INTERNET

History of the Internet

History of the Internet

A commonly asked question is 'What is the Internet?' The reason sucha question gets asked so often is because there's no agreed uponanswer that neatly sums up the Internet. The Internet can be thoughtabout in relation to its common protocols, as a physical collectionof routers and circuits, as a set of shared resources, or even as anattitude about interconnecting and intercommunication. Some commondefinitions given in the past include:* a network of networks based on the TCP/IP protocols,* a community of people who use and develop those networks,* a collection of resources that can be reached from thosenetworks.

Today's Internet is a global resource connecting millions of usersthat began as an experiment over 20 years ago by the U.S. Departmentof Defense. While the networks that make up the Internet are based ona standard set of protocols (a mutually agreed upon method ofcommunication between parties), the Internet also has gateways tonetworks and services that are based on other protocols.To help answer the question more completely, the rest of this papercontains an updated second chapter from 'The Whole Internet User'sGuide and Catalog' by Ed Krol (1992) that gives a more thoroughexplanation. (The excerpt is published through the graciouspermission of the publisher, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.)

The Internet (excerpt from 'The Whole Internet User's Guide andCatalog')The Internet was born about 20 years ago, trying to connect togethera U.S. Defense Department network called the ARPAnet and variousother radio and satellite networks. The ARPAnet was an experimentalnetwork designed to support military research--in particular,research about how to build networks that could withstand partialoutages (like bomb attacks) and still function. (Think about thiswhen I describe how the network works; it may give you some insightinto the design of the Internet.) Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, America's foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How could the U.S. authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war?

Post-nuclear America would need a command-and-control network, linked from city to city, state to state, base to base. However, no matter how thoroughly that network was armoured or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would destroy any conceivable network.

How would the network itself be commanded and controlled? Any central authority, any network central citadel, would be an obvious and immediate target for an enemy missile. The centre of the network would be the very first place to be destroyed. RAND mulled over this grim puzzle in deep military secrecy, and arrived at a daring solution. The RAND proposal was made public in 1964. In the first place, the network would 'have no central authority.' Furthermore, it would be 'designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters.'

The principles were simple. The network itself would be assumed to be unreliable at all times. It would be designed from the beginning to transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to ...