Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
B.10.1. Joseph C. R. Licklider (1915-90) was a visionary computer pioneer whose impact is still
felt everywhere in computer science. His interests were wide ranging and included psycholog-
ical aspects of communications and learning, brain studies, computer networks, time-sharing
computers, interactive systems, and cooperation between computers and humans. His ground-
breaking paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis” investigated the possibility of a closer cooperation
between humans and computers with computers being used to augment human intellectual
capacity. His 1968 paper with Bob Taylor, “The Computer as a Communications Device,” out-
lined their joint vision of what has become the present-day Internet.
any means, but he had the same concept - all of the stuff linked together
throughout the world, that you can use a remote computer, get data from a
remote computer, or use lots of computers in your job. The vision was really
Lick's originally. None of us can really claim to have seen that before him
nor [can] anybody in the world. Lick saw this vision in the early sixties. He
didn't have a clue how to build it. He didn't have any idea how to make this
happen. But he knew it was important, so he sat down with me and really
convinced me that it was important and convinced me to move into making
it happen.
2
B.10.2. Sun Microsystems was
founded in the early 1980s by two
Stanford MBAs, Vinod Khosla and
Scott McNealy, and a Stanford grad-
uate student, Andy Bechtolsheim,
together with another graduate
student, Bill Joy, from the University
of California, Berkeley. Sun was an
acronym for Stanford University
Network, where Bechtolsheim's
prototypes were already running,
connected by the Ethernet.
It was Roberts and a small team of dedicated engineers and graduate stu-
dents, mostly trained at MIT, who built the ARPANET. The ARPANET was
rapidly followed by a worldwide proliferation of similar - but incompatible -
networks. In 1974, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf brought order to this chaos by
publishing a paper with the intimidating title “A Protocol for Packet Network
Intercommunication.” Their paper coined the term
Internet
for what they called
the “internetworking of networks.”
In 1982, two Stanford MBAs, Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy, founded
Sun Microsystems, together with hardware expert Andy Bechtolsheim, a PhD
student in Stanford University's Electrical Engineering Department, and a Unix
software expert, Bill Joy, a graduate student from the nearby University of
California, Berkeley (
B.10.2
). They set up the company to develop robust single-
user
workstations
, computers with less computing power than minicomputers
but more powerful than PCs. From the start, the Sun founders envisioned net-
working their workstations. As Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy, said,
The whole concept of “The Network is the Computer” we started at Sun
was based on the fact that every computer should be hooked to every other
computing device on the planet.
3
To begin our story, we shall go back in time to the origins of the telegraph
(
Fig. 10.1
) system and briefly describe what has been called “The Victorian
Internet” by author and journalist Tom Standage.
Fig. 10.1. An advanced version of a
telegraph with a printing receiver and
transmitter.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search