The History of the Net

• The “Atlantic cable” was installed across the ocean with the idea of connecting the communication systems in US and Europe. While this was a great idea, the 1858 implementation of it was only operational for a few days.

• The implementation was attempted again in 1866, and this time with great success. The original Atlantic cable laid in 1866 remained operational for almost 100 years.

• In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. As a response to the Soviet research efforts, president Dwight D. Eisenhower instructed the Department of Defense to establish the Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA. The agency started with great success and launched the first American satellite within 18 months of the agency's conception. Several years later, ARPA was also given the task of developing a reliable communications network, specifically for use by computers. The primary motivation for this was to have a network of decentralized military computers connected in such way that in the case of destruction of one or several nodes in a potential war, the network would still survive with communication lines between remaining nodes.

• In 1962 Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was given the task of leading ARPA's research efforts in improving the use of computer technology in the military. It was due to Dr. Licklider's influence that ARPA's primary research efforts moved from the private sector to the universities around the US. His work paved the way for the creation of ARPANET.

• Paul Baran of RAND Corporation publishes the paper "On Distributed Communications Networks" which introduces Packet-switching (PS) networks; no single outage point.

• ARPA sponsors study on "cooperative network of time-sharing computers" -- TX-2 at MIT Lincoln Lab and Q-32 at System Development Corporation (Santa Monica, CA) are directly linked (without packet switches).

• At the ACM Symposium on Operating Principles, a plan was presented for a packet-switching network. Also, the first design paper on ARPANET was published by Lawrence G. Roberts.

• PS-network was presented to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
• It is argued that the first packet-switching network was operational and in-place at the National Physical Laboratories in the UK. Parallel efforts in France also resulted in an early packet-switching network at Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques in 1968-1970.

• First ARPANET node was established at UCLA's Network Measurements Center.
• Subsequent nodes were established at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and UCSB (UC Santa Barbara).
• Information Message Processors (IMP) was developed by Bolt Beranek on a Honeywell DDP 516. The system devlivered messages between the 4 node network above.
• First RFC (Request For Comments), "Host Software", was submitted by Steve Crocker.

• Norman Abrahamson develops ALOHAnet at University of Hawaii. ALOHAnet provided the background for the work which later became ethernet.
• ARPANET hosts start using Network Control Protocol (NCP). This protocol was used until 1982 at which time it was replaced with TCP/IP.

• ARPANET had grown to 15 nodes which included 26 nodes: UCLA, SRI, UCSB, University of Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND, SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIUC, CWRU, CMU, and NASA(Ames).

• RFC 318: Telnet
• Ray Tomlinson writes e-mail program to operate across networks
• Inter-Networking Working Group (INWG), headed by Vinton Cerf, is established and given the task of investigating common protocols.
• Public demonstration of the ARPANET by Bob Kahn of BBN. The demonstration consisted of a "packet switch", and a TIP (Terminal Interface Processor) in the basement of the Washington Hilton Hotel. The public could use the TIP to run distributed applications across the US. According to Vinton Cerf, the demonstration was a "roaring success".

• ARPANET goes international:
• University College of London -- UK
• Royal Radar Establishment --Norway
• First published outline for the idea of Ethernet: Bob Metcalfe's Harvard PhD Thesis.
• RFC 454: File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

• The design of TCP was given in "A Protocol for Packet Network Internetworking" by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn.

• UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Program) is developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX the following year.

• RFC 733: Mail specification
• THEORYNET, a UUCP based email system with over 100 users is established at University of Wisconsin.
• First demonstration of ARPANET/Packet Radio

• Computer scientists from University of Wisconsin, NSF, DARPA, and other universities meet to establish Computer Science network.
• Tom Truscott and Steve Bellovin implement USENET.
• Only between UNC and Duke
• All groups originally under net.
• Internet Configuration Board is created by ARPA.
• PRNET (Packet Radio Network) is established.

• BITNET (Because It's Time NETwork) established.
• CSNET (Computer Science NETwork) established.
• Based on funding from NSF
• Stated goal of providing network access to universities without ARPANET access

• TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol) is selected as the protocol suite for ARPANET.
• TCP/IP selected by DoD as standard
• RFC 827: External Gateway Protocol

• Name server developed at University of Wisconsin.
• Gateway between CSNET and ARPANET is established.
• ARPANET is split into ARPANET and MILNET.
• UNIX machines with built-in TCP/IP gain in popularity.
• Internet Activities Board (IAB) replaces ICCB.
• Tom Jennings develops FidoNet.

• Domain Name Server (DNS) introduced.
• Over 1000 hosts
• Japan Unix Network operational

• NSFNET created.
• Originially composed of 5 super-computer centers connected with 56Kbps lines.
• Other universities join in.
• Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) created.
• Mail Exchanger (MX) records developed by Craig Partridge allow non-IP network hosts to have domain addresses.

• NSF and Merit Network, Inc. agree to manage the NSFNET backbone.
• Over 10,000 Internet hosts

• November 1- Internet worm affects 10% of hosts
• DoD adopts OSI.
• NSFNET backbone is upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps)
• Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Norway, Sweden are on NSFNET.

• Over 100,000 hosts
• CSNET merges into BITNET to form Corporation for Research and Education Networking (CREN).
• Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) created
• Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) created
• Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, UK on NSFNET

• NSFNET replaces ARPANET
• Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at McGill release Archie
• Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Greece, India, Ireland, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland on NSFNET

• Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), is invented by Brewster Kahle
• Gopher released by Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the University of Minnesota
• Tim Berners-Lee at CERN releases World-Wide Web (WWW)
• NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps)
• NSFNET traffic passes 1 trillion bytes/month and 10 billion packets/month
• Croatia, Czech Repulic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, Tunisia on NSFNET

• Internet Society (ISOC) is formed
• Over 1,000,000 hosts
• Veronica, a gopherspace search tool, is released by University of Nevada
• Cameroon, Cyprus, Ecuador, Estonia, Kuwait, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, Venezuela on NSFNET

• InterNIC created by NSF
• US National Information Infrastructure Act
• WWW proliferates at a 341,634% annual growth rate of service traffic. Gopher's growth is 997%.
• Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Egypt, Fiji, Ghana, Guam, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Liechtenstein, Peru, Romania, Russian Federation, Turkey, Ukrayne, UAE, Virgin Islands on NSFNET

• NSFNET traffic passes 10 trillion bytes/month
• Percent packets and bytes in order:
• FTP
• WWW
• telnet
• Algeria, Armenia, Bermuda, Burkina Faso, China, Colombia, French Polynesia, Jamaica, Lebanon, Lithuania, Macau, Morocco, New Caledonia, Nicaragua, Niger, Panama, Philippines, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Uruguay, Uzbekistan on NSFNET

• NSFNET reverts back to a research network. Main US backbone traffic now routed through interconnected network providers
• WWW surpasses ftp-data in March as the service with greatest traffic on NSFNet based on packet count, and in April based on byte count
• Traditional online dial-up systems (Compuserve, American Online, Prodigy) begin to provide Internet access
• Registration of domain names is no longer free. Beginning 14 September, a $50 annual fee has been imposed, which up until now was subsidized by NSF. NSF continues to pay for .edu registration, and on an interim basis for .gov
• Technologies of the Year: WWW, Search engines
• Emerging Technologies: Mobile code (JAVA, JAVAscript), Virtual environments (VRML), Collaborative tools