Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
12
Internet
"The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow."
- Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft
Four decades ago, Vinton Cerf - widely known as one of "the fathers of the Internet" and
today VP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google - developed TCP/IP in collaboration with
Bob Kahn. TCP/IP, in turn, proved to be the essential building block which enabled the cre-
ation of the Internet.
According to Cerf, there were three critical phases in the development of the Net. "The
first was packet switching," he comments, "which was independently conceived by Leonard
Kleinrock at MIT and UCLA, Donald W. Davies at the U.K.'s National Physical Laboratory
and the late Paul Baran at the Rand Corporation. Paul's work was in the early 1960s, when
the burning question was: How do you devise a voice and data network that can survive a
nuclear first strike?"
Cerf notes that the second phase was "actually building a packet-switched network. The
best-known one was the Defense Department's ARPAnet, led by Larry Roberts. Its purpose
was radical: a network that could share information across heterogeneous machines. Data
networks already existed in the 1960s, but these were networks of proprietary machines.
SNA required IBM computers, DECnet required DEC computers, and so on."
The third phase, of course, was "building a network that could extend ARPAnet's ma-
chine independence by connecting to other networks. That's what Bob Kahn and I set out to
do with the TCP/IP protocol. The Internet is literally a network of networks." TCP/IP stands
for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol.
After Cerf and Kahn defined TCP/IP, Cerf as a program manager for the United States
Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aggressively funded
various institutions and research labs to develop TCP/IP technology. (Later on, during the
late 1980s, as the Internet began to inch towards commercialization, Cerf moved to MCI
where he played a key role in the development of the first consumer email system, MCI
Mail.)
The Internet found its first function connecting research institutions and government
agencies, and fostering communications between scientists and technologists worldwide. It
was with these users in mind that Tim Berners-Lee launched a revolution.
Berners-Lee (British physicist, computer scientist and MIT professor) made the first pro-
posal for what became the World Wide Web in March 1989. Less than one year later, on
Christmas Day 1990 (with the assistance of Robert Cailliau, a young researcher at CERN
[The European Organization for Nuclear Research]) Berners-Lee implemented the first suc-
