The Internet

The invention: 



A worldwide network of interlocking computer

systems, developed out of a U.S. government project to improve

military preparedness.



The people behind the invention:



Paul Baran, a researcher for the RAND corporation

Vinton G. Cerf (1943- ), an American computer scientist

regarded as the “father of the Internet”








Cold War Computer Systems



In 1957, the world was stunned by the launching of the satellite

Sputnik I by the Soviet Union. The international image of the United

States as the world’s technology superpower and its perceived edge

in the ColdWar were instantly brought into question. As part of the

U.S. response, the Defense Department quickly created the Advanced

Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to conduct research into

“command, control, and communications” systems. Military planners

in the Pentagon ordered ARPA to develop a communications

network that would remain usable in the wake of a nuclear attack.

The solution, proposed by Paul Baran, a scientist at the RAND Corporation,

was the creation of a network of linked computers that

could route communications around damage to any part of the system.

Because the centralized control of data flow by major “hub”

computers would make such a system vulnerable, the system could

not have any central command, and all surviving points had to be

able to reestablish contact following an attack on any single point.

This redundancy of connectivity (later known as “packet switching”)

would not monopolize a single circuit for communications, as

telephones do, but would automatically break up computer messages

into smaller packets, each of which could reach a destination

by rerouting along different paths.

ARPA then began attempting to link university computers over

telephone lines. The historic connecting of four sites conducting

ARPAresearch was accomplished in 1969 at a computer laboratory

at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), which was

connected to computers at the University of California at Santa

Barbara, the Stanford Research Institute, and the University of Utah.

UCLA graduate student Vinton Cerf played a major role in establishing

the connection, which was first known as “ARPAnet.” By

1971, more than twenty sites had been connected to the network, including

supercomputers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

and Harvard University; by 1981, there were more than two

hundred computers on the system.





The Development of the Internet



Because factors such as equipment failure, overtaxed telecommunications

lines, and power outages can quickly reduce or abort

(“crash”) computer network performance, the ARPAnet managers

and others quickly sought to build still larger “internetting” projects.

In the late 1980’s, the National Science Foundation built its

own network of five supercomputer centers to give academic researchers

access to high-power computers that had previously been

available only to military contractors. The “NSFnet” connected university

networks by linking them to the closest regional center; its

development put ARPAnet out of commission in 1990. The economic

savings that could be gained from the use of electronic mail

(“e-mail”), which reduced postage and telephone costs, were motivation

enough for many businesses and institutions to invest in

hardware and network connections.

The evolution of ARPAnet and NSFnet eventually led to the creation

of the “Internet,” an international web of interconnected government,

education, and business computer networks that has been

called “the largest machine ever constructed.” Using appropriate

software, a computer terminal or personal computer can send and

receive data via an “Internet Protocol” packet (an electronic envelope

with an address). Communications programs on the intervening

networks “read” the addresses on packets moving through the

Internet and forward the packets toward their destinations. From

approximately one thousand networks in the mid-1980’s, the Internet

grew to an estimated thirty thousand connected networks by

1994, with majority of Internet users live in the United States and Europe, but

the Internet has continued to expand internationally as telecommunications

lines are improved in other countries.



Impact



Most individual users access the Internet through modems attached

to their home personal computers by subscribing to local area

networks. These services make information sources available such as

on-line encyclopedias and magazines and embrace electronic discussion

groups and bulletin boards on nearly every specialized interest

area imaginable. Many universities converted large libraries to electronic

form for Internet distribution, with an ambitious example being

Cornell University’s conversion to electronic form of more than

100,000 books on the development of America’s infrastructure.

Numerous corporations and small businesses soon began to

market their products and services over the Internet. Problems soon

became apparent with the commercial use of the new medium,

however, as the protection of copyrighted material proved to be difficult;

data and other text available on the system can be “downloaded,”

or electronically copied. To protect their resources from

unauthorized use via the Internet, therefore, most companies set up

a “firewall” computer to screen incoming communications.

The economic policies of the Bill Clinton administration highlighted

the development of the “information superhighway” for

improving the delivery of social services and encouraging new

businesses; however, many governmental agencies and offices, including

the U.S. Senate and House of Representative, have been

slow to install high-speed fiber-optic network links. Nevertheless,

the Internet soon came to contain numerous information sites to improve

public access to the institutions of government.

are improved in other countries.



Vinton Cerf



Although Vinton Cerf is widely hailed as the “father of the

Internet,” he himself disavows that honor. He has repeatedly

emphasized that the Internet was built on the work of countless

others, and that he and his partner merely happened to make a

crucial contribution at a turning point in Internet development.

The path leading Cerf to the Internet began early. He was

born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1943. He read widely, devouring

L. Frank Baum’s Oz books and science fiction novels—

especially those dealing with real-science themes. When he was

ten, a book called The Boy Scientist fired his interest in science.

After starting high school in Los Angeles in 1958, he got his first

glimpse of computers, which were very different devices in

those days. During a visit to a Santa Monica lab, he inspected a

computer filling three rooms with wires and vacuum tubes that

analyzed data from a Canadian radar system built to detect

sneak missile attacks from the Soviet Union. Two years later he

and a friend began programming a paper-tape computer at

UCLA while they were still in high school.

After graduating from Stanford University in 1965 with a

degree in computer science, Cerf worked for IBM for two years,

then entered graduate school at UCLA. His work on multiprocessing

computer systems got sidetracked when a Defense

Department request came in asking for help on a packet-switching

project. This new project drew him into the brand-new field

of computer networking on a system that became known as the

ARPAnet. In 1972 Cerf returned to Stanford as an assistant professor.

There he and a colleague, Robert Kahn, developed the

concepts and protocols that became the basis of the modern Internet—

a term they coined in a paper they delivered in 1974.

Afterward Cerf made development of the Internet the focus

of his distinguished career, and he later moved back into the

business world. In 1994 he returned to MCI as senior vice president

of Internet architecture. Meanwhile, he founded the Internet

Society in 1992 and the Internet Societal Task Force in 1999.







See also: Cell phone; Communications satellite; Fax machine;

Personal computer.