The invention: A worldwide network of interlocking computer systems, developed out of a U.S. government project to improve military preparedness.
The people behind the invention:
Paul Baran, a researcher for the RAND corporation Vinton G. Cerf (1943- ), an American computer scientist regarded as the “father of the Internet”
Cold War Computer Systems
In 1957, the world was stunned by the launching of the satellite Sputnik I by the Soviet Union. The international image of the United States as the world’s technology superpower and its perceived edge in the Cold War were instantly brought into question. As part of the U.S. response, the Defense Department quickly created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to conduct research into “command, control, and communications” systems. Military planners in the Pentagon ordered ARPA to develop a communications network that would remain usable in the wake of a nuclear attack. The solution, proposed by Paul Baran, a scientist at the RAND Corporation, was the creation of a network of linked computers that could route communications around damage to any part of the system. Because the centralized control of data flow by major “hub” computers would make such a system vulnerable, the system could not have any central command, and all surviving points had to be able to reestablish contact following an attack on any single point. This redundancy of connectivity (later known as “packet switching”) would not monopolize a single circuit for communications, as telephones do, but would automatically break up computer messages into smaller packets, each of which could reach a destination by rerouting along different paths.
ARPA then began attempting to link university computers over telephone lines. The historic connecting of four sites conducting ARPA research was accomplished in 1969 at a computer laboratory at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), which was connected to computers at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Stanford Research Institute, and the University of Utah. UCLA graduate student Vinton Cerf played a major role in establishing the connection, which was first known as “ARPAnet.” By 1971, more than twenty sites had been connected to the network, including supercomputers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University; by 1981, there were more than two hundred computers on the system.
The Development of the Internet
Because factors such as equipment failure, overtaxed telecommunications lines, and power outages can quickly reduce or abort (“crash”) computer network performance, the ARPAnet managers and others quickly sought to build still larger “internetting” projects. In the late 1980′s, the National Science Foundation built its own network of five supercomputer centers to give academic researchers access to high-power computers that had previously been available only to military contractors. The “NSFnet” connected university networks by linking them to the closest regional center; its development put ARPAnet out of commission in 1990. The economic savings that could be gained from the use of electronic mail (“e-mail”), which reduced postage and telephone costs, were motivation enough for many businesses and institutions to invest in hardware and network connections.
The evolution of ARPAnet and NSFnet eventually led to the creation of the “Internet,” an international web of interconnected government, education, and business computer networks that has been called “the largest machine ever constructed.” Using appropriate software, a computer terminal or personal computer can send and receive data via an “Internet Protocol” packet (an electronic envelope with an address). Communications programs on the intervening networks “read” the addresses on packets moving through the Internet and forward the packets toward their destinations. From approximately one thousand networks in the mid-1980′s, the Internet grew to an estimated thirty thousand connected networks by 1994, with an estimated 25 million users accessing it regularly. The
VlNTON CERF
Although Vinton Cerf is widely hailed as the “father of the Internet,” he himself disavows that honor. He has repeatedly emphasized that the Internet was built on the work of countless others, and that he and his partner merely happened to make a crucial contribution at a turning point in Internet development.
The path leading Cerf to the Internet began early. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1943. He read widely, devouring L. Frank Baum’s Oz topics and science fiction novels— especially those dealing with real-science themes. When he was ten, a topic called The Boy Scientist fired his interest in science. After starting high school in Los Angeles in 1958, he got his first glimpse of computers, which were very different devices in those days. During a visit to a Santa Monica lab, he inspected a computer filling three rooms with wires and vacuum tubes that analyzed data from a Canadian radar system built to detect sneak missile attacks from the Soviet Union. Two years later he and a friend began programming a paper-tape computer at UCLA while they were still in high school.
After graduating from Stanford University in 1965 with a degree in computer science, Cerf worked for IBM for two years, then entered graduate school at UCLA. His work on multiprocessing computer systems got sidetracked when a Defense Department request came in asking for help on a packet-switching project. This new project drew him into the brand-new field of computer networking on a system that became known as the ARPAnet. In 1972 Cerf returned to Stanford as an assistant professor. There he and a colleague, Robert Kahn, developed the concepts and protocols that became the basis of the modern In-ternet—a term they coined in a paper they delivered in 1974.
Afterward Cerf made development of the Internet the focus of his distinguished career, and he later moved back into the business world. In 1994 he returned to MCI as senior vice president of Internet architecture. Meanwhile, he founded the Internet Society in 1992 and the Internet Societal Task Force in 1999.
majority of Internet users live in the United States and Europe, but the Internet has continued to expand internationally as telecommunications lines are improved in other countries.
Impact
Most individual users access the Internet through modems attached to their home personal computers by subscribing to local area networks. These services make information sources available such as on-line encyclopedias and magazines and embrace electronic discussion groups and bulletin boards on nearly every specialized interest area imaginable. Many universities converted large libraries to electronic form for Internet distribution, with an ambitious example being Cornell University’s conversion to electronic form of more than 100,000 topics on the development of America’s infrastructure.
Numerous corporations and small businesses soon began to market their products and services over the Internet. Problems soon became apparent with the commercial use of the new medium, however, as the protection of copyrighted material proved to be difficult; data and other text available on the system can be “downloaded,” or electronically copied. To protect their resources from unauthorized use via the Internet, therefore, most companies set up a “firewall” computer to screen incoming communications.
The economic policies of the Bill Clinton administration highlighted the development of the “information superhighway” for improving the delivery of social services and encouraging new businesses; however, many governmental agencies and offices, including the U.S. Senate and House of Representative, have been slow to install high-speed fiber-optic network links. Nevertheless, the Internet soon came to contain numerous information sites to improve public access to the institutions of government.
See also Cell phone; Communications satellite; Fax machine; Personal computer.
