Computers & Robots

We all use the internet. Some of us use it more than others. But where did this miraclious thing come from and how does it run? Have you noticed that there is no central office you can go to and complain if you don't like how the internet works? And another interesting thing is that it is free. Of course you have to pay a service provider to connect but the actual service of the internet is indeed free, at least for now.

In 1961, Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published the first paper on packet switching theory . Packets are small amounts of data that are sent from one computer to another. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, wrote a series of memos in August 1962 that envisioned a network of computers capable of communicating with each other. Kleinrock had convinced others that packets were the way to go.

It wasn't until 1965 that Thomas Merrill and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, connected the TX-2 computer in Mass. to the Q-32 in California with a low speed dial-up telephone line creating the first wide-area computer network ever built.

Picture Source: National Library of Medicine

In 1969 ARPANET was created. Four host computers were initially connected. ARPANET was created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD).

In 1970 the host to host protocol was finished and could now be implemented in the network. This protocol was known as the Network Control Protocol or NCP. The implementation was finished in 1972 and now applications could be developed for his net.

In 1972 electronic mail was introduced to the net for the first time. When email was introduced it quickly became the largest application on the web.

Eventually ARPANET grew into the internet.

Roberts while working for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) introduced the concept of open-architecture networking in 1972. The NCP protocol couldn't address computers outside of ARPANET. The TCP/IP protocol was developed to correct this problem. DARPA had put out three contracts to develop and implement TCP/IP.

Source: US Navy

Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1945. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found". They put out the word that they had "debugged" the machine, thus introducing the term "debugging a computer program".
In 1988, the log, with the moth still taped by the entry, was in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia.

In the beginning when desktops first appeared, many thought that TCP/IP wouldn't fit on them and they didn't have the ability to handle it, even if it did fit. This was proven wrong when TCP/IP was put on work stations and the IBM PC.

In 1973 Xerox developed Ethernet technology. The Ethernet is a device than connects computers to the local area network. The Xerox ethernet used coaxial cable and ran at a speed of 3 Mbps (3 million bytes a second).

The production of computers and connection of local area networks began to increase greatly in the 1980s.

Hosts were eventually assigned names because numbers were to hard to remember. You can still use numbers to get to a site if you know them but its much easier to type 'yahoo.com' than a string of numbers.

The internet was and is made up of routers. In the beginning the routers used a single series of numbers as addresses but were overwhelmed by expansion and a different system was put into use. Each region of the internet was given its own protocol and regions were tied together by an Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP).

UNIX BSD became the computing environment that was preferred. UNIX BSD is an operating system.

In 1983 ARPANET host protocol was changed from NCP to TCP/IP.

Local Area Network Connected to Another LAN over the internet

Picture Source: My drawing and ashamed to admit it.

The adoption of TCP/IP by the Defense Department enabled civilians to begin sharing in the DARPA Internet technology base and led directly to the eventual partitioning of the military and non- military communities.

By 1985 the internet supported a large world wide community.

Who is running the internet now? The net seems to be run by a loose confederation of Government, Business, Technical Organizations, Universities, and to a smaller extent users. There is no central authority. Here is a list of some of the technical organizations involved:
The Internet Society: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG)
Internet Architecture Board (IAB)
Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA)
T he Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)
Steering Group (IRSG)