47 lines
3.0 KiB
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47 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
Internet
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n. The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as the
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ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has been
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widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture for
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military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and
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including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from
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the start as a way to get most economical use out of then-scarce
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large-computer resources. Robert Herzfeld, who was director of ARPA at the
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time, has been at some pains to debunk the survive-a-nuclear-war myth, but
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it seems unkillable. As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have
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been to support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms
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of distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic mail
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quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research labs and
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defense contractors early discovered the Internet's potential as a medium of
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communication between humans and linked up in steadily increasing numbers,
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connecting together a quirky mix of academics, techies, hippies, SF fans,
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hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this lexicon lie in those early years.
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Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The typical
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machine/OS combination moved from DEC PDP-10 s and PDP-20 s, running TOPS-10
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and TOPS-20 , to PDP-11s and VAX en and Suns running Unix , and in the 1990s
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to Unix on Intel microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable,
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most notably in the move from NCP/IP to TCP/IP in 1982 and the
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implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983. It was around this time that
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people began referring to the collection of interconnected networks with
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ARPANET at its core as the Internet. The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of
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participation guidelines -- connected institutions had to be involved with a
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DOD-related research project. By the mid-80s, many of the organizations
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clamoring to join didn't fit this profile. In 1986, the National Science
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Foundation built NSFnet to open up access to its five regional
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supercomputing centers; NSFnet became the backbone of the Internet,
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replacing the original ARPANET pipes (which were formally shut down in
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1990). Between 1990 and late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major
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telecommunications companies until the Internet backbone had gone completely
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commercial. That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture
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discovered the Internet. Once again, the killer app was not the anticipated
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one rather, what caught the public imagination was the hypertext and
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multimedia features of the World Wide Web. Subsequently the Internet has
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seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by
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European telecoms monopolies) and is in the process of absorbing into itself
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many of the proprietary networks built during the second wave of wide-area
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networking after 1980. By 1996 it had become a commonplace even in
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mainstream media to predict that a globally-extended Internet would become
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the key unifying communications technology of the next century. See also the
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network.
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