A (rather long) History of the Internet

Origin of the Internet

1957

In 1957 the so called cold war was at its maximum. The USSR launched the first satellite ever launched from earth. Sputnik as the satellite was called, earned a huge amount of praise, because the mankind was now able to build artificial satellites. But at the same time Sputnik caused huge waves of fear all over the USA, because his orbit crossed the territory of the USA and at this time no one was able to do anything against that. Of course there was another kind o f fear too, because if the USSR could construct a satellite flying over the USA doing nothing but beeping, why shouldn’t the be able to build a spy satellite or even more dangerous an orbital nuclear bomb.

In response of this threat, the USA formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958 in order to prevent further surprises by the USSR and to establish a permanent lead in science and technology.

1962

At ARPA J.C.R. Licklider invented a network which was pretty much like the Internet of today. Of course since then many technically things have changed, but the main idea still remained the same. He had thought of a set of computers(all over the world) which are interconnected, and through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any location. While Licklider was at ARPA (The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) changed its name to Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1971, then back to ARPA in 1993, and back to DARPA in 1996. I refer to DARPA the current name.) he convinced his superiors at DARPA of the importance and usefulness of his networking concept. So he became the first head of the computer research program there.

1964

Nearly at the same time, in 1964, Leonard Kleinrock invented his so called packing switching theory. He was also able to convince his superior Lawrence Roberts of the benefit of his system. This was one major step in the creation of a network, which will, as I’ll show later, lead directly to the future ARPANET.

One of the other very important steps into this direction was to finally make computer “talk” together.

What is packet switching?

Packet Switching means that the data which should be sent through the line, is broken into smaller pieces (the packets). So instead of the huge file this smaller pieces can be sent through the line. The disadvantage of transmitting the whole file at the same time was, that the target computer has to receive the whole file at once. So it wasn’t able to send data, while receiving a file. So for example, computer B has to stop sending files through the same line until computer A has finished sending.

With packet switching the target computer (B) is able to send files while retrieving one through the same line, so the computer isn’t blocked any longer during a file transfer.

An other advantage of packet switching is that each packet has an “address” which states where the targeted computer is located. Thanks to that information the packets can be send without knowing the lines the packet needs to take(The packet is acting like a letter, you needn’t to know which streets it has to use, just the address of the recipient.). The benefit comes, if for example a packet needs to go from host A to host B and the direct line between host A and B is blocked, the packet can be diverted and find its way through the host C and D to B. This wasn’t possible with the former transmission system.

1965

This key step was made by T. Merrill and Roberts, who managed to connect the TX-2 computer at the MIT Lincoln Lab to the AN/FSQ-32 at System Development Corporation (Santa Monica, California), using only a low speed dial-up telephone line(1200bps). This was the first (however small) wide-area computer network(WAN) ever built. The main result of this experiment was that time shared computers could work together, using the network to run programs and retrieving data as necessary on a remote computer(client). But they also found out that an ordinary phone line was totally inadequate for this, because it was much too slow.

So they had to find something to raise the connection speed, which led finally to the invention of the Packet switchers.

1967

After that experiment Roberts went back to DARPA and developed his computer network concept. In 1967 he finished this plan for the future “ARPANET”. As I told before, the plan for the ARPANET was the descendant of the earlier plan of Leonard Kleinrocks network. Although not the whole plan from Kleinrock was taken(The ARPANET was only designed to be a small network, and not like in Kleinrocks paper world wide.)most of Kleinrocks concept was used in Roberts plan.

1968

So in August 1968 the constructionof the ARPANET started. After a few economic and structural refinements there was just one key component missing. These were the packet switches or Interface Message Processors (IMP’s) as they were called. Finally a team consisting of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) got the order to design them. After that a there was the question where to build up the first node(a server in the network which rules the traffic). Finally the first node on the ARPANET was built at the Network Measurement Centre at UCLA, because this centre was headed by Kleinrock. Kleinrock was the first man who envisioned packet switching and thanks to this he was the man who made the building of an huge network possible. To honour him for his thoughts the most important component of the ARPANET was installed at his research centre.

1969

In September 1969 after the first IMP had been installed by the BBN team at UCLA, the network was switched on and the first host computer was connected. It worked well, and after a short time the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) provided a second node. At this time the SRI took over important functions like maintaining tables of host names.

This was important because you since nowadays you need to know the exact address of a computer to send him a file or message. But at this early stage (before the invention of TCP and IP – I’ll refer to them later) there was no architectural design of the ARPANET, that means if that the host computers were addressed in an arbitrary way.

Just imagine an village where the houses were randomly marked an numbered, and you want to find e.g. number 5. It is not enough to find number 4, because to one next to number 4 might be number 36. So you will need to look after in a complete plan of the village just to find one specific house.

This situation is comparable to the situation in the first years of the ARPANET. There you knew the address of a host but not where the host was situated. And the location of the host was written down in these tables.

One month after the SRI was connected to the ARPANET the first host-to-host message was sent from Kleinrock’s laboratory to SRI.

Shortly after that two more nodes were added, trying to investigate methods for display of mathematical functions and to investigate methods of 3-D representations over the net.

So by the end of 1969 the ARPANET consisted of four host computers.

Even at this early stage, it should be noted that networking research incorporated both:

• The work on the underlying network and
• the work on how to utilize the network.

This tradition continues to this day.

Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the following years, and work proceeded on completing a functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and other network software.

1970

In December 1970 the Network Working Group (NWG) finished the first ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol. This protocol was called Network Control Protocol (NCP). With this protocol it was now possible to begin to develop applications, because before it was far more complicated to send data through the net.

1972

In 1972 was the first public demonstration of this new network technology. This happened at the International Computer Communication Conference. It was also in 1972 that electronic mail was invented. Right from the beginning the so called email was a total success. The first software to send and read emails was written because the developers of the ARPANET needed and fast and easy coordination mechanism. After a few months this software was refined and expanded by adding the possibility to selectively read, file, forward and respond to messages. From there the email began to be the first and the largest network application for over a decade. This harbinger indicated the kind of activities all over the World Wide Web (WWW) we are experiencing today, namely the enormous growth of all kinds of “people-to-people” traffic.

The Initial Internetting Concepts

It happened that the original ARPANET grew into the Internet. At first the Internet was only a idea to make independent networks working together. It began with the ARPANET, because it was the pioneering packet switching network, but soon other networks could be included as well. Such as packet satellite networks, ground-based packet radio networks and all the other kinds of possible networks. This was possible, because the Internet is based on an underlying technical idea, the open architecture networking. This means that all the rather arbitrary individual networks weren’t dictated by a particular architecture(design), but rather that the networks could be chosen individually by each provider (A provider links the small individual networks and the whole internet together ) and be made to interwork with all the other networks. This happens through a so called meta-level, an underlying “Internetworking Architecture”.

Until that time(in the 1960ies) there was just one way to interconnect different networks or different computers. This was the way of the traditional circuit switching method where networks would interconnect at the circuit level. This means that individual bits were transmitted along a portion between a pair of end locations ( See Packet Switching).

As I told before Kleinrock had shown in 1961 that packet switching was the more efficient switching method. With packet switching special arrangements and special way of interconnection between different networks were possible. Of course there had been ways to interconnect different networks before (I don’t only mean networks which are situated at different locations, but as well networks, which were using different technologies to interconnect.) but these required that the networks were used as a component of the other, and not acting as a simple peer of the other in offering end-to-end service, as it is possible in an open architecture network.

In an open architecture network the individual networks can be separately designed and developed and each may have there own way to interconnect with host and providers. Each network can be designed in accordance with the specific environment and user requirements of that network. There are generally no constraints on the types of network that can be included or on their geographic scope, although certain pragmatic considerations will dictate what makes sense to offer. But because of the open architecture it is now possible to interconnect even the most different networks easily.

The birth of TCP/IP

This idea of so called open-architecture networking was first introduced by Kahn shortly after having arrived at DARPA in 1972. His work was originally part of another networking program the packet radio program, but subsequently became a separate program in its own right.

This program was called “Internetting”.

It was important to make the packet radio system reliable, and to do this, a reliable end-to-end protocol was needed, which could maintain communication even in face of jamming and other radio interference, or withstand intermittent blackout such as caused by being in a tunnel or blocked by the local terrain. First Kahn developed the protocol only locally to the packet radio network and continued to use NCP.

But, however the NCP protocol did not have the abilities necessary for a huge network, like the Internet. It did not have the ability to address networks (and computers) and thus some change to NCP would have been be required. (The assumption was that the ARPANET was not changeable in this regard). Furthermore the NCP didn’t have any end-to-end host error protocol. That means that the protocol didn’t check the sent packets on errors, and so a corrupt packet(damaged) could stop the whole program. The NCP was designed in this way, because the ARPANET was thought to be a very reliable network and therefore there was no error control required.

Thus, Kahn decided to develop a new version of the protocol which could meet all the needs of an open-architecture network environment.

This protocol was called the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP).

Of course there have been a few advancements to this protocol, but basically it is the same protocol which has been used since today as a main Internet and network protocol.

While NCP tended to act like a device driver, the new protocol was more like a communications protocol.

Four ground rules were critical to Kahn’s early thinking:

1. Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.
2. Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn’t make it to the final destination, it would shortly be retransmitted from the source.
3. Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.
4. There would be no global control at the operations level.

Other key issues that needed to be addressed were:

• Algorithms to prevent lost packets from permanently disabling communications and enabling them to be successfully retransmitted from the source.
• Providing for host to host “pipelining” so that multiple packets could be enroute from source to destination at the discretion of the participating hosts, if the intermediate networks allowed it.
• Gateway functions to allow it to forward packets appropriately. This included interpreting IP headers for routing, handling interfaces, breaking packets into smaller pieces if necessary, etc.
• The need for end-end checksums, reassembly of packets from fragments and detection of duplicates, if any.
• The need for global addressing
• Techniques for host to host flow control.
• Interfacing with the various operating systems
• There were also other concerns, such as implementation efficiency, internetwork performance, but these were secondary considerations at first.

Kahn realized it would be necessary to learn the implementation details of each operating system to have a chance to embed any new protocols in an efficient way.

Therefore, in the spring of 1973, after starting his internetting effort, he asked Vint Cerf (then at Stanford) to work with him on a detailed design of the protocol.

Cerf had been involved in the original NCP design and development and so he already had the knowledge about interfacing to existing operating systems and the problems this could cause.

So equipped with Kahn’s architectural approach to the communications side and with Cerf’s NCP experience, they teamed up to spell out the details of what became TCP/IP.

The give and take was highly productive and the first written version of the resulting approach was distributed at a special meeting of the International Network Working Group (INWG) in September 1973. Cerf had been invited to chair this group and used the occasion to hold a meeting of INWG members who were heavily represented at the Sussex Conference.

Some basic approaches emerged from this collaboration between Kahn and Cerf:

Their work was highly effective and they quickly managed to finish and to present the first version of TCP at a meeting of the International Network Working Group (INWG) in September 1973.

Some of the basic approaches:

• Communication between two processes would logically consist of a very long stream of bytes (they called them octets). The position of any octet in the stream would be used to identify it.
• Flow control would be done by using sliding windows and acknowledgments (acks). The destination could select when to acknowledge and each ack returned would be cumulative for all packets received to that point.
• It was left open how the source and destination would agree on the parameters of the windowing to be used. Defaults were used initially.
• Although Ethernet was under development at Xerox PARC at that time, the proliferation of LANs were not envisioned at the time, much less PCs and workstations. The original models were national level networks like ARPANET of which only a relatively small number were expected to exist. Thus a 32 bit IP address was used of which the first 8 bits signified the network and the remaining 24 bits designated the host on that network. This assumption, that only 256 (!) networks would be sufficient for the foreseeable future, was clearly in need of reconsideration when LANs began to appear in the late 1970s.

The split from TCP into TCP/IP

The original ideas of Cerf and Kahn described one protocol, called TCP, which provided all the transport and forwarding services in the Internet. It was also intended that the TCP should support a range of transport services.

However, the initial effort to implement TCP resulted in a version that only allowed to work with virtual circuits. This model worked fine for file transfer and remote login applications, but some of the early work on advanced network applications, in particular packet voice in the 1970s, made clear that in some cases packet losses should not be corrected by TCP, but should be left to the application to deal with.

This led to a reorganization of the original TCP into two protocols, the simple IP which provided only for addressing and forwarding of individual packets, and the separate TCP, which was concerned with service features such as flow control and recovery from lost packets. For those applications that did not want the services of TCP, an alternative called the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) was added in order to provide direct access to the basic service of IP.

Resource sharing

The major motivation for the ARPANET and as well for the Internet was resource sharing (For example allowing users to access the time sharing systems attached to the ARPANET, like Mainframe or other supercomputers).

Connecting these two together was far more economical than duplicating these very expensive computers. However, while file transfer and remote login were very important applications, but email has probably had the most significant impact of the innovations from that time. Email provided a new model of how people could communicate with each other, and changed the nature of collaboration, first in the building of the Internet itself and later for much of society.

There were other applications proposed in the early days of the Internet, like packet based voice communication (The precursor of Internet telephony. It is now becoming more and more important to phone someone through the Internet without using a normal phone line.), various models of file, or disk sharing.

A major key concept of the Internet is that it was not designed for just one application, but as a general infrastructure on which new applications could be conceived, as it was illustrated later by the emergence of the World Wide Web. It is the nature of the service provided by TCP and IP that makes this possible.

Proving the Ideas

This was the beginning of long term experimentation and development to evolve and mature the Internet concepts and technology. Beginning with the first three networks (ARPANET, Packet Radio, and Packet Satellite) and their initial research communities, the experimental environment has grown to incorporate essentially every form of network and a very broad-based research and development community. With each expansion has come new challenges.

The early implementations of TCP were done for large time sharing systems such as Tenex and TOPS 20.

A group of scientists at Stanford produced a detailed specification of TCP and within a year independent implementations of TCP emerged which were able to cooperate.

This was the beginning of a period of experimentation and development. It first started with the initial three networks(ARPANET, Packet Radio, and Packet Satellite) and their initial research communities, but it has quickly grown to incorporate nearly every different form of network and a very broad-based research and development community. With each expansion there have come new challenges.

For example the early implementation of TCP for large time sharing systems such as Tenex and TOPS 20.

At this time the first personal computers appeared and it was first thought that TCP was too complex to run on a personal computer, because before this time the protocol was only run on large computer systems, but it was quickly shown that a compact and simple implementation of TCP was possible.

That implementation was fully compatible with other TCP’s, and showed that workstations, as well as large time-sharing systems, could be a part of the Internet.

The widespread development of LANS, PCs and workstations in the 1980s allowed the Internet to flourish. The Ethernet technology(The network technology for personal Computers) is now probably the dominant network technology in the Internet and PCs and workstations are the dominant computers.

This change from having a few networks with a modest number of time-shared hosts (the original ARPANET model) to having many networks(with a lot of personal computers), resulted in a number of new concepts and changes to the underlying technology.

First, it resulted in the definition of three network classes (A, B, and C) to accommodate the range of networks.

Class A represented large national scale networks (small number of networks with large numbers of hosts);

Class B represented regional scale networks; and

Class C represented local area networks (large number of networks with relatively few hosts).

The increasing size and scale of the Internet made it necessary to change a few issues. The number of sites made it impossible to remember the numeric addresses. With only a few addresses it was possible to maintain a list with all the names and numbers of Websites, but with the growing of the Internet and the growing number of independently managed networks(LAN) this became impossible. To solve that problem, to the numeric addresses names were associated. The so called Domain Name System. Since then it is possible to enter the numeric address or the name of the site(e.g. www.microsoft.com instead of 207.46.230.218).

Furthermore, the increased size of the Internet also challenged the capabilities of the routers. In the first few years there was a single algorithm for routing, which was implemented by all the routers in the Internet. But as the number of networks, hosts, providers.. increased even further, this design couldn’t be maintained any longer. Therefore it was replaced by a hierarchical model of routing, with an Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) used inside each region of the Internet, and an Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) used to tie the regions together.

This design permitted different regions to use a different IGP, so that different requirements for cost, rapid reconfiguration, robustness and scale could be accommodated. Not only the routing algorithm, but the size of the addressing tables, stressed the capacity of the routers. New approaches for address aggregation, in particular classless inter-domain routing (CIDR), have recently been introduced to control the size of router tables.

One of the most important challenges was the transition of the ARPANET host protocol from NCP to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. This was a “flag-day” style transition, because it required all hosts to convert simultaneously or to be left behind having to communicate via rather ad-hoc mechanisms. This transition was carefully planned within the community over several years, before it actually took place and so it went surprisingly smoothly. Of course this transition resulted in a distribution of buttons saying

“I survived the TCP/IP transition”.

Military and non military use

TCP/IP was even used as a defence standard in 1980. This led directly to the splitting between military and non military communities, because it enabled the sharing of the DARPA Internet technology base.

Until 1983 the ARPANET was used by a huge number of defence and military operational organizations. Then the transition of the ARPANET from NCP to TCP/IP in 1983 permitted the splitting of the ARPANET into a MILNET supporting operational requirements of the military forces in the USA and an ARPANET supporting research and later economic needs.

Thus, two years later, in 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology, which supported a broad community of researchers and developers, and it was now was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications. Electronic mail was being used broadly across several communities, often with different systems, but thanks to packet switching these different mail systems could be used together, presenting the utility of broad based electronic communications between people.

Transition to Widespread Infrastructure

When the Internet and its technology got widely used by many computer researchers, other kinds of networks and other networking technologies were getting more and more interesting.

The usefulness of the ARPANET was quickly shown, especially the usefulness of email, and therefore other networks were developed.

All these early networks had something in common. They were purpose built. That means that they were intended for, and unfortunable largely restricted to, closed communities of peoples and therefore there was no reason for the individual networks to be compatible and, indeed, they largely were not. This changed when the U.S. NSFNET program announced the intent to

support the entire higher education community. Indeed, a condition for a U.S. university to receive NSF funding for an Internet connection was that “… the connection must be made available to ALL qualified users on campus.”

In 1985 the NSF made a critical decision – that TCP/IP would be mandatory for the NSFNET program. A year later the NSF recognised the need for a wide area networking infrastructure to support the general academic and research communities, along with the need to develop a strategy for establishing such infrastructure on a basis which should be independent of direct federal funding. Their policies and strategies were adopted to achieve that.

The NSF also elected to support DARPA’s existing Internet organizational infrastructure(The infrastructure of the ARPANET), hierarchically arranged under the Internet Activities Board (IAB). In addition to the selection of TCP/IP for the NSFNET program, Federal agencies made several other policy decisions which shaped and changed the future Internet of today:

• Federal agencies shared the cost of common infrastructure, such as trans-oceanic circuits. They also supported “managed interconnection points” for interagency traffic; the Federal Internet Exchanges (FIX-E and FIX-W) built for this purpose served as models for the Network Access Points and “*IX” facilities that are prominent features of today’s Internet architecture.
• To coordinate this sharing, the Federal Networking Council was formed. The FNC also cooperated with other international organizations, such as RARE in Europe, through the Coordinating Committee on Intercontinental Research Networking (CCIRN), to coordinate Internet support of the research community worldwide.
• Subsequently, in a similar mode, the NSF encouraged its regional (academic) networks to seek commercial, non-academic customers, expand their facilities to serve them, and exploit the resulting economies of scale to lower subscription costs for all.
• On the NSFNET Backbone – the national-scale segment of the NSFNET – NSF enforced an “Acceptable Use Policy” (AUP) which prohibited Backbone usage for purposes “not in support of Research and Education.” The predictable (and intended) result of encouraging commercial network traffic at the local and regional level, while denying its access to national-scale transport, was to stimulate the emergence and/or growth of “private”, competitive, long-haul networks. This process of privately-financed augmentation for commercial uses was thrashed out starting in 1988 in a series of NSF-initiated conferences at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on “The Commercialisation and Privatisation of the Internet” – and on the “com-priv” list on the net itself.
• In 1988, a National Research Council committee produced a report titled “Towards a National Research Network”. This report was influential on former Senator Al Gore, and so it ushered in high speed networks that laid the networking foundation for the future information superhighway.
• In 1994, a National Research Council report entitled “Realizing The Information Future: The Internet and Beyond” was released. This report was the document in which a blueprint for the evolution of the information superhighway was articulated and which has had a lasting affect on the way to think about its evolution. It anticipated the critical issues of intellectual property rights, ethics, pricing, education, architecture and regulation for the Internet.
• NSF’s privatisation policy culminated in April, 1995, with the refunding of the NSFNET Backbone. The funds thereby recovered were (competitively) redistributed to regional networks to buy national-scale Internet connectivity from the now numerous, private, long-haul networks.

When the backbone of the ARPANET (and of the later Internet) started its work it provided six nodes with 56kbps links, and 8 ½ year later 21 nodes with multiple 45 mbps links. This enormous growth didn’t stop at the capacity of the routers and so in it’s 8 and a ½ year lifetime it had seen the Internet grow to over 50,000 networks on all seven continents and outer space, with approximately 29,000 networks in the United States.

The weight of the NSFNET program’s ecumenism and funding ($200 million from 1986 to 1995) was so huge – and the quality of the protocols themselves – that by 1990 when the ARPANET itself was finally decommissioned, TCP/IP had supplanted or marginalized most other wide-area computer network protocols worldwide. And therefore IP was well on its way to becoming the basis for the Global Information Infrastructure.

1990 when the ARPANET was officially decommissioned was the birth of the Internet. The former ARPANET was now called Internet(The parts of the network which have been between universities and schools have earlier been called Internet.).

The Role of Documentation

Very important for the rapid growth of the Internet has been the free and open access to the basic documents, especially the specifications of the protocols.

In the beginnings of the ARPANET and the Internet in the university research community the academic tradition of open publication of ideas and results was admired and because of this supported and promoted. But actually the normal cycle of traditional academic publication(to publish books or to hold meetings on several themes) was too formal and too slow for the dynamic exchange of ideas which was essential to creating networks in a so short time.

In 1969 this major disadvantage was removed by establishing a series of notes called the Request for Comments (or RFC). These were short notes or memos and were intended to be an informal and therefore a fast distribution way to share ideas with other network researchers(RFC’s have never been used for any other academic research.).

At first the RFC’s were printed on paper and distributed via mail. As the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) came into use, the RFC’s were upgraded and since then prepared as online files and accessed via FTP. Now, of course, the RFC’s are easily accessed via the World Wide Web at dozens of sites around the world.

The effect of the RFC’s was to create a positive feedback loop, with ideas or proposals presented in one RFC dealing with ideas presented in another RFC, and so on. When some consensus (or a least a consistent set of ideas) had come together a specification document would be prepared. Such a specification would then be used as the base for implementations by the various research teams.

Over time, the RFC’s have become more focused on protocol standards (the “official” specifications), though there are still informational RFC’s that describe alternate approaches, or provide background information on protocols or engineering issues. The RFC’s are now viewed as the “documents of record” in the Internet engineering and standards community.

The open access to the RFC’s promotes the growth of the Internet because it allows the actual specifications to be used for examples in college classes and by entrepreneurs developing new systems.

Email has been a significant factor in all areas of the Internet, and that is certainly true in the development of protocol specifications, technical standards, and Internet engineering. The very early RFC’s often presented a set of ideas developed by the researchers at one location to the rest of the community. But after email came into use, that changed, and RFC’s were presented by joint authors with common view independent of their locations.

The use of specialized email mailing lists has been long used in the development of protocol specifications, and continues to be an important tool till nowadays.

For example:

The IETF now has in excess of 75 working groups, each working on a different aspect of Internet engineering. Each of these working groups has a mailing list to discuss one or more draft documents under development. When a consensus is reached on a draft document it may be distributed as an RFC.

As the current rapid expansion of the Internet is fuelled by the realization of its capability to promote information sharing, we should understand that the network’s first role in information sharing, was sharing the information about it’s own design and operation through the RFC documents. This unique method for evolving new capabilities in the network will continue to be critical to future evolution of the Internet.

Formation of the Broad Community

The Internet is primary a collection of communities and a collection of technologies, and consequently largely attributable to a few important facts. It must satisfy the basic community needs and as well utilize the community in an effective way to help the creation of new infrastructure. This need has a long history beginning with the early ARPANET. At the era of the early ARPANET the researchers worked as a close community to accomplish the initial specifications of packet switching technology.

Because of the unique role that ARPANET played as an infrastructure supporting the various research programs, the Network Working Group changed its name into Internet Working Group.

In the late 1970’s, Vint Cerf, the manager of the Internet Program at DARPA, recognized that the growth of the Internet was accompanied by a growth in the size of the interested research community and as a result by an increased need for coordination mechanisms. So he formed several agencies an International Cooperation Board (ICB), to coordinate activities with some cooperating European countries and then an Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB). The ICCB was an important and influent body which assisted Cerf in managing the growing Internet activity.

In 1983 DARPA recognized that the enormous size and rate of growing demanded a restructuring of the whole coordination body. To be able to handle with the continuing growth the ICCB was disbanded and instead of the ICCB a new structure of Task Forces was formed. These Task Forces were focused on particular areas of the technology (e.g. routers, end-to-end protocols, etc.). Furthermore the Internet Activities Board (IAB) was formed.

By 1985 there happened to be an enormous growth in the more practical (engineering) side of the Internet. It was found out that this growth was possible, according to an explosion in the size and complexity of the IETF meetings, and so it was tried to create substructure to the IETF in the form of working groups.

Of course this growth was complemented by a major development in the community. DARPA was no longer the only major player in the funding of the Internet. In addition to NSFNET and the various US and international government-funded activities, interest in the commercial sector was beginning to grow.

This interest in the commercial sector continued to grow and resulted in even further substructure within both the IAB and IETF. The IETF now arranged the Working Groups into Areas, and designated Area Directors. Additionally Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) was formed of the Area Directors. IAB recognized the increasing importance of the IETF early, and changed the standards to recognize the IESG as the major review body for standards.

The IAB itself was also restructured so that the rest of the Task Forces (other than the IETF) were combined into an Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), with the old task forces renamed simply to research groups.

The commercial sector started to grow in the early 1980’s and continued to this day. During that time, the Internet grew beyond its mainly research roots to include both a broad user community and increased commercial activity.

Therefore an increased attention was paid to making the process open and fair. This coupled with a recognized need for community support of the Internet and ultimately led to the formation of the Internet Society in 1991.

In 1992, yet another reorganization took place.

The Internet Activities Board was re-organized and re-named to the Internet Architecture Board, which was now operating under the auspices of the Internet Society.

A more tense relationship was defined between the new IAB and IESG, with the IETF and IESG taking larger responsibility for the approval of standards. In due course, a cooperative and mutually supportive relationship was formed between the IAB, IETF, and Internet Society, with the Internet Society taking on as a goal the provision of service and other measures which would facilitate the work of the IETF.

The recent development and deployment of the World Wide Web has brought a new community with it. Although many of the people working on the WWW have not thought of themselves as primarily network researchers and developers.

So a new coordination organization had to be formed, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In the beginning this was led from MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. The W3C has taken on the responsibility for evolving the various protocols and standards associated with the Web.

Thus, through the over two decades of Internet activity, we have seen a steady evolution of organizational structures designed to support and facilitate an ever-increasing community working collaboratively on Internet issues.

Commercialisation of the Technology

Well, the so called commercialisation of the Internet wasn’t limited to the development of competitive, private network services. There has always been the development of commercial products which implemented the Internet technology.

In the early 1980’s something curios happened. Dozens of vendors included TCP/IP into their products, because they saw a new market for that new approach in networking.

Unfortunately they hardly knew anything about how the technology was supposed to work and how the customers planned to use this new approach. They simply saw it as a nuisance add-on that had to be glued on to their own networking solutions(e.g.: SNA, DECNet, Netware, NetBios). And of course, no one knew what to do or how to work with this add-on.

The Department of Defence(DoD) had simply mandated the use of TCP/IP in many of its purchases but didn’t offer help to the vendors regarding how to build useful TCP/IP products.

In 1985 Dan Lynch found out about this curiosity. He considered this as a lack of information and appropriate training, so in cooperation with the IAB he arranged a workshop. This was a three day workshop for ALL vendors to learn about how TCP/IP worked and what it still could not do well. The speakers came mostly from the DARPA research community who had both developed these protocols and used them in daily work. This workshop was a total success. About 250 vendors from all over the country came to listen to about 50 inventors and experimenters. The result was a very productive one. On one side the vendors were amazed to find that the inventors were so open about the way things worked (and what still did not work) and on the other side the inventors were pleased to listen to new problems that they had not considered, but which were being discovered by the vendors in the field.

According to that successful meeting, a two way discussion was formed that has lasted for over a decade.

Both parties went to work and after more than two years full of conferences, tutorials, design meetings and workshops, a meeting was announced that invited all the vendors whose products used and implemented TCP/IP to come together in one room for three days to show off how well these products were able to work together and also to be run over the Internet.

This was called Interop trade show. And in September 1988 the first Interop trade show took place. More than 50 companies and 5000 engineers from potential customer organizations came to see if it all did work as it was promised.

It did.

Why? Because the vendors worked extremely hard to ensure that everyone’s products was fully co operable with all of the other products – even with those of their competitors. The Interop trade show has grown immensely since then and today it is held in 7 locations around the world simultaneous each year to an audience of over 250,000 people who come to learn which products work with each other in a seamless manner, learn about the latest products, and discuss the latest technology.

At the same time when the commercialisation efforts were made by the Interop activities the vendors began to attend the IETF meetings that were held 3 or 4 times a year to discuss new ideas for extensions of the TCP/IP protocol suite. First these meetings started with a few hundred attendees mostly from academia these number was quickly increased and now these meetings now often exceeds a thousand attendees, mostly from the vendor community. This self-selected group evolves the TCP/IP suite in a equally cooperative manner. The reason it is so useful is that it is comprised of all stakeholders: researchers, end users and vendors. Network management provides an excellent example what can be done of the interplay between the research and commercial communities.

In the beginning of the Internet, the main focus was on defining and implementing protocols that achieved interoperation.

But as the network grew larger, it became clear that sometimes ad hoc procedures were used to manage the network and that these would not scale. So manual configuration of tables was replaced by distributed automated algorithms, and better tools were devised to isolate faults.

In 1987 it became clear that a protocol was needed that would permit the elements of the network, such as the routers, which could be remotely managed in a uniform way. Several protocols for this purpose were proposed, including the Simple Network Management Protocol or SNMP (designed, as its name would suggest, for simplicity, and derived from an earlier proposal called SGMP) , HEMS (a more complex design from the research community) and CMIP (from the OSI community). A series of meeting led to the decisions that HEMS would be withdrawn as a candidate for standardization, in order to help resolve the contention, but that work on both SNMP and CMIP would go forward as well, using the idea that the SNMP could be a more near-term solution and CMIP a longer-term approach. The market could choose the one it found more suitable. SNMP is now used almost universally for network based management.

During the past few years a new phase of commercialisation has been born. Originally, commercial efforts mainly comprised vendors providing the basic networking products, and service providers which offered the connectivity and basic Internet services.

But now the Internet has become almost a basic service, and a lot of attention has been passed on the use of this global information infrastructure for support of other commercial services. This has been tremendously accelerated by the widespread and rapid adoption of browsers and the World Wide Web technology, which allowed users easy access to any information linked situated anywhere at the globe. Products are now available to facilitate the gaining of that information and many of the latest developments in technology have been aimed at providing an improved and sophisticated information services on top of the basic Internet data communications.

The Recent Past

On October 24, 1995, the FNC generally passed a resolution defining the term Internet. This definition was developed in consultation with members of the internet and intellectual property rights communities.

RESOLUTION: The Federal Networking Council (FNC) agrees that the following language reflects our definition of the term “Internet”. “Internet” refers to the global information system that -

(i) is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons;

(ii)                is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and

(iii)               provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein.

The Internet has changed much in the two decades since it came into existence. It was created in the era of time-sharing, but has survived into the era of personal computers, client-server and peer-to-peer computing, and the network computer. It was designed before had ever LANs existed, but it was able to accommodate that new network technology. It was envisioned as supporting a range of functions from file sharing and remote login to resource sharing and collaboration, and has spawned electronic mail and more recently the World Wide Web.

But most important, it started as the creation of a small group of enthusiastic researchers, and has turned out to be a commercial success with nowadays gets billions of dollars of annual investment.

One should not conclude that the Internet has now finished changing. The Internet, although a network in name and geography, is a creature of the computer, not the traditional network of the telephone or even the television industry. It will, indeed it must, continue to change and evolve at the speed of the computer industry, because if it doesn’t it won’t survive in our fast living world. We must now change it to provide such new services as real time data transport, in order to support, just to mention an example, audio and video streams. The availability of omnipresent networking (the Internet) along with powerful inexpensive computing and communications in portable form (laptop computers, two-way pagers, cellular phones), is making possible a new concept of mobile computing and communications.

This evolution will bring us new applications – like Internet telephony and, slightly further out, Internet television.

The Internet is changing to permit more sophisticated forms of pricing and cost recovery, a perhaps painful requirement in this commercial world. It is changing to accommodate yet another generation of underlying network technologies with different characteristics and requirements, from broadband cable networks to satellites. New modes of access and new forms of service will spawn new applications, which in turn will drive further evolution of the Net itself.

One of the most pressing questions for the future of the Internet is not, how the technology will change, but how the process of change and evolution itself will be managed.

The architecture of the Internet has always been driven by a core group of designers, but the form of that group has changed as the number of interested parties has grown.

With the success of the Internet a large number of stakeholders with an economic and as well an intellectual investment in the network have come up. We can now observe, in the debates over control of the domain name space and the form of the next generation IP addresses, which is indeed, a struggle to find the next social structure that will guide the Internet in future.

The form of that structure will be harder to find, given the large number of concerned stakeholders. At the same time, the industry is struggling to find the economic basis for the large investment needed for the future growth, for example to upgrade built-up access to a more suitable technology.

If the Internet stumbles, it will not be because we lack technology, vision, or motivation. It will be, because we cannot set a direction and march collectively into the future.

Growth

Internet growth:

   Date       Hosts        |      Date       Hosts     Networks   Domains

   -----    ---------      +      -----    ---------   --------  ---------

   12/69            4      |      07/89      130,000        650      3,900

   06/70            9      |      10/89      159,000        837

   10/70           11      |      10/90      313,000      2,063      9,300

   12/70           13      |      01/91      376,000      2,338

   04/71           23      |      07/91      535,000      3,086     16,000

   10/72           31      |      10/91      617,000      3,556     18,000

   01/73           35      |      01/92      727,000      4,526

   06/74           62      |      04/92      890,000      5,291     20,000

   03/77          111      |      07/92      992,000      6,569     16,300

   12/79          188      |      10/92    1,136,000      7,505     18,100

   08/81          213      |      01/93    1,313,000      8,258     21,000

   05/82          235      |      04/93    1,486,000      9,722     22,000

   08/83          562      |      07/93    1,776,000     13,767     26,000

   10/84        1,024      |      10/93    2,056,000     16,533     28,000

   10/85        1,961      |      01/94    2,217,000     20,539     30,000

   02/86        2,308      |      07/94    3,212,000     25,210     46,000

   11/86        5,089      |      10/94    3,864,000     37,022     56,000

   12/87       28,174      |      01/95    4,852,000     39,410     71,000

   07/88       33,000      |      07/95    6,642,000     61,538    120,000

   10/88       56,000      |      01/96    9,472,000     93,671    240,000

   01/89       80,000      |      07/96   12,881,000    134,365    488,000

                           |      01/97   16,146,000               828,000

                           |      07/97   19,540,000             1,301,000

   Hosts    = a computer system with registered ip address (an A record)

   Networks = registered class A/B/C addresses

   Domains  = registered domain name (with name server record)

WWW Growth:

   Date     Sites     |   Date     Sites     |   Date     Sites

   -----  ----------  +   -----  ----------  +   -----  ----------

   06/93         130  |   07/97   1,203,096  |   04/99   5,040,663

   09/93         204  |   08/97   1,269,800  |   05/99   5,414,325

   10/93         228  |   09/97   1,364,714  |   06/99   6,177,453

   12/93         623  |   10/97   1,466,906  |   07/99   6,598,697

   06/94       2,738  |   11/97   1,553,998  |   08/99   7,078,194

   12/94      10,022  |   12/97   1,681,868  |   09/99   7,370,929

   06/95      23,500  |   01/98   1,834,710  |   10/99   8,115,828

   01/96     100,000  |   02/98   1,920,933  |   11/99   8,844,573

   06/96     252,000  |   03/98   2,084,473  |   12/99   9,560,866

   07/96     299,403  |   04/98   2,215,195  |   01/00   9,950,491

   08/96     342,081  |   05/98   2,308,502  |   02/00  11,161,811

   09/96     397,281  |   06/98   2,410,067  |   03/00  13,106,190

   10/96     462,047  |   07/98   2,594,622  |   04/00  14,322,950

   11/96     525,906  |   08/98   2,807,588  |   05/00  15,049,382

   12/96     603,367  |   09/98   3,156,324  |   06/00  17,119,262

   01/97     646,162  |   10/98   3,358,969  |   07/00  18,169,498

   02/97     739,688  |   11/98   3,518,158  |   08/00  19,823,296

   03/97     883,149  |   12/98   3,689,227  |   09/00  21,166,912

   04/97   1,002,512  |   01/99   4,062,280  |   10/00  22,282,727

   05/97   1,044,163  |   02/99   4,301,512  |

   06/97   1,117,255  |   03/99   4,389,131  |

   Sites = # of web servers (one host may have multiple sites by

                             using different domains or port numbers)

USENET Growth:

   Date  Sites  ~MB  ~Posts  Groups  |  Date   Sites   ~MB   ~Posts  Groups

   ----  -----  ---  ------  ------  +  ----  -------  ---   ------  ------

   1979      3            2       3  |  1987    5,200    2      957     259

   1980     15           10          |  1988    7,800    4     1933     381

   1981    150  0.05     20          |  1990   33,000   10    4,500   1,300

   1982    400           35          |  1991   40,000   25   10,000   1,851

   1983    600          120          |  1992   63,000   42   17,556   4,302

   1984    900          225          |  1993  110,000   70   32,325   8,279

   1985  1,300  1.0     375          |  1994  180,000  157   72,755  10,696

   1986  2,200  2.0     946     241  |  1995  330,000  586  131,614

      ~ approximate: MB - megabytes per day, Posts - articles per day