[HPforGrownups] Re: Voldemort as History

[Caius Marcius]

No: HPFGUIDX 3095


The personal computer
> (imagined by anti-war activists), the internet, the web, have
> made knowledge much more accessible.

The anti-war activists may have imagined it, but who actually built it?
"War is the father of all" wrote the old Greek Wizard Heraclitus.  Did not
the Internet make its first incarnation (just as Voldy first appeared as
mere Tom Riddle) as Arpnet, a fully funded project of every liberals'
Slytherin House, the Pentagon?

At the risk of taxing my fellow subscribers' patience, I'm pasting here a
brief Internet history

Sterling: A Brief History of the Internet

 A Brief History of the Internet by Bruce Sterling

 From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, February 1993.
 F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr other

 Some thirty  years ago, the RAND Corporation,  America's  foremost Cold War
think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem.  How  could the US
authorities successfully communicate  after a nuclear  war?

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

  And 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  center of the network would
be the very first place to go.

  RAND mulled over this grim puzzle  in deep military secrecy,  and arrived
at a daring solution.   The RAND proposal  (the brainchild  of RAND staffer
Paul Baran)  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  get-go 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 originate,
pass, and receive messages.  The  messages themselves would be divided into
packets, each packet  separately addressed.  Each packet would begin at
some specified  source node, and end at some other specified destination
node.  Each  packet would wind its way through the network on an individual
basis.

  The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant.  Only
final results would count.  Basically, the packet would be tossed  like a
hot potato from node to node to node, more or less in the  direction of its
destination, until it ended up in the proper place.  If  big pieces of the
network had been blown away, that simply  wouldn't matter;  the packets
would still stay airborne, lateralled  wildly across the field by  whatever
nodes happened to survive.  This  rather haphazard delivery system might be
"inefficient" in the usual  sense  (especially compared to, say, the
telephone system)  -- but it  would be extremely rugged.

  During the 60s, this intriguing concept of a decentralized,  blastproof,
packet-switching network was kicked around by RAND,  MIT and UCLA.  The
National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain set  up the first test network
on these principles in 1968.     Shortly  afterward, the Pentagon's Advanced
Research Projects Agency decided  to fund a larger, more ambitious project
in the USA.  The nodes of the  network were to be high-speed supercomputers
(or what passed for  supercomputers at the time).   These were rare and
valuable machines  which were in real need of good solid networking, for the
sake of  national research-and-development projects.

  In fall 1969, the  first such node was installed in UCLA.  By  December
1969, there were four nodes on the infant network, which  was named ARPANET,
after its Pentagon sponsor.

  The four computers could  transfer data  on dedicated high- speed
transmission lines.   They could even be programmed remotely  from the other
nodes.  Thanks to ARPANET, scientists and researchers  could share one
another's computer facilities by long-distance.  This  was a very handy
service, for computer-time was precious in the  early '70s.  In 1971 there
were fifteen nodes in ARPANET; by 1972,  thirty-seven nodes.  And it was
good.

  By the second year of operation, however, an odd fact became  clear.
ARPANET's users had warped the computer-sharing network into a dedicated,
high-speed,  federally subsidized  electronic post- office.  The main
traffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing.  Instead, it was news
and personal messages.   Researchers were using  ARPANET  to collaborate on
projects,  to trade notes on work,  and eventually, to downright gossip and
schmooze.   People had their  own personal user accounts on the ARPANET
computers, and their  own personal addresses for electronic mail.   Not only
were they using  ARPANET for person-to-person communication, but they were
very  enthusiastic about this particular service -- far more enthusiastic
than  they were about long-distance computation.

  It wasn't long before the invention of the mailing-list, an  ARPANET
broadcasting technique in which an identical message could  be sent
automatically to large numbers of network subscribers.

        Interestingly, one of the first really big mailing-lists was  "SF-
LOVERS," for science fiction fans.   Discussing science fiction on  the
network was not work-related and was frowned upon by many  ARPANET computer
administrators, but this didn't stop it from  happening.

  Throughout the '70s, ARPA's network grew.  Its decentralized  structure
made expansion easy.   Unlike standard corporate computer  networks, the
ARPA network could accommodate many different  kinds of machine.  As long as
individual machines could speak the  packet- switching lingua franca of the
new, anarchic network, their  brand-names, and their content, and even their
ownership, were  irrelevant.

  The ARPA's original standard for communication was known as NCP,  "Network
Control Protocol," but as time passed and the technique  advanced, NCP  was
superceded by a higher- level, more sophisticated  standard known as TCP/IP.
TCP,  or "Transmission Control Protocol,"  converts messages into streams of
packets at the source, then  reassembles them back into messages at the
destination.  IP, or  "Internet Protocol," handles the addressing, seeing to
it that packets  are routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple
networks  with multiple standards -- not only ARPA's  pioneering NCP
standard,  but  others like Ethernet, FDDI, and X.25.

  As early as 1977, TCP/IP was being used by other networks to  link to
ARPANET.   ARPANET itself remained fairly tightly controlled, at least until
1983, when its military segment broke off and became  MILNET.   But TCP/IP
linked them all.  And ARPANET itself, though it  was growing,  became a
smaller and smaller neighborhood amid the  vastly growing galaxy of other
linked machines.

  As the '70s and '80s advanced, many very different social  groups found
themselves in possession of powerful computers.  It was  fairly easy to link
these computers to the growing  network-of- networks.   As the use of TCP/IP
became more common, entire other networks fell into the digital embrace of
the Internet, and messily adhered.  Since the software called TCP/IP was
public-domain, and the basic technology was decentralized and rather
anarchic by its very nature, it was  difficult to stop people from barging
in and linking up somewhere-or-other.  In point of fact, nobody *wanted* to
stop them from joining this branching complex of networks,  which came to be
known as the "Internet."

  Connecting to the Internet cost the taxpayer little or nothing, since each
node was independent, and had to handle its own financing and its own
technical requirements.   The more, the merrier.  Like the phone network,
the computer network became steadily more valuable as it embraced larger and
larger territories of people and resources.

  A  fax machine is only valuable if *everybody else* has a fax machine.
Until they do, a fax machine is just a curiosity.  ARPANET, too, was a
curiosity for a while.  Then computer-networking became an utter necessity.

  In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into the act, through its
Office of Advanced Scientific Computing.   The new NSFNET set a blistering
pace for technical advancement, linking newer, faster, shinier
supercomputers, through thicker, faster links, upgraded and expanded, again
and again, in 1986, 1988, 1990.  And other government agencies leapt in:
NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, each of
them maintaining a digital satrapy  in the Internet confederation.

  The nodes in this growing network-of-networks were divvied up into basic
varieties.   Foreign computers, and a few American ones, chose to be denoted
by their geographical locations.  The others were  grouped by the six basic
Internet "domains":  gov, mil, edu, com, org  and net.   (Graceless
abbreviations such as this are a standard feature of the TCP/IP protocols.)
Gov, Mil, and Edu denoted governmental, military and educational
institutions, which were, of  course, the pioneers, since ARPANET had begun
as a  high-tech  research exercise in national security.  Com, however,
stood  for "commercial" institutions, which were  soon bursting into the
network like  rodeo bulls, surrounded by a dust-cloud of eager  nonprofit
"orgs."  (The "net" computers served as gateways between  networks.)

  ARPANET itself formally expired in 1989, a happy victim of its own
overwhelming success.  Its users scarcely noticed, for ARPANET's functions
not only continued but steadily improved.  The use of TCP/IP standards for
computer networking is now global.  In 1971, a mere twenty-one years ago,
there were only four nodes in the ARPANET  network.  Today there are tens of
thousands of  nodes in the Internet,  scattered over forty-two countries,
with more coming on-line every day.   Three million, possibly four million
people use this gigantic mother-of-all-computer-networks.

  The Internet is especially popular among scientists, and is probably the
most important scientific instrument of the late twentieth century.   The
powerful, sophisticated access that it
 provides to specialized data and personal communication has sped up the
pace of scientific research enormously.

  The Internet's pace of growth in the early 1990s is  spectacular, almost
ferocious.  It is spreading faster than cellular phones, faster than fax
machines.  Last year the Internet was growing at a rate of twenty percent a
*month.*  The number of "host" machines with direct connection to TCP/IP has
been doubling every year since 1988.   The Internet is moving out of  its
original base in military and research institutions,  into elementary and
high schools, as well as into public libraries and the commercial sector.

  Why do people want to be "on the Internet?"  One of the main reasons is
simple freedom.   The Internet is a rare example of a true, modern,
functional  anarchy.   There is no "Internet Inc."   There are  no official
censors, no bosses, no board of directors, no stockholders.  In principle,
any node can speak as a peer to any other node, as long as it obeys the
rules of the TCP/IP protocols, which are strictly technical, not social or
political.  (There has been some struggle over
 commercial use of the Internet, but that situation is changing as
businesses supply their own links).

  The Internet is also a bargain.  The Internet as a whole, unlike the phone
system, doesn't charge for long-distance service.  And unlike most
commercial computer networks, it doesn't charge for access time, either.  In
fact the "Internet" itself, which doesn't even officially exist as an
entity, never "charges" for anything.   Each group of people accessing the
Internet is responsible for their own machine and their own section of line.

  The Internet's "anarchy" may seem strange or even unnatural, but it makes
a certain deep and basic sense.  It's rather like the "anarchy" of the
English language.  Nobody rents English, and nobody owns English.    As an
English-speaking person, it's up to you to learn how to speak English
properly  and make whatever use you please of it (though the government
provides certain subsidies to help you learn to read and write a bit).
Otherwise, everybody just sort of
 pitches in, and somehow the thing evolves on its own, and somehow turns out
workable.  And interesting.   Fascinating, even.   Though a lot of people
earn their living from using and exploiting  and teaching English, "English"
as an institution is public property, a public good.  Much the same goes for
the Internet.   Would English  be improved if the "The English Language,
Inc."  had a board of directors and a chief executive officer, or a
President and a Congress?   There'd probably be a lot fewer new words in
English, and a lot fewer new ideas.

  People on the Internet feel much the same way about their own
institution.   It's an institution that resists institutionalization.   The
Internet belongs to everyone and no one.

  Still, its various interest groups all have a claim.   Business  people
want the Internet put on a sounder financial footing.  Government people
want the Internet more fully regulated.
 Academics want it dedicated exclusively to scholarly research.  Military
people want it spy-proof and secure.   And so on and so on.

  All these sources of conflict remain in a stumbling  balance  today, and
the Internet, so far, remains in a thrivingly anarchical  condition.   Once
upon a time, the NSFnet's high-speed, high-capacity  lines were  known as
the "Internet Backbone," and their owners could  rather lord it over the
rest of the Internet;  but today there are  "backbones" in Canada, Japan,
and Europe, and even privately owned  commercial Internet backbones
specially created for carrying business
 traffic.  Today, even privately  owned desktop computers can become
Internet nodes.  You can carry one under your arm.  Soon, perhaps, on  your
wrist.

  But what does one *do* with the Internet?  Four things,  basically:  mail,
discussion groups, long-distance computing, and file  transfers.

  Internet mail is "e-mail," electronic mail, faster by several  orders of
magnitude than the US Mail, which is scornfully known by  Internet regulars
as "snailmail."  Internet mail is somewhat like fax.  It's electronic text.
But you don't have to pay for it  (at least not  directly),  and it's global
in scope.   E-mail can also send software and  certain forms of compressed
digital imagery.  New forms of mail are in the works.

  The discussion groups, or "newsgroups," are a world of their  own.   This
world of news, debate and argument is generally known as  "USENET. "  USENET
is, in point of fact, quite different from the  Internet.   USENET is rather
like an enormous billowing crowd of  gossipy, news-hungry people, wandering
in and through  the  Internet on their way to various private backyard
barbecues.  USENET is not so much a physical network as a set of social
conventions.    In any case, at the moment there are some 2,500  separate
newsgroups on USENET, and their discussions generate about  7 million words
of typed commentary every single day.   Naturally
 there is a vast amount of talk about computers on USENET, but the  variety
of subjects discussed is enormous, and it's growing larger all  the time.
USENET also distributes various free electronic journals and  publications.

  Both netnews and e-mail are very widely available, even  outside the
high-speed core of the Internet itself.    News and e-mail  are easily
available over common phone-lines, from Internet fringe- realms like BITnet,
UUCP and Fidonet.   The last two Internet services,  long-distance computing
and file transfer, require what is known as  "direct Internet access" --
using TCP/IP.

  Long-distance computing was an original inspiration for ARPANET and is
still a very useful service, at least for some. Programmers can maintain
accounts on distant, powerful computers, run programs there or write their
own.  Scientists can make  use of  powerful supercomputers a continent away.
Libraries offer their  electronic card catalogs for free search.   Enormous
CD-ROM catalogs  are increasingly available through this service.  And there
are
 fantastic amounts of free software available.

  File transfers allow Internet users to access remote machines and retrieve
programs or text.    Many Internet computers -- some  two thousand of them,
so far -- allow any person to access them  anonymously, and to simply copy
their public files, free of charge.  This is no small deal, since entire
books can be transferred through  direct Internet access in a matter of
minutes.  Today, in 1992, there  are over a million such public files
available to anyone who asks for  them (and many more millions of files are
available to people with  accounts).   Internet file-transfers  are becoming
a new form of  publishing, in which the reader simply electronically copies
the work  on demand, in any quantity he or she wants, for free.   New
Internet  programs, such as "archie," "gopher," and "WAIS," have been
developed to catalog  and explore these enormous archives of  material.

  The headless, anarchic, million-limbed Internet is spreading like
bread-mold.   Any computer of sufficient power is a potential spore  for the
Internet, and today such  computers sell for less than $2,000  and are in
the hands of people all over the world.    ARPA's network,  designed to
assure control of  a ravaged society after a nuclear  holocaust, has been
superceded by its mutant child the Internet,  which is  thoroughly out of
control, and spreading exponentially  through the post-Cold War electronic
global village.   The spread of  the Internet in the 90s resembles the
spread of personal  computing in the 1970s, though it is even faster and
perhaps more  important.   More important, perhaps, because it may give
those  personal computers a means of cheap, easy storage and access that is
truly planetary in scale.

  The future of the Internet bids fair to be bigger and exponentially
faster.  Commercialization of the Internet is a very hot  topic today, with
every manner of wild new commercial information- service promised.  The
federal government, pleased with an unsought
 success, is also still  very much in the act.  NREN, the National Research
and Education Network, was approved by the US Congress in fall  1991, as a
five-year, $2 billion project to upgrade the Internet  "backbone."  NREN
will be some fifty times faster than the fastest  network available today,
allowing the electronic transfer of the entire  Encyclopedia Britannica in
one hot second.    Computer networks  worldwide will feature 3-D animated
graphics, radio and cellular
 phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice, and high-
definition television.   A multimedia global circus!

  Or so it's hoped  -- and planned.   The real Internet of the  future may
bear very little resemblance to today's plans.   Planning  has never seemed
to have much to do with the seething, fungal  development of the Internet.
After all, today's Internet bears  little resemblance to those original grim
plans for RAND's post- holocaust command grid.   It's a fine and happy
irony.

  How does one get access to the Internet?   Well -- if you don't  have a
computer and a modem, get one.   Your computer can act as a  terminal, and
you can use an ordinary telephone line to connect to an  Internet-linked
machine.  These slower and simpler adjuncts to the  Internet can provide you
with the netnews discussion groups and  your own e-mail address.  These are
services worth having -- though  if you only have mail and news, you're not
actually "on the Internet"  proper.

  If you're on a campus, your university may have direct  "dedicated access"
to high-speed Internet TCP/IP lines.  Apply for an  Internet account on a
dedicated campus machine, and you may be able to get those hot-dog
long-distance computing and file-transfer  functions. Some cities, such as
Cleveland, supply "freenet"  community access.  Businesses increasingly have
Internet access, and  are willing to sell it to subscribers.  The standard
fee is about $40 a
 month -- about the same as TV cable service.

  As the Nineties proceed, finding a link to the Internet will  become much
cheaper and easier.  Its ease of use will also improve,  which is fine news,
for the savage UNIX interface of TCP/IP leaves plenty of room for
advancements in user-friendliness.  Learning the Internet now, or at least
learning about it, is wise.  By the turn of the century, "network literacy,"
like "computer literacy"  before it,  will be forcing itself into the  very
texture of your life.