A computer history....OT
Denise Rogers
gypsycaine at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 10 05:34:14 UTC 2000
No: HPFGUIDX 3098
WOW! Thanks!
----- Original Message -----
From: Caius Marcius
To: HPforGrownups at egroups.com
Sent: Monday, October 09, 2000 11:16 PM
Subject: Re: [HPforGrownups] Re: Voldemort as History
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.
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