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more on Wendy Grossman: Carbon-dating the Internet

From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 09:58:42 -0400


Begin forwarded message:

From: Sid Karin <skarin () ucsd edu>
Date: October 16, 2004 11:07:04 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Wendy Grossman: Carbon-dating the Internet

Dave,

Nice note.  Small correction;  while the NSF Supercomputer centers were
in some sense established in 1985, they weren't linked to or via NSFnet
for quite some time after that. We established SDSCnet, a clone of the DDCMP based DOE MFEnet (and linked it to MFEnet), in early 1986 and ran SDSCnet until there was a 
robust NSFnet,  sometime in 1987 if my memory is correct.   With our own
approximately 20 nodes and seamless access to the dozens of MFE nodes we
provided fairly substantial networking for the time. I caught a lot of flack at the time for establishing a politically incorrect network, but the reality was 
that the politically correct network did not yet exist for all practical
purposes and we had real users from Hawaii to the east coast who needed
access. SDSCnet provided interactive access directly to our Cray XMP. This was the only interactive access in the NSF Supercomputer centers program for more than a year. (The Princeton based center established a network as well, but only provided access to a front end for batch access to their CDC 205.) When NSFnet became functional we shut down SDSCnet. Sometime later I received a very gracious note from Larry Landwebber saying that he now understood what we had done in the first place. Dennis Jennings tried to get us connected to the ARPAnet in the interim period, but he underestimated the influence NSF Program Directors had over DoD. :-) 


        Cheers,

                ......Sid




___

Dave Farber  +1 412 726 9889



 ..... Forwarded Message .......
From: Bob Drzyzgula <bob () drzyzgula org>
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: Ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2004 09:00:58 -0400
Subj: Wendy Grossman: Carbon-dating the Internet


http://www.theinquirer.net/Default.aspx?article=18978

|    Carbon-dating the Internet
|    net.wars
|
|    By[1] Wendy M. Grossman: Friday 08 October 2004, 12:33
|
| THE DEMENTED three-year-old that rampages through all of Microsoft's | software - My Music; MY Pictures; MY COMPUTER - seems to have been let | loose on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Internet, which 
|    is around now sometime. Or isn't. It depends whose publicity
|    department you listen to.
|
| The year most people seem to be dating the Internet to is 1969, when | the ARPAnet was first connected up. It's certainly tempting to set it 
|    then. That's the network that's generally agreed to be the most
| important precursor of the Internet. October 29 is the date [2]UCLA 
|    has chosen for the official celebration. That's commemorating
| September 2, the day the first Internet message was sent from Leonard 
|    Kleinrock's UCLA computer lab.
|
|    That of course makes that date entirely correct as far as UCLA is
|    concerned. But is that the [3]Big Bang that created the Internet?
| Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyons, in their 1996 book Where Wizards Stay | Up Late, document the efforts of Boston-based [4]Bolt Beranek Newman | to create the IMP machines that Kleinrock's lab used. BBN was where, | in 1971, Ray Tomlinson inaugurated person-to-person network email and | chose the now-ubiquitous @ symbol. But we can't take either 1969 or | 1971 as the beginning of email itself, since that was first created 
|    for the [5]time-sharing systems of the 1960s.
|
| We could go back a few years earlier, to when Paul Baran, working at | Rand Corporation, and Donald Davies, working at the UK's [6]National 
|    Physical Laboratory independently came up with the idea of packet
| switching. That was a completely new way of looking at transmitting | data across a network, and is the heart of the way the Internet as we 
|    know it operates.
|
|    Thing is, packet-switching could have remained just an idea. The
|    telephone network, still the biggest network in the world, doesn't
| work that way. The TCP/IP protocols that arguably define the Internet | weren't invented until 1974, by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. If you want | to go, say, from the publication of their paper, you could pick May 
|    1974, as Cerf mentions in a [7]recent column. That would make the
| Internet 30 years old. But obviously it would be more logical to date | from when the ARPAnet moved to using TCP/IP, which was 1983. In which | case - glory be! -- the Internet turned 21 years old in January. That | would mean it's newly an adult, although you'd never know it from the | behavior of some of the people on it. Perhaps they're still out on the 
|    now obligatory American coming-of-age pub crawl.
|
| That year - 1983 - is a good pick for another reason. That's the year | the [8]domain name system as we now know it was designed and deployed. 
|    Without that relatively user-friendly veneer email would have been
|    slower to take off, and the commercial Web as we know it might not
| exist at all. The domain name system did as much or more to make the | Internet usable as graphical Web browsers did. Though 1969 can answer 
|    that by pointing out that the first-ever RFC, the Requests for
| Comments that define Internet standards, is dated [9]April 7, 1969. 
|    That gives UCLA the right year, but puts it six months behind
|    schedule.
|
| Of course, to most people the Internet means the Web and email (and | sometimes email also means the Web). In which case, you could go for | 1989, when [10]Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, invented it. That's 
|    straightforward enough. Except that the Web didn't really take off
| until graphical browsers turned up, which is not, as Netscape (now an 
|    AOL division) might like to claim, 1994, when the first version of
| Netscape was released, nor its precursor, [11]Mosaic, which came out | in 1993. When Mosaic came out, there were already a number of browser | projects competing for attention, of which the earliest were [12]Viola | and Erwise, which were released within a month of each other in 1992. 
|
|    There are still more dates you could consider: 1995, the year Bill
| Gates got net; 1979, the year Usenet was created; 1985, the year the | supercomputing centers were created and linked to form NSFnet, which | became an important Internet backbone; 1991, the year that acceptable | use policies were changed to allow commercial traffic on the Internet; 
|    1994, the year that the big online information services - AOL,
|    CompuServe, Delphi - set up their Internet gateways.
|
| In 1998, I appeared at a conference called "Technological Visions", | hosted at the University of Southern California, and as part of the 
|    exercise felt required to produce some predictions. The papers
|    eventually appeared earlier this year - ah, Internet time - in a
| [13]book. Six years is of course long enough to look really silly, but | one prediction seems clearly to have come true. I said that it would 
|    take constant vigilance to ensure that history did not record that
| Bill Gates invented the Internet. I think the general reaction was, | "Nah, nah, come on, these people are still alive, and this stuff is 
|    all written down."
|
| Yes. By PR departments. Who take the view that the Internet started | when their company made its memorable contribution. In which case, I 
|    say to hell with it, the Internet is 13 years and four months old,
|    because I got online in June 1991. So there. ยต
|
|    Wendy M. Grossman's [14]Web site has an extensive archive of her
|    books, articles, and music, and an [15]archive of all the earlier
| columns in this series. She has an [16]intermittent blog. Readers are 
|    welcome to post there or to send email, but please turn off HTML.
|
| References
|
|    1. mailto:netwars () skeptic demon co uk
|    2. http://www.internetanniversary.com/
|    3. http://www.internethistory.info/
|    4. http://www.bbn.com/
|    5. http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Email
|    6. http://www.npl.co.uk/
|    7. http://global.mci.com/us/enterprise/insight/cerfs_up/
|    8. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1591.html
|    9. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1591.html
|   10. http://www.w3c.org/
| 11. http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/NCSAMosaicHome.html 
|   12. http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~wei/viola/violaHome.html
|   13. http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1686_reg.html
|   14. http://www.pelicancrossing.net
|   15. http://www.pelicancrossing.net/nwcols.htm
|   16. http://www.livejournal.com/~wendyg



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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
     Sidney Karin, Ph.D., P.E.       858-534-5075 (voice)
                                        858-822-5443 (fax)
                                        skarin () ucsd edu
     Professor,
     Department of Computer Science and Engineering
     Director Emeritus
     San Diego Supercomputer Center
     University of California, San Diego
     9500 Gilman Drive
     La Jolla,  CA  92093-0505


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