People had their own personal user accounts on the ARPANET computers, and their own personal addresses for electronic mail. Not only were they using ARPANET for person-to-person communication, but they were very enthusiastic about this particular service -- far more enthusiastic than they were about long-distance computation. It wasn't long before the invention of the mailing-list, an ARPANET broadcasting technique in which an identical message could be sent automatically to large numbers of network subscribers. Interestingly, one of the first really big mailing-lists was "SF- LOVERS," for science fiction fans. Discussing science fiction on the network was not work-related and was frowned upon by many ARPANET computer administrators, but this didn't stop it from happening. (Sterling)
It was also during this time that John Vittal developed "MSG, the first all-inclusive email program providing replying, forwarding, and filing capabilities" (Hobbes). Ironically, though, developments in email led to other problems. "In RFC 706 - On the Junk Mail Problem, Jon Postel" wrote "that the design of most mail systems made it difficult to block junk mail" (Anderberg).
It was also around this time that network communication had produced its own jargon as evidenced by the release of the "Jargon File", by Raphael Finkel (Hobbes).
However, 1975 also saw a watershed event in the computer industry, an event that would have implications for the Internet many years later.
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. (Kazmierczak)
In 1976, UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) was "developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later" (Hobbes). In addition, Leonard Kleinrock published "the first book about ARPANET technologies: 'Queueing Systems Volume II - Computer Applications' which helped packet switching gain wide-spread acceptance" and "the CCITT (now the ITU)" defined "the X.25 protocol for public packet switched networks" (Anderberg). In this way, packet switching started to become more noticed throughout the world just as a public standard was set for it. Both events helped establish the Internet because, without wide-spread support and common standards, it would not evolve into its present form.
Also in 1976, "the packet satellite project went into practical use. SATNET, Atlantic packet satellite network, was born. This network linked the United States with Europe. Surprisingly, it used commercial Intelsat satellites that were owned by the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, rather than government satellites" (Kristula).
In 1977, THEORYNET was created by Larry Landweber at the University of Wisconsin "providing electronic mail to over 100 researchers in computer science (using a locally developed email system over TELENET)" and Tymshare launched the Tymnet network (Hobbes). It was that same year that Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and others demonstrated "the first gateway system connecting packet radio and the ARPANET" (Anderberg).
In "How the Internet Came to Be," Vinton Cerf described the intricate process of demonstrating the gateway system.
It went over the Atlantic via a point-to-point satellite link to Norway and down to London, by land line, and then back through the Atlantic Packet Satellite network (SATNET) through a Single Channel Per Carrier (SCPC) system, which had ground stations in Etam, West Virginia, Goonhilly Downs England, and Tanum, Sweden. Traffic passed from the mobile unit on the Packet Radio network across the ARPANET over an internal point-to-point satellite link to University College London, and then back through the SATNET into the ARPANET again, and then across the ARPANET to the USC Information Sciences Institute to one of their DEC KA-10 (ISIC) machines. So what we were simulating was someone in a mobile battlefield environment going across a continental network, then across an intercontinental satellite network, and then back into a wireline network to a major computing resource in national headquarters. Since the Defense Department was paying for this, we were looking for demonstrations that would translate to militarily interesting scenarios. So the packets were traveling 94,000 miles round trip, as opposed to what would have been an 800-mile round trip directly on the ARPANET. We didn't lose a bit! (Cerf "How...")
It was a little less than a year later that the TCP protocol "was split into TCP and IP" (Internet Protocol) (Hobbes). In doing so, Vinton Cerf, Steve Crocker, and Danny Cohen separated "TCP's routing functions into a separate protocol called the Internet Protocol (IP)," but "error handling and datagram functions would remain a part of TCP" (Anderberg).
Cerf characterized the development of the TCP suite as a process: "Even at the beginning of this work we were faced with using satellite communications technology as well as ARPANET and packet radio. We went through four iterations of the TCP suite, the last of which came out in 1978" (Cerf "How...").
In the original design we didn't distinguish between TCP and IP; there was just TCP. In the mid-1970s, experiments were being conducted to encode voice through a packet switch, but in order to do that we had to compress the voice severely from 64 Kbps to 1800 bps. If you really worked hard to deliver every packet, to keep the voice playing out without a break, you had to put lots and lots of buffering in the system to allow sequenced reassembly after retransmissions, and you got a very unresponsive system. So Danny Cohen at ISI, who was doing a lot of work on packet voice, argued that we should find a way to deliver packets without requiring reliability. He argued it wasn't useful to retransmit a voice packet end to end. It was worse to suffer a delay of retransmission. That line of reasoning led to separation of TCP, which guaranteed reliable delivery, from IP. So the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) was created as the user-accessible way of using IP. And that's how the voice protocols work today, via UDP. (Cerf "How...)
During this same period, the bulletin board system was invented and marked another milestone in Internet development, although far less significant than TCP/IP.
The invention of the first computer bulletin board system, or BBS, is commonly credited to Ward Christianson in 1977-1978. Christianson was the author of the Xmodem file transfer protocol, which was in itself a singular milestone in the history of the Net as the first widely available file transfer method for personal computers. Christianson and Randy Suess started a dial-in BBS called RCPM (for "Remote CP/M", an operating system) in 1978 in Chicago. (Hardy)
In 1979, DARPA established "the Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB) to help the process of creating the gateways between hosts and the network" (Anderberg).
In the late 1970's, recognizing that the growth of the Internet was accompanied by a growth in the size of the interested research community and therefore an increased need for coordination mechanisms, Vint Cerf, then manager of the Internet Program at DARPA, formed several coordination bodies - an International Cooperation Board (ICB), chaired by Peter Kirstein of UCL, to coordinate activities with some cooperating European countries centered on Packet Satellite research, an Internet Research Group which was an inclusive group providing an environment for general exchange of information, and an Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB), chaired by Clark. The ICCB was an invitational body to assist Cerf in managing the burgeoning Internet activity. (Leiner)
This cooperation of government, education, and the private sector continued in the ongoing attempt to create new networks. That same year, Larry Landweber organized a meeting between the University of Wisconsin, DARPA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), "and computer scientists from many universities to establish a Computer Science Department research computer network" (Hobbes). This meeting led to the eventual establishment of the Computer Science Research Network (CSNET)" in later years (Hardy).
Also in 1979, USENET was established "using UUCP between Duke and UNC by Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis, and Steve Bellovin." As a result, "users from all over the world" joined USENET "discussion groups to talk about the net, politics, religion and thousands of other subjects" (PBS).
Usenet is an example of a client-server (client-host) architecture. A user connects to a machine which in turn connects to another machine which has stored the Usenet postings for the past few days, weeks, or hours. The users typically look at the headings of postings in the newsgroups of interest to them. The user may issue a command requesting the full text of a particular posting (article). The client machine in turn requests the particular article to be forwarded from the host machine. If the article is unavailable (expired, no longer stored, or canceled by its poster) then a message, "article unavailable," is transmitted back to the user. Otherwise, the full text of the requested posting should appear on the user's terminal. The user may then read or store the article, or reply through electronic mail, post a follow-up article or start a new subject heading with a new posting. (Hardy)
1979 also saw the development of the first MUD and MUD1. They were established by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw at the University of Essex (Hobbes). These are the network interfaces that enabled online gaming between multiple, simultaneous users. While these interfaces were primarily used for fantasy gaming back then, they have applications today in distance learning environments.
In fact, 1979 saw another playful development when Kevin MacKenzie emailed the MsgGroup and suggested that they add "some emotion back into the dry text medium of email, such as -) for indicating a sentence was tongue-in-cheek. Though flamed by many at the time, emoticons became widely used" later (Hobbes).
There was nothing playful, though, about the development of SGML that same year. Invented by Charles Goldfarb, SGML "separates content structure from presentation. Thus the same document can be rendered in different ways. HTML, the markup language of the Web, is an SGML application" (Cailliau). Consequently, SGML helped set the stage for the development of the World Wide Web in later years.
But, as the current growth and development proved promising, all was not well. On October 27, 1980, the entire ARPANET "ground to a complete halt" as the result "of an accidentally-propagated status-message virus" (Hobbes). This was the first indication of problems to come as a result of Internet connectivity.
In 1980, BITNET, the "Because It's Time NETwork" was "started as a cooperative network at the City University of New York, with the first connection to Yale." The "original acronym stood for 'There' instead of 'Time' in reference to the free NJE protocols provided with the IBM systems." The network provided "electronic mail and listserv servers to distribute information, as well as file transfers" (Hobbes).
From the beginning, BITNET has been multi-disciplinary in nature with users in all academic areas. It has also provided a number of unique services to its users (e.g., LISTSERV). Today, BITNET and its parallel networks in other parts of the world (e.g., EARN in Europe) have several thousand participating sites. In recent years, BITNET has established a backbone which uses the TCP/IP protocols with RSCS-based applications running above TCP. (Cerf "A Brief...")
Also in 1980, the CSNET (Computer Science NETwork) was "built by a collaboration of computer scientists" at the University of Delaware, Purdue University, the University of Wisconsin, RAND Corporation, and BBN "through seed money granted by NSF to provide networking services (especially email) to university scientists with no access to ARPANET." CSNET later became "known as the Computer and Science Network" (Hobbes).
CSNET was established for two reasons. On the one hand, UUCP, modems, and the existing telephone system provided a ready-made method of data transport. On the other hand, large computing facilities such as the University of Wisconsin which were not part of the ARPANET were increasingly concerned that the advantages of linked computer systems at university ARPANET sites gave those sites a substantial advantage in research and faculty and student recruitment. A series of proposals to the NSF was generated and revised. The earliest designs for CSNET envisioned it as a stand-alone network. During this period of revisions the idea of a gateway to the ARPANET was added to the plan. In summer 1980, DARPA scientist Vinton Cerf proposed a plan for an inter-network connection between CSNET and the ARPANET. This plan called for CSNET to be a logical network composed of several physical networks. Communications between CSNET and ARPANET would be arranged so as to be transparent, that is, services on either network would be accessed through a set of protocols that would be the same from the standpoint of the user regardless of what network the user or service was on. A set of communications protocols developed by DARPA, called TCP/IP would be used to route information between the networks. Connections between the networks would be through a gateway called the VAN, or Value Added Network. The implementation of this inter-network gateway and the important decision to make TCP/IP available without charge mark the foundation of what later became known as "the Internet." (Hardy)
It was also during this time that Minitel (Teletel) was "deployed across France by France Telecom" (Hobbes).
Then, the following year in 1981, IBM released "its IBM PC retailing for $4500." They sold more than 65,000 units in the first 4 months (Anderberg). While that was an obvious foreshadow of thing to come in the computer industry, it would also have a profound effect on Internet development only two years later.
As if the Internet community sense the approaching change, jockeying for position became the modus operandi in 1982. Norway left the network to become an Internet connection via TCP/IP over SATNET" and UCL followed suit. Afterward, DCA and DARPA established "the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for ARPANET. This leads to one of the first definitions of an 'internet' as a connected set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP, and 'Internet' as connected TCP/IP internets." It was also at this time that the Department of Defense declared the TCP/IP suite as their network standard (Hobbes). They marked January 1, 1983 as their change-over date (Anderberg).
1982 also was eventful as new networks sprang up. The EUnet (European UNIX Network) was "created by EUUG to provide email and USENET services" with "original connections between the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden," and the United Kingdom and the "Movement Information Net (MINET) started early in the year in Europe," and was connected to the Internet in September. In addition, "ARPANET split into ARPANET and MILNET; the latter became integrated with the Defense Data Network created the previous year. 68 of the 113 existing nodes went to MILNET" and the CSNET/ARPANET gateway was put into place (Hobbes).
While this network development continued, so did ease of use. The University of Wisconsin developed the name server so that users no longer needed "to know the exact path to other systems" in order to use them (Hobbes).
In addition, PC development continued. The first PC LAN (Local Area Network) was "demonstrated at the National Computer Conference by Drew Major, Kyle Powell, and Dale Neibaur. Their software would eventually become Novell's Netware" (Anderberg).
A year later, in 1983, "desktop workstations come into being, many with Berkeley UNIX (4.2 BSD) which" included "IP networking software." As a result, networking needs switched "from having a single, large time sharing computer connected to the Internet at each site, to instead connecting entire local networks" (Hobbes).
As the Internet evolved, one of the major challenges was how to propagate the changes to the software, particularly the host software. DARPA supported UC Berkeley to investigate modifications to the Unix operating system, including incorporating TCP/IP developed at BBN. Although Berkeley later rewrote the BBN code to more efficiently fit into the Unix system and kernel, the incorporation of TCP/IP into the Unix BSD system releases proved to be a critical element in dispersion of the protocols to the research community. Much of the CS research community began to use Unix BSD for their day-to-day computing environment. Looking back, the strategy of incorporating Internet protocols into a supported operating system for the research community was one of the key elements in the successful widespread adoption of the Internet. (Leiner)
This would foreshadow the popularity of desktop workstations and an important development in Internet history because the mid-80s marked "a boom in the personal computer and super-minicomputer industries. The combination of inexpensive desktop machines and powerful, network-ready servers" allowed "many companies to join the Internet for the first time. It was then that corporations began "to use the Internet to communicate with each other and with their customers" (PBS).
Also in 1983, the Internet Activities Board (IAB) was "established, replacing the Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB)." Dave Clark continued "to act as the chairman and a number of task forces were created to handle specific technological issues including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) (Anderberg).
In 1983, when Barry Leiner took over management of the Internet research program at DARPA, he and Clark recognized that the continuing growth of the Internet community demanded a restructuring of the coordination mechanisms. The ICCB was disbanded and in its place a structure of Task Forces was formed, each focused on a particular area of the technology (e.g. routers, end-to-end protocols, etc.). The Internet Activities Board (IAB) was formed from the chairs of the Task Forces. It of course was only a coincidence that the chairs of the Task Forces were the same people as the members of the old ICCB. (Leiner)
EARN (European Academic and Research Network) was also established that same year and was "very similar to the way BITNET works with a gateway funded by IBM" (Hobbes).
The Domain Name System (DNS) was also introduced in 1983 (Hobbes). "Paul Mockapetris of USC's Information Sciences Institute" published RFC 882 and RFC 883 which outlined "the Domain Name Service. Paul's first implementation of a DNS server was called JEEVES. Kevin Dunlap and later Paul Vixie would soon write BIND, which is by far the most common implementation today" (Anderberg).
Later that same year, Mike Muuss wrote "Ping while at the US Army Ballistics Research Laboratory" (Anderberg).
In spite of these successes however, 1983 was ushered in with some trepidation because on January 1 the entire ARPANET switched "from NCP to IP" (Anderberg).
Vinton Cerf described the change-over.
In 1982 it was decided that all the systems on the ARPANET would convert over from NCP to TCP/IP. A clever enforcement mechanism was used to encourage this. We used a Link Level Protocol on the ARPANET; NCP packets used one set of one channel numbers and TCP/IP packets used another set. So it was possible to have the ARPANET turn off NCP by rejecting packets sent on those specific channel numbers. This was used to convince people that we were serious in moving from NCP to TCP/IP. In the middle of 1982, we turned off the ability of the network to transmit NCP for one day. This caused a lot of hubbub unless you happened to be running TCP/IP. It wasn't completely convincing that we were serious, so toward the middle of fall we turned off NCP for two days; then on January 1, 1983, it was turned off permanently. (Cerf "How...")
"By the end of 1983, all the interconnected research networks of the ARPANET were converted to the TCP/IP protocol, and the 'Internet,' as we know now was officially born" (CosmosLink). The transition is said to have went smoothly, although buttons were distributed saying 'I survived the TCP/IP transition.' Dan Lynch of USC ISI handled much of the logistics and went on to start Interop in 1988" (Anderberg).
1984 ushered in the establishment of a number of new networks. JUNET (Japan Unix Network) using UUCP and JANET (Joint Academic Network) was "established in the UK using the Coloured Book protocols" (Hobbes). In addition, FidoNet was "developed by Tom Jennings, with the node #2 belonging to John Madill" (Anderberg) and the USSR's Kremvax sent a message announcing its newly acquired connectivity to USENET (Hobbes).
One event, though, would foreshadow the eventual future path of the Internet in the United States. An "upgrade to CSNET was contracted to MCI. New circuits would be T1 lines, 1.5 Mbps which is twenty-five times faster than the old 56 Kbps lines. IBM would provide advanced routers and Merit would manage the network." The "new network was to be called NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network), and old lines were to remain" part of CSNET (Kristula).
In Canada, however, a phenomenal effort was taking place. 1984 marked the beginning of "a one-year effort to network its universities" as the NetNorth Network of Canada was "connected to BITNET in Ithaca from Toronto." Then in 1985, "100 years to the day of the last spike being driven on the cross-Canada railroad, the last Canadian university" was connected to NetNorth as the completion of Canada's "one year effort to have coast-to-coast connectivity" (Hobbes).
It was also in 1985 that the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at USC was "given responsibility for DNS root management by DCA, and SRI for DNS NIC registrations" and Symbolics.com became the first registered domain. Other firsts included "cmu.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu, ucla.edu (April); css.gov (June); mitre.org, .uk (July)" (Hobbes).
However, 1985 will probably be remembered most in Internet development for the actions of the Internet Activities Board.
Part of the force behind the Internet's early development had been the open availability of information (since 1969 most of the key research memoranda, and the discussions they had generated, had been archived in downloadable on-line files) but now the Internet Activities Board went a step further. In 1985 it organized the first workshop, specifically targeting the private sector, to discuss the potentials (and current limitations) of TCP/IP protocols... beginning a dialogue between government/academic scientists and the private sector, and among private entrepreneurs themselves (who, from the beginning were thus able to ensure the interoperability of their products). (Griffiths)
Consequently, the 1985 start-up of Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) was significant in what it foreshadowed. This private service was started by Larry Brilliant of Networking Technologies International and Stewart Brand of the Point Foundation, with Matthew McClure as director. Customers were charged $8 per month plus $2 per hour for dial-up network connections (Anderberg).
NSFNET and the Dominance of TCP/IP
In 1985, Dennis Jennings came from Ireland to spend a year at NSF leading the NSFNET program. He worked with the community to help NSF make a critical decision - that TCP/IP would be mandatory for the NSFNET program. When Steve Wolff took over the NSFNET program in 1986, he recognized the need for a wide area networking infrastructure to support the general academic and research community, along with the need to develop a strategy for establishing such infrastructure on a basis ultimately independent of direct federal funding. Policies and strategies were adopted...to achieve that end. (Leiner)
Consequently, in 1986 the National Science Foundation established five "super-computing centers to provide high-computing power for all (JVNC@Princeton, PSC@Pittsburgh, SDSC@UCSD, NCSA@UIUC, Theory Center@Cornell)" (Hobbes).
The National Science Foundation (NSF) wanted to make supercomputers useable for research projects, so they decided to link five super-computing centers. First they wanted to use ARPANET for connecting the computers, but ARPANET's bureaucracy and shortage of staff kept NSF from using this solution. So they built their own network using the IP-protocol of ARPANET. NSF linked the five centers...but apparently they could not link the universities with this network, simply because they didn't have enough money for building cables to every university. The solution: the schools and universities of one region were linked together and this network was linked to one of the supercomputers. The "traffic" in this network increased steadily and so the computers and the lines were soon too slow to handle the massive amount of data. (Mayr)
This allowed "an explosion of connections, especially from universities." The new network was called NSFNET and had a "backbone speed of 56Kbps." In addition, the "NSF-funded SDSCNET, JVNCNET, SURANET, and NYSERNET" became operational that same year (Hobbes).
The American program involved a number of decisions that were crucial for the further development of the Internet. The use of TCP/IP protocols was mandatory for all participants in the program. Federal Agencies would share the cost of establishing common infrastructures (as trans-oceanic connections) and support the gateways. NSFNet signed shared infrastructure 'no-metered-cost' agreements with other scientific networks (including ARPANET) which formed the model for all subsequent agreements. It threw its support behind the 'Internet Activities Board' (the direct descendent of the Internetworking Working Group established back in 1972) and encouraged international cooperation in further research. Finally, NSFNet agreed to provide the 'backbone' for the US Internet service, and provided five 'supercomputers' to service the envisaged traffic. The first computers provided a network capacity of 56,000 bytes per second but the capacity was upgraded in 1988 to 1,544,000,000 bytes per second. There was one proviso.... this facility excluded "purposes not in support of research and education." The effect of the creation of NSFNet was dramatic. In the first place it broke the capacity bottleneck in the system. Secondly, it encouraged a surge in Internet use. It had taken a decade for the number of computer hosts attached to 'the Net' to top the thousand mark. By 1986 the number of hosts had reached 5000 and a year later the figure had climbed to...28,000. Thirdly, the exclusion of commercial users from the back-bone had had the (intended) consequence of encouraging the development of private Internet providers. (Griffiths)
In addition to NSFNet and its funded networks, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio created "the first 'Freenet' for the Society for Public Access Computing (PBS). The Freenet (Cleveland) started on July 16, 1986 "under the auspices of the Society for Public Access Computing (SoPAC)," although the Freenet's program management was "assumed by the National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN) in 1989" (Hobbes).
The Cleveland Freenet was not the only new network to start that year independent of the National Science Foundation. BARRNET (Bay Area Regional Research Network) was "established using high speed links" in 1986 and became "operational in 1987" (Hobbes).
Even before this proliferation of networks, though, the increased need for more technological cooperation was apparent. As a result, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) came "into existence under the IAB" and held their first meeting in January of 1986 (Hobbes). "The Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF was created to serve as a forum for technical coordination by contractors for DARPA working on ARPANET, US Defense Data Network (DDN), and the Internet core gateway system" (Kristula).
After some changing membership on the IAB, Phill Gross became chair of a revitalized Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), at the time merely one of the IAB Task Forces. As we saw...by 1985 there was a tremendous growth in the more practical/engineering side of the Internet. This growth resulted in an explosion in the attendance at the IETF meetings, and Gross was compelled to create substructure to the IETF in the form of working groups. This growth was complemented by a major expansion in the community. No longer was DARPA the only major player in the funding of the Internet. In addition to NSFNet and the various US and international government-funded activities, interest in the commercial sector was beginning to grow. Also in 1985, both Kahn and Leiner left DARPA and there was a significant decrease in Internet activity at DARPA. As a result, the IAB was left without a primary sponsor and increasingly assumed the mantle of leadership. (Leiner)
In keeping with the spirit of technological cooperation prevailing over Internet development, it was also in 1986 that Dan Lynch organized and held "the first TCP/IP Implementor's Workshop (which would become Interop in a few years)" (Anderberg).
Dan Lynch in cooperation with the IAB arranged to hold a three day workshop for all vendors to come learn about how TCP/IP worked and what it still could not do well. The speakers came mostly from the DARPA research community who had both developed these protocols and used them in day to day work. About 250 vendor personnel came to listen to 50 inventors and experimenters. The results were surprises on both sides: the vendors were amazed to find that the inventors were so open about the way things worked (and what still did not work) and the inventors were pleased to listen to new problems they had not considered, but were being discovered by the vendors in the field. Thus a two way discussion was formed that has lasted for over a decade. (Leiner)
1986 also saw the birth of the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) which was "designed to enhance Usenet news performance over TCP/IP" (Hobbes). It "was created in an effort to make Usenet news faster and more efficient (Anderberg).
In addition, the development of Mail Exchanger (MX) records by Craig Partridge allowed "non-IP network hosts to have domain addresses" (Hobbes). This allowed the joining of mail records and the Domain Name System (Anderberg).
In spite of these improvements, however, the Net saw one of its greatest problems to date on December 12, 1986 when all of New England was "cut off from the Net" for almost an entire day when AT&T suffered "a fiber optics cable break between Newark, NJ and White Plains, NY." The outage occurred because "all seven New England ARPANET trunk lines were in the one severed cable" (Hobbes).
Network service interruptions like this were a growing concern, so during August of the following year Jeff Case, Mark Fedor, Martin Schoffstall, and James Davin demonstrated "their Simple Gateway Monitoring Protocol (SGMP). Amazingly a major Internet outage occurred during the presentation, showing just how badly the system was needed. Their protocol would later evolve into SNMP" (Anderberg).
In fact, problems continued in '87. Just four months after the interrupted demonstration of SGMP, the "Christmas Virus" found "its way onto BITNET, causing many mail servers to crash because of the overload. Eventually much of the network" was "shutdown for a time to stop its spread" (Anderberg).
None the less, 1987 was an extremely productive year. The National Science Foundation signed a cooperative agreement "to manage the NSFNET backbone with Merit Network, Inc. (IBM and MCI involvement was through an agreement with Merit). Merit, IBM, and MCI later founded ANS." By this time, the number of hosts on the Internet had broken the 10,000 mark and BITNET had more than 1,000 hosts (Hobbes).
In 1987, BITNET and CSNET merged to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN). In the Fall of 1991, CSNET service was discontinued having fulfilled its important early role in the provision of academic networking service. A key feature of CREN is that its operational costs are fully met through dues paid by its member organizations. (Cerf "A Brief...")
In addition, UUNET was founded in 1987 with Usenix funds to provide commercial UUCP and Usenet access, originally an experiment by Rick Adams and Mike O'Dell" and an email link was "established between Germany and China using CSNET protocols, with the first message from China sent" on September 20, 1987 (Hobbes). UUNET was also significant in that it was "the first subscription based commercial internet company" (Griffiths).
At this stage, the Internet is still quite a forbidding place for the uninitiated. Access commands to find data range from the complicated to the impenetrable, the documentation available is mostly (highly) scientific and the presentation unattractive (courier script, no color), finding stuff is a pain in the neck and transfer times are relatively slow). The main attractions for the commercial sector are the e-mail facilities and access to e-mail, newsgroups, 'chat' facilities and computer games. Although commercial exploitation of the net had started, the expansion of the Internet continued to be driven by the government and academic communities. It was also becoming ever more international.(Griffiths)
In 1988, the NSFNET backbone was upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps) (Hobbes). The upgrade was made to handle more traffic and that's just what NSFNET got...more traffic.
Soon after the completion of the T1 NSFNET backbone, traffic increased so quickly that plans immediately began on upgrading the network again. Merit and its partners formed a not for profit corporation called ANS, Advanced Network Systems, which was to conduct research into high speed networking. It soon came up with the concept of the T3, a 45 Mbps line. NSF quickly adopted the new network and by the end of 1991 all of its sites were connected by this new backbone. (Kristula)
The network upgrade also paved the way for the first Canadian regional networks to connect to NSFNET in 1988 (Hobbes). ONet connected via Cornell, RISQ via Princeton, and BCnet via the University of Washington. In addition, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden connected to NSFNET that same year. FidoNet was also added to the Net, enabling the exchange of email and news over that network (Hobbes).
While the Internet was evolving, new networks were still being created. The Los Nettos network was "created with no federal funding," instead it was "supported by regional members (founding: Caltech, TIS, UCLA, USC, ISI)." In addition, CERFnet (California Education and Research Federation network) was founded by Susan Estrada (Hobbes).
Much of the overall development at this time was assisted by the installation of "the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable linking North America and Europe." The cable could "handle 40,000 telephone calls simultaneously" and that, in addition to the NSFNET upgrade, helped the Internet's operations (Anderberg).
Another improvement in traffic-handling capabilities was Bernard Daines' development of "the first Ethernet switch to add Ethernet support to Northern Telecom carrier-class telephone switches" (Anderberg).
These traffic-handling increases were not the only foreshadowers of the future, however. The first multicast tunnel was "established between Stanford and BBN in the Summer of 1988" (Hobbes). This paved the way for further development in audio/video distribution over the Internet. In addition, the first of many Interop trade shows occurred.
In September of 1988 the first Interop trade show was born. 50 companies made the cut. 5,000 engineers from potential customer organizations came to see if it all did work as was promised. It did. Why? Because the vendors worked extremely hard to ensure that everyone's products interoperated with all of the other products - even with those of their competitors. The Interop trade show has grown immensely since then and today it is held in 7 locations around the world each year to an audience of over 250,000 people who come to learn which products work with each other in a seamless manner, learn about the latest products, and discuss the latest technology. (Leiner)
1988 was also the year the Department of Defense chose "to adopt OSI and sees use of TCP/IP as an interim," in spite of TCP/IP's growing support. Consequently, the "US Government OSI Profile (GOSIP) defines the set of protocols to be supported by government purchased products," thus eliminating TCP/IP from its long-term plans (Hobbes).
Hardware and administrative developments were not the only watershed events of 1988. Software also had an impact...both positive and negative. On the positive side, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was developed in 1988 by Jarkko Oikarinen and Van Jacobson wrote traceroute while at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs after a conversation with Steve Deering of Stanford University (Anderberg). On the negative side, though, an automated program called the Internet Worm worked its way through the Internet on November 2, 1988 affecting about 6,000 of the 60,000 hosts (Hobbes).
By 1988 the Internet is an essential tool for communications, however it also begins to create concerns about privacy and security in the digital world. New words, such as "hacker," "cracker" and" electronic break-in", are created. These new worries are dramatically demonstrated on Nov. 1, 1988 when a malicious program called the "Internet Worm" temporarily disables approximately 6,000 of the 60,000 Internet hosts. (PBS)
As a result, CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) was "formed by DARPA in response to the needs exhibited during the...worm incident" but their only advisory that year was in regards to the earlier worm (Hobbes).
1988 was also the year an important seed was planted that would later come to fruition in 1991 as federal legislation popularizing the Internet as the Information Superhighway.
In 1988, a National Research Council committee, chaired by Kleinrock and with Kahn and Clark as members, produced a report commissioned by NSF titled "Towards a National Research Network". This report was influential on then Senator Al Gore, and ushered in high speed networks that laid the networking foundation for the future information superhighway. (Leiner)
With the Internet growing, administrative concerns grew too. In 1989, the IAB consolidated "its growing list of task forces into two groups, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). The IETF (one of the original 10 Task Forces) was given near-term responsibility for developments and standards while the smaller IRTF focused on longer-range research. Steering, Working, and Research groups are all formed under the IETF and IRTF" (Anderberg).
The IETF combined Working Groups into Areas, and designated Area Directors. An Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) was formed of the Area Directors. The IAB recognized the increasing importance of the IETF, and restructured the standards process to explicitly recognize the IESG as the major review body for standards. The IAB also restructured so that the rest of the Task Forces (other than the IETF) were combined into an Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)...with the old task forces renamed as research groups. (Leiner)
And the growth continued. RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeans) was "formed (by European service providers) to ensure the necessary administrative and technical coordination to allow the operation of the pan-European IP Network and The Corporation for Research and Education Networking (CREN) was "formed by merging CSNET into BITNET" (Hobbes). In addition, Compuserve was "connected through Ohio State University" and MCI was "connected through the Corporation for National Research Initiative" (Anderberg). The Compuserve and MCI connections were extremely significant because they constituted the "first relays between a commercial electronic mail carrier and the Internet" (Hobbes).
That was not the largest segment of growth in 1989, though. Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom connected to NSFNET (Hobbes). This foreshadowed a wave of NSFNET connections that would come over the next few years as countries scrambled to network with the rest of the world.
As if that growth weren't enough, the First Web Project proposal was "distributed by CERN's Tim Berners-Lee. His proposal was for a 'hypertext system' to aid the sharing of information between teams of researchers in the High Energy Physics community (Anderberg). Little did he know at the time that his proposal would develop into the World Wide Web, which would become the most popular part of the Internet...the part that will largely be responsible for putting the Internet in the hands of the masses and foster it as a new communication medium.
One chapter of Internet history was closing, however. ARPANET, the one that started it all, was scheduled to shut down in 1990 (Hobbes). "ARPANET (which had been stripped of its military research functions in 1983) became a victim of its own success. The network had been reduced to a pale shadow of its former self and was wound up" (Griffiths). As a result, UCLA sponsored "the Act One symposium to celebrate ARPANET's 20th anniversary and its decommissioning." In connection with the symposium, Request For Comment 1121 was issued entitled "Act One - The Poems" (Hobbes).
1990 may have been the end of ARPANET, but it was the beginning of new software for the Internet, software that would make the Internet far more user-friendly.
Archie was released in 1990 by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at McGill University (Hobbes). Archie was significant since it was "the first Internet search-engine for finding and retrieving computer files" (Griffiths). And the growth of the Internet had established the need for just such a tool at just that time.
As the commands for e-mail, FTP, and telnet were standardized, it became a lot easier for non-technical people to learn to use the nets. It was not easy by today's standards by any means, but it did open up use of the Internet to many more people in universities, in particular. Other departments besides the computer, physics, and engineering departments found ways to make good use of the nets to communicate with colleagues around the world and to share files and resources. Libraries, which had been automating their catalogs went a step further and made their automated catalogs available to the world. While the number of sites on the Internet was small, it was fairly easy to keep track of the resources of interest that were available. But as more and more universities and organizations connected, the Internet became harder and harder to track. There was more and more need for tools to index the resources that were available. (Howe)
However, as significant as Archie was at the time as the first indexing tool, its fame would be greatly overshadowed because none of these software developments would become as significant as the creation of Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web in November of that year. His colleague, Robert Cailliau, described how it was named.
During some sessions in the CERN cafeteria, Tim and I try to find a catching name for the system. I was determined that the name should not yet again be taken from Greek mythology. Tim proposes "World-Wide Web". I like this very much, except that it is difficult to pronounce in French. (Cailliau)
Yet, while the name proved to be catchy, it was not the gimmicky name that would make the Web stand out. The significance of Berners-Lee's creation is critical to the understanding of Internet development.
The World Wide Web is a network of sites that can be searched and retrieved by a special protocol known as a Hypertext Transfer protocol (HTTP). The protocol simplified the writing of addresses and automatically searched the internet for the address indicated and automatically called up the document for viewing. The WWW concept was designed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and scientists at CERN (Geneva), the European center for High Energy Physics, who were interested in making easier to retrieve research documentation. A year later he had developed a 'browser/editor' program and had coined the name World Wide Web as a name for the program. The program is released free on an ftp site. This doesn't sound very dramatic but anyone used to the hassle of getting documents previously will testify that it represented a major leap forward. Once the entire dial and retrieve language had been simplified, the next step was to design an improved 'browser', a system which allowed the links to be hidden behind text (using a Hypertext Markup Language, HTML) and activated by a click with the 'mouse'. Until that occurred the transition to the new system was slow. By the end of 1992 there were only 50 web-sites in the World and a year later the number was still no more than 150. (Griffiths)
It was ultimately HTML that would be the catalyst that made the World Wide Web so popular. "HTML is a special version of SGML (...used by big companies for exchange of data) focused on Hypertext. HTML code is written in ASCII - format. This is a big advantage, because ASCII can be read by about any platform (IBM, Macintosh, UNIX,...) thus making the WWW usable for any platform as long as viewer programs, the browsers, exist" (Mayr).
One software development that would play a significant role with the Web in later years was the result of a disgruntled employee. It's development started in 1990 when Patrick Naughton sent "an angry resignation letter to the CEO of Sun Microsystems detailing the woeful state of the company's operating systems." In response, the company commissioned "Naughton, Bill Joy, James Gosling, and three others to create a solution to the problem. They would create a simple object-oriented programming language named Oak, which would evolve into Java a few years later" (Anderberg).
One software development that year, however, was inevitable due to the growth of TCP/IP. The ISO Development Environment (ISODE) was created "to provide an approach for OSI migration" for the Department of Defense, a software application that allowed OSI applications to operate over TCP/IP (Hobbes).
1990 also marked the beginning of a unique form of network growth. According to Vinton Cerf "...commercial Internet service providers emerged from the collection of intermediate-level networks inspired and sponsored by the National Science Foundation as part of its NSFNet initiatives." He also said that "in 1990 a conscious effort was made to link in commercial and nonprofit information service providers, and this has also turned out to be useful" (Cerf "How...).
Network growth also continued in 1990 as CA*net was "formed by 10 regional networks" in order to make a direct connection of the national Canadian backbone with NSFNET. In addition, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Greece, India, Ireland, Korea, Spain, and Switzerland connected that same year to NSFNET (Hobbes).
Also of significance, is the start-up of The World (world.std.com), "the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access" (Hobbes).
In 1991, software releases dominated the developments. Gopher was released by Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the University of Minnesota; Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), invented by Brewster Kahle, was released by Thinking Machines Corporation; and PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) was released by Philip Zimmerman (Hobbes). Gopher and WAIS would become the more famous of the three, though.
In 1991, the first friendly interface to the Internet was developed at the University of Minnesota. The University wanted to develop a simple menu system to access files and information on campus through their local network. A debate followed between mainframe adherents and those who believed in smaller systems with client-server architecture. The mainframe adherents 'won' the debate initially, but since the client-server advocates said they could put up a prototype very quickly, they were given the go-ahead to do a demonstration system. The demonstration system was called a gopher after the U of Minnesota mascot--the golden gopher. The gopher proved to be very prolific, and within a few years there were over 10,000 gophers around the world. It takes no knowledge of unix or computer architecture to use. In a gopher system, you type or click on a number to select the menu selection you want. (Howe)
At about the same time, Brewster Kahle, then at Thinking Machines, Corp. developed his Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), which would index the full text of files in a database and allow searches of the files. There were several versions with varying degrees of complexity and capability developed, but the simplest of these were made available to everyone on the nets. At its peak, Thinking Machines maintained pointers to over 600 databases around the world which had been indexed by WAIS. They included such things as the full set of Usenet Frequently Asked Questions files, the full documentation of working papers by those developing the Internet's standards, and much more. (Howe)
In addition, the World Wide Web, created the previous year by Tim Berners-Lee, was released to the public in 1991 (Hobbes) and CERN held their first "computer seminar on WWW" (Anderberg). "SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California," became "the first Web server" in the United States and served "the contents of an existing, large data base of abstracts of physics papers" (Cailliau).
While the World Wide Web is just a method of using the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee is quoted in "Internet for Historians, History of the Internet: The Development of the Internet" describing how the Web is inherently different from the rest of the Internet and is best viewed as a "space."
The Web is an abstract (imaginary) space of information. On the Net, you find computers--on the Web, you find documents, sounds, videos,.... information. On the Net, the connections are cables between computers; on the Web, connections are hypertext links. The Web exists because of programs which communicate between computers on the Net. The Web could not be without the Net. The Web made the Net useful because people are really interested in information (not to mention knowledge and wisdom!) and don't really want to have know about computers and cables. (Griffith)
None the less, at this time the Web was just in its infancy and the Internet was continuing to proliferate as a network of networks. The Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) Association, Inc. was "formed by General Atomics (CERFnet), Performance Systems International, Inc. (PSInet), and UUNET Technologies, Inc. (AlterNet)" in 1991 when the National Science Foundation lifted "restrictions on the commercial use of the Net" (Hobbes). Also, NSF upgraded their backbone to T3 (44.736Mbps) and its traffic passed 1 trillion bytes per month and 10 billion packets per month. That same year saw Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, and Tunisia connected to NSFNET (Hobbes).
As far as networking issues, however, 1991 is probably best remembered for the official birth of the Information Superhighway.
(The ) "Information superhighway" project came into being. This was the name given to popularize Al Gore's High Performance Computing Act which provided funds for further research into computing and improving the infrastructure of the Internet's (US) structure. Its