An anecdotal history of the people and communities that brought about
the Internet and the Web

©2005 Walt Howe
(Last updated 7 November 2005)

Go to Top

Go to Learning
Tree

The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the
early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share
information on research and development in scientific and military fields.
J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of computers in
1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of
MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to
form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected
a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up
telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but
also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate.
Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to
DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. These visionaries and
many more left unnamed here are the real founders of the Internet.

When Senator Ted Kennedy heard in 1968 that the pioneering
Massachusetts company BBN had won the ARPA contract for an
"interface message processor (IMP)," he sent a congratulatory
telegram to BBN for their ecumenical spirit in winning the
"interfaith message processor" contract.

The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a
contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which
initially connected four major computers at universities in the
southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the
University of Utah). The contract was carried out by BBN of Cambridge, MA
under Bob Kahn and went online in December 1969. By June 1970, MIT,
Harvard, BBN, and Systems Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica, Cal.
were added. By January 1971, Stanford, MIT's Lincoln Labs,
Carnegie-Mellon, and Case-Western Reserve U were added. In months to come,
NASA/Ames, Mitre, Burroughs, RAND, and the U of Illinois plugged in. After
that, there were far too many to keep listing here.

Who was the first to use the
Internet?
Charley Kline at UCLA sent the first packets on
ARPANet as he tried to connect to Stanford Research Institute on Oct
29, 1969. The system crashed as he reached the G in LOGIN!

The Internet was designed in part to provide a communications network
that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear
attack. If the most direct route was not available, routers would
direct traffic around the network via alternate routes.

The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, scientists,
and librarians. There was nothing friendly about it. There were no home or
office personal computers in those days, and anyone who used it, whether a
computer professional or an engineer or scientist or librarian, had to
learn to use a very complex system.

Did Al Gore invent the
Internet?
According to a CNN transcript of an interview
with Wolf Blitzer, Al Gore said,"During my service in the United
States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Al
Gore was not yet in Congress in 1969 when ARPANET started or in 1974
when the term Internet first came into use. Gore was elected to
Congress in 1976. In fairness, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf acknowledge in
a paper titled Al Gore and the
Internet that Gore has probably done more than any other elected
official to support the growth and development of the Internet from
the 1970's to the present .

E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. He
picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link the
username and address. The telnet
protocol, enabling logging on to a remote computer, was published as a
Request for Comments (RFC) in 1972. RFC's are a means of sharing
developmental work throughout community. The ftp protocol,
enabling file transfers between Internet sites, was published as an RFC in
1973, and from then on RFC's were available electronically to anyone who
had use of the ftp protocol.

Libraries began automating and networking their catalogs in the late
1960s independent from ARPA. The visionary Frederick G. Kilgour of the
Ohio College Library Center (now OCLC,
Inc.) led networking of Ohio libraries during the '60s and '70s. In
the mid 1970s more regional consortia from New England, the Southwest
states, and the Middle Atlantic states, etc., joined with Ohio to form a
national, later international, network. Automated catalogs, not very
user-friendly at first, became available to the world, first through telnet or the
awkward IBM variant TN3270 and
only many years later, through the web. See The History of OCLC

Ethernet, a protocol for many local networks, appeared in 1974,
an outgrowth of Harvard student Bob Metcalfe's dissertation on
"Packet Networks." The dissertation was initially rejected by the
University for not being analytical enough. It later won acceptance
when he added some more equations to it.

The Internet matured in the 70's as a result of the TCP/IP
architecture first proposed by Bob Kahn at BBN and further developed by
Kahn and Vint Cerf at Stanford and others throughout the 70's. It was
adopted by the Defense Department in 1980 replacing the earlier Network
Control Protocol (NCP) and universally adopted by 1983.

The Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP) was invented in 1978 at Bell
Labs. Usenet was started in 1979 based on UUCP. Newsgroups, which are
discussion groups focusing on a topic, followed, providing a means of
exchanging information throughout the world . While Usenet is not
considered as part of the Internet, since it does not share the use of
TCP/IP, it linked unix systems around the world, and many Internet sites
took advantage of the availability of newsgroups. It was a significant
part of the community building that took place on the networks.

Similarly, BITNET (Because It's Time Network) connected IBM mainframes
around the educational community and the world to provide mail services
beginning in 1981. Listserv
software was developed for this network and later others. Gateways were
developed to connect BITNET with the Internet and allowed exchange of
e-mail, particularly for e-mail discussion lists. These listservs and
other forms of e-mail discussion lists formed another major element in the
community building that was taking place.

In 1986, the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross
country 56 Kbps backbone for the Internet. They maintained their
sponsorship for nearly a decade, setting rules for its non-commercial
government and research uses.

As the commands for e-mail, FTP, and telnet were
standardized, it became a lot easier for non-technical people to learn to
use the nets. It was not easy by today's standards by any means, but it
did open up use of the Internet to many more people in universities in
particular. Other departments besides the libraries, computer, physics,
and engineering departments found ways to make good use of the nets--to
communicate with colleagues around the world and to share files and
resources.

While the number of sites on the Internet was small, it was fairly easy
to keep track of the resources of interest that were available. But as
more and more universities and organizations--and their libraries--
connected, the Internet became harder and harder to track. There was more
and more need for tools to index the resources that were available.

The first effort, other than library catalogs, to
index the Internet was created in 1989, as Peter Deutsch and his crew at
McGill University in Montreal, created an archiver for ftp sites, which
they named Archie. This
software would periodically reach out to all known openly available ftp
sites, list their files, and build a searchable index of the software. The
commands to search Archie were unix commands, and it took some knowledge
of unix to use it to its full capability.

McGill University, which hosted the first Archie, found out one
day that half the Internet traffic going into Canada from the United
States was accessing Archie. Administrators were concerned that the
University was subsidizing such a volume of traffic, and closed down
Archie to outside access. Fortunately, by that time, there were many
more Archies available.

At about the same time, Brewster Kahle, then at
Thinking Machines, Corp. developed his Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), which
would index the full text of files in a database and allow searches of the
files. There were several versions with varying degrees of complexity and
capability developed, but the simplest of these were made available to
everyone on the nets. At its peak, Thinking Machines maintained pointers
to over 600 databases around the world which had been indexed by WAIS.
They included such things as the full set of Usenet Frequently Asked
Questions files, the full documentation of working papers such as RFC's by
those developing the Internet's standards, and much more. Like Archie, its
interface was far from intuitive, and it took some effort to learn to use
it well.

Peter Scott of the University of Saskatchewan, recognizing the need to
bring together information about all the telnet-accessible library
catalogs on the web, as well as other telnet resources, brought out his
Hytelnet catalog in 1990. It gave a single place to get information about
library catalogs and other telnet resources and how to use them. He
maintained it for years, and added HyWebCat in 1997 to provide
information on web-based catalogs.

In 1991, the first really friendly interface to the
Internet was developed at the University of Minnesota. The University
wanted to develop a simple menu system to access files and information on
campus through their local network. A debate followed between mainframe
adherents and those who believed in smaller systems with client-server
architecture. The mainframe adherents "won" the debate initially, but
since the client-server advocates said they could put up a prototype very
quickly, they were given the go-ahead to do a demonstration system. The
demonstration system was called a gopher after
the U of Minnesota mascot--the golden gopher. The gopher proved to be very
prolific, and within a few years there were over 10,000 gophers around the
world. It takes no knowledge of unix or computer architecture to use. In a
gopher system, you type or click on a number to select the menu selection
you want.

Gopher's usability was enhanced much more when the University of Nevada
at Reno developed the VERONICA
searchable index of gopher menus. It was purported to be an acronym for
Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives. A spider
crawled gopher menus around the world, collecting links and retrieving
them for the index. It was so popular that it was very hard to connect to,
even though a number of other VERONICA sites were developed to ease the
load. Similar indexing software was developed for single sites, called JUGHEAD
(Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display).

Peter Deutsch, who developed Archie, always insisted that Archie
was short for Archiver, and had nothing to do with the comic strip.
He was disgusted when VERONICA and JUGHEAD appeared.

In 1989 another significant event took place in making
the nets easier to use. Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European
Laboratory for Particle Physics, more popularly known as CERN, proposed a
new protocol for information distribution. This protocol, which became the
World Wide Web in 1991, was based on hypertext--a system of embedding
links in text to link to other text, which you have been using every time
you selected a text link while reading these pages. Although started
before gopher, it was slower to develop.

The development in 1993 of the graphical browser Mosaic by
Marc Andreessen and his team at the National Center For Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) gave the protocol its big boost. Later, Andreessen
moved to become the brains behind Netscape Corp., which produced the
most successful graphical type of browser and server until Microsoft declared war and developed
its MicroSoft Internet Explorer.

MICHAEL DERTOUZOS
1936-2001

The early days of the web was a confused period as many
developers tried to put their personal stamp on ways the web should
develop. The web was threatened with becoming a mass of unrelated
protocols that would require different software for different
applications. The visionary Michael Dertouzos of MIT's Laboratory
for Computer Sciences persuaded Tim Berners-Lee and others to form
the World Wide Web
Consortium in 1994 to promote and develop standards for the Web.
Proprietary plug-ins still abound for the web, but the Consortium
has ensured that there are common standards present in every
browser.

Read Tim Berners-Lee's tribute to Michael
Dertouzos.

Since the Internet was initially funded by the government, it was
originally limited to research, education, and government uses. Commercial
uses were prohibited unless they directly served the goals of research and
education. This policy continued until the early 90's, when independent
commercial networks began to grow. It then became possible to route
traffic across the country from one commercial site to another without
passing through the government funded NSFNet Internet backbone.

Delphi was the first national commercial online service to offer
Internet access to its subscribers. It opened up an email connection in
July 1992 and full Internet service in November 1992. All pretenses of
limitations on commercial use disappeared in May 1995 when the National
Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone, and all
traffic relied on commercial networks. AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came
online. Since commercial usage was so widespread by this time and
educational institutions had been paying their own way for some time, the
loss of NSF funding had no appreciable effect on costs.

Today, NSF funding has moved beyond supporting the backbone and higher
educational institutions to building the K-12 and local public library
accesses on the one hand, and the research on the massive high volume
connections on the other.

Microsoft's full scale entry into the browser, server,
and Internet Service Provider market completed the major shift over to a
commercially based Internet. The release of Windows 98 in June 1998 with
the Microsoft browser well integrated into the desktop shows Bill Gates'
determination to capitalize on the enormous growth of the Internet.
Microsoft's success over the past few years has brought court challenges
to their dominance. We'll leave it up to you whether you think these
battles should be played out in the courts or the marketplace.

During this period of enormous growth, businesses entering the Internet
arena scrambled to find economic models that work. Free services supported
by advertising shifted some of the direct costs away from the
consumer--temporarily. Services such as Delphi offered free web pages,
chat rooms, and message boards for community building. Online sales have
grown rapidly for such products as books and music CDs and computers, but
the profit margins are slim when price comparisons are so easy, and public
trust in online security is still shaky. Business models that have worked
well are portal sites, that try to provide everything for everybody, and
live auctions. AOL's acquisition of Time-Warner was the largest merger in
history when it took place and shows the enormous growth of Internet
business! The stock market has had a rocky ride, swooping up and down as
the new technology companies, the dot.com's encountered good news and bad.
The decline in advertising income spelled doom for many dot.coms, and a
major shakeout and search for better business models took place by the
survivors.

A current trend with major implications for the future is the growth of
high speed connections. 56K modems and the providers who supported them
spread widely for a while, but this is the low end now. 56K is not fast
enough to carry multimedia, such as sound and video except in low quality.
But new technologies many times faster, such as cablemodems and digital
subscriber lines (DSL) are
predominant now.

Wireless has grown rapidly in the past few years, and travellers search
for the wi-fi "hot spots" where they can connect while they are away from
the home or office. Many airports, coffee bars, hotels and motels now
routinely provide these services, some for a fee and some for free.

The next big growth area is the surge towards universal wireless
access, where almost everywhere is a "hot spot". Municipal wi-fi or
city-wide access, wiMAX offering broader ranges than wi-fi, and Verizon's
EV-DO will joust for dominance in the USA in the months ahead. The battle
is both economic and political.

Another trend that is beginning to affect web designers is the growth
of smaller devices to connect to the Internet. Small tablets, pocket PCs,
smart phones, game machines, and even GPS devices are now capable of
tapping into the web on the go, and many web pages are not designed to
work on that scale.

As Heraclitus said in the 4th century BC, "Nothing is permanent, but
change!"
May you live in interesting times! (ostensibly an ancient
Chinese curse)*

For more information on Internet history, visit these sites:

Hobbes'
Internet Timeline . ©1993-8 by Robert H Zakon. Significant dates in
the history of the Internet.

BBN Timeline.
Similar to Hobbes'.

A Brief History of
the Internet from the Internet Society. Written by some of those who
made it happen.

Do you have a comment or question about Internet
history?
Post it in the Navigating the Net
Forum or write to me.

Go to Top

Go to Learning
Tree