Talk:History of the Internet/Archive 1

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents

Needs more content

This is still woefully thin on early work on the Internet; I'll add some more soon. Also, there's a lot of replicated material on this page, and a number of others (e.g. e-mail, etc), and the whole area (about 20 pages all told, I reckon, along with packet datagram packet switching etc) all needs to be gone over and rationalized. More soon... Noel 08:39, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Link?

The link to supercomputing in the Early Growth section...should/could it link to super computer? Ianneub 00:20, May 22, 2004 (UTC)

Al Gore Myths

Can someone please help me dispell the myths that without Al Gore, the internet would not be as widespread as today?

I do this to help myself in internet chats.

[20:05:14] <Lumi> without gores push for funding you wouldnt be here jackfuck.

I apologize with the language but this guy is a serious ass and I need to have something to make him stfu. He doesn't listen to the cold war, he doesn't think the arpanet is the reason of the web, and he doesn't believe anything, really. If you get some plz post to my talk page. --TIB 01:25, Aug 12, 2004 (UTC)

Your statement at minimal face value, that without Al Gore, the internet would not be as widespread as today, is in fact true to a certain extent. The question is not whether he helped, but to what degree. The history of the Internet is long. There is no "one thing" responsible for it. Al Gore never said that he invented the Internet. He did push for funding for the National Science Foundation to establish a nation-wide research network. The NSFNet did replace the ARPANet as the US Internet backbone in 1990. Without the changes that happened when the backbone moved from the ARPANet to the NSFNet, the Internet would not be as widespread today. At that time there was a lot of talk about the "Information Superhighway". Big corporate interests at the time would have been just as happy if that had meant 500 channels of cable TV, instead of world-wide TCP/IP connectivity. The World Wide Web would not have happened if the Internet had remained only the military-focused ARPANet. So all of these statements, on both sides of the argument, have an element of truth. For an argumentative chat person like Lumi appears to be, just state your case and let it go. If they want to be ignorant of the history before Gore and the NSFNet, let them. Post a link to the Wikipedia article for anyone who wants to know, and be done with it. --Amillar 18:22, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

So why there is still no information about Al Gore's involvement? This document Al Gore's support of the Internet by V.Cerf and B.Kahn looks like a great place to get the facts. Anyone care to write that? Paranoid 10:59, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

In part because Gore's role, although non-trivial, was rather late in the early growth of the Internet, and also because it's not clear how significant the things he did really were. Note, for instance, that the most respected academic history of the growth of the Internet (Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet, MIT Press, 1999) doesn't even mention Gore! (Also, his role may not have been as significant as the role of many others, who also aren't mentioned here, but that's another point.)
Counter-factual history is not an exact science, so we don't know how it all would have turned out without Gore, but I think a student of the growth of the Internet has to realize that there were major external factors driving the growth of a global data communication system, and those factors existed whether Gore was here or not. (One my favourite lines to the marketing people in the mid-80's was "the coolest thing about the phone on your desk is not that it can call someone down the hall in your company, but that it can call anyone anywhere".)
And as for the article you cite, you have to give a lot of weight to Vint's opinions, but you also need to read it carefully! I do agree 100.000% with Vint that "the vice president deserves significant credit for his early recognition of the importance of what has become the Internet". However, that does not mean that Gore's role was 'critical' or 'substantial' - note that Vint carefully steers clear of trying to weigh exactly how important Gore's role actually was. And Vint doesn't have a magic counter-factual history tele-sense any more than you or I do (and I suspect he's fully aware of that).
It it certainly the case the the Internet technology was well on its way by the time Gore arrived on the scene in the late 80's, and it also already had backers in various parts of the US Government. (I can also tell you, from personal perspective while at Proteon, that there was a lot of commercial interest in the technology - which is something that Vint, from his position, might not have seen so well.)
Yes, the pot of money, etc, Gore helped provide (after all, as one legislator out of many, others had a role too) was a big help - but would history have looked radically different without it? No way to know. Gore's contribution is probably neither as major as Gore fans want to think it was, nor as irrelevant as Gore-haters would like to make out.
The best way to settle this would be to carefully document the exact details what Gore did do, but alas on looking around I don't quickly see anything which does so. Our Al Gore article certainly doesn't, and neither does the Cerf/Kahn note you cite (and neither do the sites that Al Gore#Al Gore and the Internet links to - rather unfortunate). Noel (talk) 20:07, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Approachability

Is there anyone who knows computers and pedagogy who can make this article more approachable to those of us who are not so well-versed in computer technical language? The article naturally uses lots of jargon. But unfortunately it doesn't define most of them, and the links to the jargon pages usually lead the layman to... more jargon. (See TCP/IP for a great example of this). The history of the Internet is so important to our entire society. The article needs to be more approachable to everyone. Fishal 23:17, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I sympathize with your plaint, but I also want to make sure that the 'technical' history of the Internet is carefully and correctly told. The reason the jargon isn't explained is i) it would make the page a lot longer to do so here (as opposed to by reference), and ii) it would be duplicative of material elsewhere. Perhaps we need two pages, one a "technical history of the internet", and the other a "social history of the impact of the internet", or something? Noel 02:44, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)

No, I don't think that would be a good way to go. I guess the best solution would be to work on those linked pages. But that's quite a task. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.25.69.29 (talk • contribs) 13:26, 5 September 2004

See, I know that personally I am interested in the technical development of the Internet. But being not gifted in that area, I'd just like to know the basics. Maybe it's impossible. I don't know. I think this is a great page; unfortunately it brings home the fact that I am a techie outsider. Fishal 19:15, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Well, I definitely would recommend Katie Hafner's book. It's written for the ordinary reader, but has all the technical details right. Of course, it's also book-length! Noel (talk) 15:07, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
OK thanks. Perhaps I can read it and then use her style as an inspiration. I really would like to know what, for example, TCP/IP is, because it clearly is a vital part of the story of the development of the Internet. But unfortunately sentences like "The Internet protocol suite is the set of protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs" are rather daunting to the outsider. Well I'll find that book. Fishal 16:39, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yes, that's one's daunting. :-) Here's the translation into ordinary English: a protocol is just a set of rules and formats which two things can use to communicate. Think of it as a very formal, but (usually) limited-capability, "language". A protocol stack is just the notion that you build up a complex communication system out of a set of protocol layers, each one of which uses the services of the layer(s) below it, and provide a (more complex) service to the ones above it. A good example is e.g. the English "protocol stack", in which the "layers" are:

  • characters
  • words
  • sentences

Yes, probably there's some page somewhere that should say this, to improve the readability for non-technical readers, but you know the Wikipedia - so many pages needing work, so little time! :-) Feel free to add this yourself, to whatever page is appropriate! Noel (talk) 18:02, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Kleinrock and Baran

Leonard Kleinrock's (sad) attempt to aggrandize his personal contributions is making its appearance here, I see. For more on this, see comments I'm about to post at Talk:Packet switching. Noel (talk) 15:07, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

There is now an extensive discussion of the issue in the article packet switching. See what you think.--Carl Hewitt 02:18, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

Good article

Good article here: http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/users/goguen/courses/275f00/invented.html

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.4.119.29 (talk • contribs) 04:52, 15 November 2004

Treat that with some salt - the writer has an ideological axe to grind. (See my comments above.) Noel (talk) 19:00, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Creation Myths

Can someone please help me dispell the myth that the Internet is the exclusive property of the U.S.A.? As far as I know, a great deal of it was developed at the CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.53.112.171 (talk • contribs) 16:58, March 29, 2005

Whether you like it or not, the Internet first came online in the U.S. in 1969 in the form of ARPANET, and the majority of applied research up until the late 1980s was done there. Most of the early Requests for Comments were written by the original ARPA research groups at UCLA and SRI, plus BBN. There are already a lot of published books about the development of ARPANET in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The reason the Europeans or Japanese don't come into this picture until much later is that most of their scientists were committed to working on ISO and ITU projects like X.25. Remember, this was at a time, the 1970s, when even the U.S. still had a phone monopoly and it seemed that monopolies in telecommunications were the only way to go. Thus any inventor wanting to create cool communications technologies had to go through ISO and ITU, which in turn had the power to force the PTTs to implement their new standards (e.g., ISDN). Only with hindsight we can say that going through ISO and ITU was kind of stupid. I've looked through some old technical magazines from that period, like ISO Bulletin, and I feel sorry for all those scientists outside the U.S. proclaiming their grand visions of the future which will now be reduced to a historical footnote (because basically they bet on the wrong horse).
Of course, it's not clear that people outside the U.S. could have done much anyway to help with Internet development, since the Internet was primarily controlled by the U.S. military up until the MILNET split and the development of NSFNET.
CERN doesn't really come into the picture until the late 1980s, when NSFNET came online and a lot of scientific sites were being allowed to connect to the Internet. Also, you have to keep in mind that Tim Berners-Lee was always on the edge of the Internet community proper. In his book, Weaving the Web, he explains that he started the Web because the Internet community refused to take up his invitation to add hypertext to the Internet. Then the IETF wanted to manage Web standards, but then this was in 1993 when everyone was crazy about the Internet, so there were too many people trying to participate in the IETF meetings and nothing got done. So Berners-Lee went off to W3C which he runs as his own little benevolent dictatorship. --Coolcaesar 20:27, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Also, I should point out that the two other technologies borrowed by Berners-Lee for the Web, markup languages and hypertext, were both pioneered in the United States. Markup languages were first proposed as "generic coding" by the Canadian publishing executive William Tunnicliffe in 1967 and were initially implemented independently by a team led by Harvard-trained lawyer-turned-IBM-programmer Charles Goldfarb in 1972. Hypertext was independently developed by two Norwegian-Americans, Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson, in the late-1960s, (and both were inspired by Vannevar Bush).
Finally, I hate to burst your bubble further, but CERN's primary contribution was serving as the birthplace of the Web in 1989 and 1990; it hasn't been involved much in Internet research after 1994. After CERN put the technology into public domain, then W3C took over. Berners-Lee moved to the U.S. and now runs W3C from a lab at MIT.
It's just too bad that so many bright researchers wasted all their time during the 1970s and 1980s working on the ISO/ITU project that was supposed to be the great networking technology for now and forever, Open Systems Interconnect, but which is now considered to be the ultimate example of vaporware. Even some U.S. researchers got sucked into the OSI cult. Fortunately, a few true believers correctly realized that TCP/IP was the future, and now we have the Internet as it exists today. --Coolcaesar 20:48, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

First, let me respond to the first poster and say that you have a seriously confused, and incredibly minimal understanding of both the subject and the history (I know to a lot of people "the Internet" == "WWW", but it's just not so). You really need to study up a bit on this subject before making such commments. Coolceasar is quite right about CERN and its relationship to the origins of the Internet (which is 0.0000000) and the WWW.

Having said that, the truth of the matter on relative US/European contributions, insofar as the Internet is concerned, is neither black nor white.

Europeans did have a very important impact on the early days of the Internet (i.e. prior to 1980). First, the work of Louis Pouzin and others on CYCLADES was really important in proving some concepts that became a key part of TCP/IP (i.e. making the hosts responsible for reliable delivery). Second, a number of Europeans researchers played imporant roles early on - do note that one of the seminal first Internet papers (the name escapes me at the moment, no time to look it up) is "Cerf and Kirstein" - Kirstein being Peter Kirstein, of the University College London. Etc, etc, etc. There's a plaque being put up out at Stanford to commemorate the "Birth of the Internet", and you will notice that there are a number of European institutions and contributors named.

On the other hand, it was a principally US project (the funding and drive all came from the US, along with most of the people, and most of the early work). The first Internet research meeting I went to (in the fall of 1977 - you will notice that my name is on that plaque :-), I think everyone there was from the US.

Coolceasar, your understanding of why Europeans weren't involved (the whole ISO rant) has some truth to it, but is not completely correct either, and your comments about military control are also subtly wrong. (No time right at this moment to explain why in detail, alas.) And you also make the common mistake of thinking the ARPANet was an early stage of the Internet project, and it wasn't - it was a wholly separate project that the Internet later sucked up. Etc, etc. So please be a little more careful in making such assertions. Noel (talk) 17:28, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Soviet Internet?

I have heard that the USSR had its own parallel form of the internet. Can anyone confirm this? Is it still operational, or absorbed into the WWW? —Preceding unsigned comment added by MacRusgail (talk • contribs) 17:31, 30 June 2005

Internet outside US

Does this article have a rather limited geographical scope? Something more about the growth of the 'net outside the US would be interesting. For example, I've heard that Norway was the first country outside the US to be connected. And when was the first Internet connection in, for example, the UK, Japan and China (to mention some) made? As it stands now US companies and researchers dominate the article too much. Jørgen 19:07, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

There is an intresting article here. It seems that the first connection was to a US sizmic station in Norway by way of satalite the the UK and on by cable via London. A little later UCL was able to use this link and become the UK's first arpnet node. I'll see if I can work soem of the info into the article. Andreww 05:28, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
More info about other early nodes can be found here Andreww 05:38, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
Thanks, great! Jørgen 08:31, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
That really ought to go in the ARPANET article. (The two really are quite distinct; the ARPANET had an independent and significant existence for years before the Internet project even got started.) It would be good to document the spread of the Internet to other countries. The first purely-Internet links outside the US were as part of SATNET (let's see if we have an article on that); IIRC, there were sites in England and Germany, not sure of the timing/order, and if there were others. Links to other countries via leased terrestrial lines came later, don't recall the details. Noel (talk) 16:39, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
UCL was indeed important in bringing the ARPANET to the UK, but when considering the history in the UK we must not forget the importance of Peter Collinson and the University of Kent at Canterbury as probably the most important feed for UUCP traffic into the UK (from ucbvax IIRC) and for the early feeds into the non-academic arena (e.g. ROOT Computers Ltd. in London). In my memory the work at UKC was the most important.

Is This Article Only Half There?

Where is the history of applications on the internet? Many people may be interested in learning about the physical growth of the network, but what about the history of internet usage? The story of what people did with the internet from 1969 to present would be a very interesting one. Here's a hint: ftp, email, newsgroups, irc, instant messaging and the biggie: www (including browsing, search engines, blogging, wikis, syndication feeds, social bookmarking). Jeff schiller 20:46, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

Most of these already have separate articles, giving the history in detail (I recall working on the email one at some point - I'll have to go check it and see how badly the amateurs/noobs have screwed it up since then). A section here giving a brief history, with links to the appropriate articles, would not be amiss. As to why it's not here - hey, dude, it's a Wiki - get busy! :-) Noel (talk) 16:35, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Dot Com Boom Bust

I struggling to find any reference to Dot Com anywhere on wikipedia. The boom and bust was a major recent event and surely forms part of the history of the Internet. Maybe I am just blind or thick today. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.7.41.250 (talk • contribs) 14:05, 31 July 2005

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Personally, I have very little knowledge of the origins of the internet apart from what I've read on Wikipedia. However, on a recent college visit to MIT, the official tour guide mentioned that the internet was invented there. Of course, this cannot be taken at face value, as the creation of the internet seems to have been largely collaborative, so this statement probably means that a landmark development in the creation of the internet occurred at MIT.

Why isn't MIT mentioned at all in the article? Is this just another myth? JianLi 03:15, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Well, this is one where I have a lot of personal knowledge, being one of the four MIT people whose name is on the "Creation of the Internet" plaque at Stanford! :-)
In the Internet, MIT as an organization, and people at MIT at the time, had a moderately significant role, but it was at a later stage in the early work. The very earliest work (mid-70's) was basically entirely a West Coast operation: Stanford primarily, some XEROX PARC, etc. (Although a number of MIT alumni were involved in that stage; Bob Metcalfe, Bob Kahn, etc.) However, in the next stage, '77-'86 or so, people at MIT (David D. Clark, David P. Reed, and I) played a very significant role - but not to the point where I would say that MIT's role was really more than "first among equals". That's the main reason that MIT's not mentioned: by that stage in the history there were too many people involved to mention each individually in an article of this length. Noel (talk) 22:00, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
I'm not sure what that was about. I think the guide may have been referring to ARPANET, the Internet's predecessor. Many, many key ARPA and ARPANET people were working at MIT and helped to bring about the creation of the first Interface Message Processors, although the original four nodes did not include MIT. Also, Robert Kahn, one of the co-designers of TCP/IP, was a professor at MIT for a while. But if I recall correctly, a lot of the crucial TCP/IP work was done on the West Coast. --Coolcaesar 03:25, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
A couple of minor corrections: For the ARPANet (BTW, it's always "the ARPANET", not "ARPANET"), MIT as an organization had a minimal role in the creation of the ARPANet itself (i.e. the data-carrying substrate). I am not aware than MIT as an organization played any role at all in the creation of the IMPs. A lot of MIT alumni (especially ex-Lincoln Lab people) had a big role, at BBN and ARPA, but that's different. (E.g. Bob Kahn, who ran the project at BBN, was ex-MIT, as you mention.) MIT people did play a bit more of a role in the creation of the NCP protocols, and application protocols, but it was only an equal share with a number of other places. I don't recall the details offhand (would have to research it, I wasn't there for it myself). But basicallly MIT's role in the ARPANet was not major. Noel (talk) 22:00, 2 September 2005 (UTC)