The first 'network' involved just four computers but the coming of the internet and the world wide web changed all that
POSSIBLY the most liberating invention of the late 20th century has its origins in the prosaic-sounding technology of packet switching, invented in the early 1960s. Until its invention, computer users could be connected to only one other computer at a time, using a long-distance telephone connection. It was expensive and unreliable.
Donald Davies, at the National Physical Laboratory in London, and Paul Baran,
at the Rand Corporation of Santa Monica, invented packet switching
independently. It works by converting data into packets, which, rather like
telegrams, contain the address of the sender and recipient. The packets are sent
via a package-switched network and
directed to a destination by small,
message-processing
computers, nowadays called
routers.
Using packet-switched networks, it was possible to attach any heterogeneous collection of computers and users cheaply and reliably, and allow access to any computer.
From the invention of packet-switching, it took 30 years for the first
primitive computer networks to evolve into today's ubiquitous information
structure, a progression that began with Arpanet, a packet-switched network that
in 1969 connected just four "host" computers funded by the US Department of
Defence's Advanced Research Projects
Agency. Development of the Arpanet was contracted
out
to a group of American universities and
this led to a democratic, occasionally anarchic, culture.
By 1971, Arpanet had 23 computers attached to it. Originally, the network was designed so that users could make use of specialised computers remote from their place of work. However, it turned out that the main use of the network was for electronic mail. In the next five years, thousands of Arpanet uses began to communicate by e-mail.
Another unplanned activity was the Usenet news system. Like a giant electronic bulletin board, Usenet enabled tens of thousands of users to access and contribute to newsgroups, free of charge. From 1975 to 1985, other computer networks sprang up, including online services such as CompuServe and America Online, or AOL, for home computers. But these were all military, scientific or private networks that could not communicate with each other.
In the late 1970s, the sponsors of Arpanet began to address this problem,
which they called inter-networking, or, simply, the internet. They devised a set
of rules (protocols) for communication between networks. This was the
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, known better as TCP/IP.
Gradually, many of the world's non-military networks connected with one another.
Thus, the internet became simply a network of networks. It was a miracle of
co-operation, each network adding to
the
telecommunications infrastructure piece-by-piece without
payment from any authority.
By 1988, there were 50,000 host computers attached to the internet. Three years later there were a million. The early 1990s saw the first commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) - such as Demon, founded in the UK in 1992 - providing inexpensive commercial and domestic access to the internet. Increasingly, the internet came to be viewed as an information repository. However, it was difficult to access this information.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a young,
British-born researcher at Cern, a particle physics
research
facility at Geneva, invented a
method of organising information. He called it the world wide web.
To access information on the web, Berners-Lee used a browser, which incorporated the use of hypertext, a system that links documents from different sources, forming an electronic path that guides users to related information.
The world wide web was initially used only by Cern scientists and was
released to the public in the summer of 1991. The information itself was
effectively disembodied in cyberspace - existing on computers here, there and
everywhere. The world wide web liberated the
internet,
allowing transfer of text, sound, images, and even video in
a straightforward manner.
In 1993, the primary users of the internet were academics and scientists; five years later, there were 130 million users all over the world and the web had become a social phenomenon.
A major commercial success was Netscape Corporation, whose Netscape Navigator browser, introduced in December 1994, did much to popularise the internet. Other corporations such as Yahoo and Lycos were commercial spin-offs of "search engines", originally developed in universities to help locate information on the web.
In 1995, Microsoft introduced its Internet Explorer browser and the Microsoft Network (MSN), seeking to dominate the internet. However, as the riches of the internet as a whole dwarfed the content of any one network, full-service providers such as AOL, MSN and CompuServe quickly changed their business model to become Internet Service Providers and mere "portals" to the world wide web. By 1996, there were 10 million host computers on the internet, a number that was doubling every 18 months.
By January 2000, there were more than 70 million and the internet enabled a
new commercial paradigm, based on the reduction of economic "friction" by
eliminating middle-men and physical inventories. The best-known example was
Amazon.com, an online bookstore established in 1995
by
Jim Bezos, a 30-year-old entrepreneur. The mid-1990s
internet was a Klondike for so-called dotcom entrepreneurs, with thousands of
businesses being formed, such as travel agencies, "e-tailers", stockbrokers and
online auctioneers.
Perhaps the most profound change produced by the internet on our everyday lives will be in the delivery of information goods such as newspapers, books, recorded music and movies. The new MP3 recorded music format, which enables music to be downloaded straight from the web without the need for delivery on a CD, is perhaps the shape of things to come. Many pundits think that internet web-casting will eventually replace broadcast radio and television.