Web 1.0: How Did We Get Here? Part 3
This is the third in a series on the commercial history of the internet. If you're lost, don't worry, you can?read Part 1 here.
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One consistent theme throughout these pieces will be the introduction of multiple characters, each of whom had an important role to play in the technological and commercial development of the internet as we know it in 2022. There is no central hero. This may be disorienting to the reader. Worry not. An index will be provided with each character’s name and contribution to be easily cross-referenced, and I encourage you to jump between pieces when you see fit and as necessary to understand the characters at play.
Why is it so? To put it simply, it's because we stand on the shoulders of giants. The technological and commercial history of the internet must acknowledge and appreciate the contributions of major players who have made the internet as it is in 2022. In the case of any technology that has had such a large global impact, there are many giants.?
ARPANET
While ARPANET, as we know, was the product of the ARPA of the DoD of the United States government, it was also the product of researchers from across the country. Robert Taylor was the man in charge of the project as head of the IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office) of ARPA, and under his leadership achieved a wide-scale interconnected network and achieve Licklider’s vision and build on Davies’s work, three network terminals projects were initiated and installed:?
By the way, Steve Jobs was now 14 years old, learning about machines from his father, less than 50 miles away. If it wasn’t for these initiatives in California, Apple Computer may never have been as successful as they were. Place matters.?
While initially, Taylor had set up three different sets of terminals for each of these projects, it quickly became obvious to him that it was a waste of resources and setting up a common terminal where they could have “interactive computing” would be the better idea. This was the birth of the idea for ARPANET.?
Taylor brought in Larry Roberts for help with ARPANET’s infrastructure, who would win the Draper Prize, an award given for the advancement of engineering, in 2001 for “the development of the internet”. Roberts came from MIT, where he and Thomas Merrill had been researching computer time-sharing over WAN (Wide Area Networks, a telecommunication infrastructure which extends over a large area, emerging in the 1950s and 60s).
In October 1967, Roberts proposed ARPANET, based on Wesley Clark’s, the American physicist widely credited with designing the first modern personal computer, proposal to use IMPs (Interface Message Processors, the first generation of internet gateways, acting as the node for routing of ARPANET till 1989).
The initial intention was to create a message-switching network (messages transmitted in their entirety, one hop at a time i.e. how the modern internet works). By incorporating Baran and Davies’s work on packet switching, Roberts was able to increase the proposed communication speed of ARPANET from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps (kilo-byte-per-second).?
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Leonard Kleinrock, computer scientist and eventual long-time professor at UCLA, would write the mathematical theory behind the technology based on his earlier work on queuing theory, which, as the name suggests, is the mathematical theory of queues, or waiting lines. This theory would be important to the development of the modern internet infrastructure as it would answer the questions of what happens when multiple packets have to reach the same destination one after the other and the mathematical foundations of routing.?
The first ARPANET link was established between Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and UCLA.
At 10:30 pm on October 29, 1969, Kleinrock remembers setting up a phone connection at UCLA with the team at SRI, with Kleinrock remembering the interaction as follows:?
“We typed the letter L and asked on the phone, Do you see the L?”
The SRI team responded, “Yes, we see the L”
We typed the letter O and asked “Do you see the O?”
“Yes, we see the O”
Then we typed G, and the system crashed".
Yet a revolution had begun.
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Ready for Part 4? You can read it here.