infoARPA

The Childhood of Internet

 
 

Background of the ARPANET

It was back in 1957 USSR launched Sputnik, first artificial earth satellite. In response, US formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the following year, within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology. This was the first most widely known and recognized step in the development of Internet.

Like almost all of our technologies today, the Internet has a war time past. It is simply amazing that war, and the threat of war has given the world so much technology. The early 1960's, in the middle of the cold war, was possibly the closest this world has ever been to nuclear annihilation. The US Department of Defense wanted a network of computers which would allow them to continue to communicate even if partially damaged.

Kazmierczak, Marcus. "ebeab - eight bits equal a bite: Internet History." http://www.mkaz.com/ebeab/history/.

J.C.R. Licklider

Consequently, in the early 1960s, computer scientists across the country began exploring ways of directly connecting remote computers and their users. The earliest ideas of a computer network were formulated by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962, in a series of memos discussing his "Galactic Network" concept which intended to allow general communication between users of various computers. These ideas contained almost everything that the Internet is today. In October 1962, Licklider was appointed head of the Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control programs at ARPA (as it was then called), the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He would then convince Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor that this was a very important concept, although he left ARPA before any actual work on his vision was performed.

Separately, Paul Baran had started work in 1959 at the RAND Corporation on secure communications technologies that could enable a military communications network to withstand a nuclear attack. His results, published in a series of studies starting in 1960, described two key ideas: first, use of a decentralized network with multiple paths between any two points; and second, dividing complete user messages into what he called message blocks before sending them into the network. This first allowed the elimination of single points of failure, and enabled the network to automatically and efficiently work around any failures. A summary paper describing the entire scheme was presented in 1962, and published in 1964.

At about the same time, Leonard Kleinrock had performed early work on store and forward message systems for his doctoral thesis at MIT. This resulted in a very important analysis covering queue J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962, in a series of memos discussing his "Galactic Network" concepting theory in store and forward networks, eventually published as a book in 1964. However, this work did not include the concept of breaking a user's message up into smaller units for transmission through the network. Kleinrock describes his work as:

"Basically, what I did for my PhD research in 1961-1962 was to establish a mathematical theory of packet networks ..."

Donald Davies

Finally, Donald Davies of NPL had begun working with related concepts in 1965, after a conference in the United Kingdom on time-sharing brought up the inadequacies of existing circuit-switched networks. His work was originally carried out independently from Baran's work, although Davies learned of it after he gave a seminar on his ideas at NPL in 1966; incidentally, it was Davies who introduced the term packet.

Thus, the ideas that were to become the ARPANET came from four independent research centers: DARPA, the RAND corporation, MIT, and NPL (in the UK).

The basic objectives of ARPAnet were:

  • To develop techniques and obtain experience on interconnecting computers in such a way that a very broad class of interactions were possible.
  • To improve and increase computer research productivity through resource sharing.
  • To develop communication protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently across multiple linked packet networks.
  • To construct a 'sub network' consisting of telephone circuits and switching nodes whose reliability, delay characteristics, capacity, and cost would facilitate resource sharing among computers on the network.
  • To understand, design, and implement the protocols and procedures within the operating systems of each connected computer, in order to allow the use of the new sub network by the computers in sharing resources.

The Technology prior to Arpanet:

Prior to the widespread inter-networking that led to the Internet, most communication networks were limited by their nature to only allow communications between the stations on the network. Some networks had gateways or bridges between them, but these bridges were often limited or built specifically for a single use. One prevalent computer networking method was based on the central mainframe method, simply allowing its terminals to be connected via long leased lines. This method was used in the 1950s by Project RAND to support researchers such as Herbert Simon, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when collaborating across the continent with researchers in Santa Monica, California, on automated theorem proving and artificial intelligence.

Hence since these networks were local and the prevalent technologies were only accessible to certain group of people, the direct effect of these seem to have sustained only in the personals in direct contact with the technology then.



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