ARPANet linked computers at universities, government agencies, and defense contractors around the world — in many ways, it was the precursor of the Internet as we know it today. On September 2, , the first data moved from a host at the University of California, Los Angeles UCLA through an interface message processor switch a piece of network equipment.
This was a double world first: the first message sent over the internet and the very first server crash. During that time, computers were actually huge mainframes that served an important military role in computing and communications.
This was enormously challenging. Getting networks to communicate with one another was much more challenging than networking two or more computers.
Each network moved data differently, which ultimately made transferring information practically impossible. Join the ZME newsletter for amazing science news, features, and exclusive scoops. More than 40, subscribers can't be wrong. In , the pair devised a new communication architecture with a universal set of rules that essentially allowed computer networks to speak the same language.
On one hand, this new architecture had to contain strict rules in order to ensure the reliable transfer of data. On the other hand, the rules also had to be flexible enough to accommodate all the different types of data that could be transmitted. You see, from the very start, Cerf and Kahn designed their inter-network communication protocol for scale — this proved to be essential for the tremendous growth the internet would later come to experience, which surpassed even the wildest expectations of its creators.
The packet-switching technology, known as the Transmission Control Protocol TCP , was designed around four major principles:. As Cerf explained :. TCP was published in December In , J. On December 9, , Doug Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute unveiled the concept of hypertext — text that links to other text or documents — predating the web by a couple of decades.
It is during this time that the term internet inter-networks was born. In , Cerf and Kahn unveiled TCP that laid out the foundation so that networks around the world could communicate with one another. Inside the van were machines that transformed the words being typed on the terminal into packets of data.
These signals radiated through the air to a repeater on a nearby mountain top, where they were amplified and rebroadcast. With this extra boost, they could make it all the way to Menlo Park, where an antenna at an office building received them. It was here that the real magic began. Inside the office building, the incoming packets passed seamlessly from one network to another: from the packet radio network to Arpanet.
To make this jump, the packets had to undergo a subtle metamorphosis. They had to change their form without changing their content. Think about water: it can be vapor, liquid or ice, but its chemical composition remains the same. This miraculous flexibility is a feature of the natural universe — which is lucky, because life depends on it.
The flexibility that the internet depends on, by contrast, had to be engineered. And on that day in August, it enabled packets that had only existed as radio signals in a wireless network to become electrical signals in the wired network of Arpanet. Remarkably, this transformation preserved the data perfectly. The packets remained completely intact.
Powering this internetwork odyssey was the new protocol cooked up by Kahn and Cerf. Two networks had become one. The internet worked. Tall and soft-spoken, he is relentlessly modest; seldom has someone had a better excuse for bragging and less of a desire to indulge in it. We are sitting in the living room of his Palo Alto home, four miles from Google, nine from Facebook, and at no point does he even partly take credit for creating the technology that made these extravagantly profitable corporations possible.
The internet was a group effort, Nielson insists. SRI was only one of many organizations working on it. Nielson himself had forgotten about it until a reporter reminded him 20 years later.
By , Americans were having cybersex in AOL chatrooms and building hideous, seizure-inducing homepages on GeoCities.
The internet had outgrown its military roots and gone mainstream, and people were becoming curious about its origins. So Nielson dug out a few old reports from his files, and started reflecting on how the internet began.
Forty years ago, the internet teleported thousands of words from the Bay Area to Boston over channels as dissimilar as radio waves and copper telephone lines. Today it bridges far greater distances, over an even wider variety of media. It ferries data among billions of devices, conveying our tweets and Tinder swipes across multiple networks in milliseconds.
The most important thing to understand about the origins of the internet, Nielson says, is that it came out of the military. While Arpa had wide latitude, it still had to choose its projects with an eye toward developing technologies that might someday be useful for winning wars. The engineers who built the internet understood that, and tailored it accordingly.
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