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History of the Internet

As a manager of the New York/Pennsauken Network Access Point, InetDaemon has a slightly different spin on the birth and evolution of the Internet, having witnessed its creation as a user and later personally participated in the Dot-Com boom of the mid to late 90's. One can never overestimate the personal impact of massive government research into seemingly frivolous ideas. One can also never fail to recognize the economic impact of creating whole new industries through the deregulation of Federally controlled resources.
BIRTH OF THE ARPAnet

The United States watched the Russians tested their first atom bomb (1949), tested their first hydrogen bomb (1953), and then launched Sputnik into orbit (1957). Though the United States had developed both atomic and nuclear weapons technologies before the Russians, the Russians had beaten the Americans into space. The fact that the Russians had comparable weapons technology, knew how to build rockets that could reach the United States, and could possibly deploy the weapons where the United States could not yet reach had far-reaching security concerns in the United States Government.

Clearly the United States had fallen behind in the technology race. The United States Government therefore commissioned the creation of an organization called the "Advanced Research Projects Agency" or ARPA for short.

In 1962 (the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis), the United States Air Force and ARPA began research and development in response to the Russion advances in space and nuclear technology. It became clear that in the event of a nuclear war, the United States would need a Command and Control (C&C) system that could survive one or more nuclear 'hits'. Work began on researching a decentralized system that would be robust enough to survive and function even if most of the network were destroyed.

RAND Corporation

The project of designing the new C&C system was granted to RAND Corporation. Paul Baran of Rand corporation first conceived the idea for a distributed, packet switching network, built on the premise that communication on the network would be unreliable. (See Paul Baran's "On Distributed Communications" series at RAND's website) The network was designed to be able to operate after a nuclear attack had wiped out large portions of the network. After tons of statistical analysis, Paul figured out that by breaking messages up into pieces and sending them via various redundant paths to the destination, messages would be difficult to destroy, and hard to intercept. A system with no centralized control point would be difficult to target, let alone destroy.

Even if some of the data were to be destroyed, as well as some of the communications points, the message would still get through, and the network would continue to function even when crippled.

After Paul Baran presented his findings, a testbed network was set up. The first machines connected to this experimental communications system (without packet switches between) were a TX-2 located at MIT and an AN/FSQ-32 at System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, CA; and a DEC computer at ARPA. The devices were attatched to 1200bps connections (circa 1965). This formed the first 'Experimental Network'.

The government awarded a Packet Switch contract to build Interface Message Processors (IMP) to Bolt Beranik and Newman (BBN) in 1968. BBN chose Honeywell DDP-516's with 12K memory as the connection and interface device. The Interface Message Processor (IMP) devices they built were placed on each of the four designated research sites. These sites were colleges who had won research grants from the US government. UCLA, Stanford, UCSB and Univeristy of Utah were the first Universities to interconnect their supercomputers (hosts) via the new ARPAnet IMP's. BBN purchased AT&T 50Kbps dedicated lines for the connections between sites.

See RFC# 4 for a timetable of the original deployment.
DARPAnet: The Defense Department Takeover

The Internet was begun as a military command and control systems research project. As the network was deployed and more government and research institutions were connected to it, the Defense Department took over the project ARPA. The Defense Department adminstrated the network for several years, and so the name was changed to DARPAnet (Defense Advanced Research Projects Network) in the early to mid 70's.

The DARPAnet eventually expanded beyond the Defense Department's willingness to sponsor it. More than half the connected sites were Universities receiving government funding, however the networks were in use by more than just the researchers. Around 1971, Ray Tomlinson, originally of BBN, wrote an application to send electronic mail back and forth and later modified it to use the @ symbol (user@host).

It wasn't long before 75% of the traffic on the network was private and personal e-mail. Many of the Defense Department connections were thus dismantled, and the network was handed over to the National Science Foundation (NSF).
DAWN OF TCP/IP

Early on in the 1980's, the Network Control Protocol (NCP) was used to move packets over the ARPANET. This protocol was eventually was split into two protocols to isolate functions in separate pieces of software, thus simplifying future software development efforts. The first of the two new protocols was to handle addressing (IP), the second was to ride over it and was designed to handle transport and make it reliable (TCP). Thus was born TCP over IP (TCP/IP). The creation of an operating system called BSD Unix which included a complete TCP/IP software 'stack', allowed colleges to connect individual workstations directly to the Internet without the need to invest in their own IMP. This caused a direct increase in the number of hosts.
BIRTH OF THE NSFnet

The National Science Foundation (NSF) was chartered to continue research and manage the Internet. This expansion began by connnecting colleges and universites using 56Kbps dedicated circuits from MCI in 1985. Later, the NSF contracted Merit to manage the NSFnet. Merit upgraded the NSFnet to 448Kbps MCI circuits and used IBM PC-RT's as routers. In 1987 Merit upgraded to 1.544Mbps T1's. In 1990 MCI, Merit, and IBM formed a non-profit corporation called American Network Services (ANS) to manage the NSFnet. ANS upgraded of the network infrastructure to DS3's (45Mbps).

CREATION OF THE NAPs

The National Science foundation built Network Access Points (NAPs) in Chicago, IL; Pennsauken, NJ; Vienna, VA; and San Jose, CA. These NAPs allowed designated regional access providers to connect to the National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet). To simplify management and access as well as routing issues, the NSF designated several companies as regional access providers (Argone, BARRnet, CERFnet, NYSERnet etc.)

According to the NSF's charter, only government and organizations receiving government research funding were allowed to connect to the NSFnet. The NFSnet, as it was now called, flourished under the management of the National Science Foundation and later Merit Networks. This, in combination with the proliferation of a low-cost network operating system called Unix brought the Internet to it's pre-web state. However, the Internet was still an etirely 'private' and non-commercial organization. Many commercial companies saw buisness opportunities in what had become an International computer network.

The Internet's growth and expansion was taken over in 1991 by the three major commercial long distance networks MCI, Sprint and AT&T after the Internet privatization initiatives proposed by the United States President. Also in 1991 Congress authorized the foundation of the National Research and Education Network (NREN).
EMERGENCE OF DNS

Around 1984 a system of resolving Domain Names was created because it was difficult for humans to remember the ever-increacing number of IP addresses reachable on the Internet. This began as a single file ( /etc/hosts.txt ) stored on a central sever everyone downloaded. As the number of hosts on the Internet increased, so did the size of the file, and the time it takes to download, and the ammount of traffic accessing the central server began to overload it's capacity.

Around 1993, a centralized set of root servers were put together with database resources from AT&T, registration services from Network Solutions, and information services from General Atomics/CERF. This set of servers would provide top level domain name resolution, IP address administration and delegate authority of domain names to those responsible for the networks for the domain name represents. The organization responsible for maintaining these services was called the Internet Network Information Center (InterNIC)
COMMERCIALIZATION OF THE Internet

COMMERCIALIZATION OF THE NAPs (Commercial Internet Exchanges)

Though Vice President (then Senator) Al Gore likes to take credit for the 'invention' of the Internet, he was in fact one of the co-authors of the bill that opened the Internet for commercialized use. Thanks to President Gore you not only have E-mail and web sites, you also have SPAM, Pop-Up ads and porn sites. By May of 1993, the National Science Foundation had written and released a solicitation to accommodate and promote the commercialization/privatization of the Internet (NSF93-52). This document mandated the creation of four Network Access Points (NAPs), which were sold via closed bid to the following providers:
Owner Name Location
Sprint Sprint NAP / NY-NAP Pennsauken, NJ
Pacific Bell PacBell NAP San Francisco, CA
Ameritech AADS NAP Chicago, IL
MFS MAE-E NAP Vienna, VA

As a condition of sale, the commercial providers purchasing NAP's were required to:

* Connect to the other NAP's.
* Establish policies and fees for connectivity at their own NAP.
* Provide a Route Server.
* Provide a Routing Arbiter Database.
* Provide NMS services for managed equipment.
* Manage site access and security for Network Provider engineers.
* Provide for the upgrade and expansion of the NAP's

These companies also referred to as the NAP Managers used these exchanges to create public Commercial Internet Exchanges (CIX's) to sell connectivity to their networks and exchange data to improve connectivity. The government had already built Federal Internet Exchanges (FIX's) in Maryland and California, maintained by NASA Ames.

The Vienna CIX was sold by NSF by closed bid to Metropolitan Fiber Systems in late 1992. Metro Fibre renamed it Metropolitan Area Exchanges (MAE's). Metro Fiber Systems was later assimilated by UUnet and installed MAE-West. UUnet was in turn assimilated by WorldCom in September 1996. MAE Dallas, Mae Houston, and MAE Los Angeles were added later.

American Network Services (ANS) was oroginally formed by a partnership between MCI, IBM, Merit and the state of Michigan. ANS was later purchased by America Online in 1995, and in 1997 America Online traded ANS to WorldCom in exchange for the American and overseas Compuserve ventures.

Work on the Very-highspeed Backbone Network Service (VBNS) was started in 1995 by MCI and the NSF to provide OC3 high-speed connectivity to supercomputers in research and educational facilities to foster the growth of the next group of Internet technologies, such as fiber optics, multimedia and other high bandwidth services.

As Metro Fiber Systems (MFS) raised prices for connectivity at their MAE's, and MAE East and MAE West became ever more congested by the explosive growth of Internet Traffic, private telecommunications companies began creating additional private access points to their networks called Network Access Points (NAP's). These NAP's became the new exchange points between all telecommunications and Internet service providers, giving them greater control of the flow of data into and out of their networks. These NAP's are located all over the United States, but tend to be concentrated where there is a large ammount of telecommunications equipment.

In 1993, the United States government awarded a private, for-profit organization called Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI), exclusive license for domain name registration services in the .com, .net and .org top-level domains for a five year period. During that time, Network Solutions enjoyed an exclusive monopoly on the registration of those Top Level Domains.

Over the course of a years discussion (circa 1996-7) between the Internet Assigned Nunbers Authority (IANA), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Federal Networking Council (FNC), and the European and Asian registries, a new authority called the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) was formed as a non-profit organization, whose authority it is to manage the IP address space in use in North and South America, the Caribbean and sub-saharan Africa. ARIN began operations on December 22, 1997.

In October 1998, the US Government appointed a private organization called Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to oversee the opening of the Domain Name Registration system to other competing companies. This responsibility technically still resides with InterNIC, however the name InterNIC has now been given to the United States Department of Commerce. Network Solutions still maintains the root DNS server equipment, and this equipment still resides on Network Solutions property. The U.S. Government expects that competition in domain name registration will provide the global Internet community with a number of benefits, including greater choice in services and prices.
The Modern Internet

Today, the 'modern' Internet is made up of several very large private global networks spanning around the world. The number of estimated users is growing exponentially, doubling every 8-9 months. To make the present-day Internet function, major carriers such as Ameritech, AT&T, BBN, Cable & Wireless, MCI/Worldcom/UUnet, Sprint, etc. build multiple dedicated private peering points to exchange data between their networks and provide transit connectivity to Internet users outside their own networks. A growing number of new start-ups are building networks to serve more than just data traffic. These new providers seek to merge data, voice, video and distributed computing services into a single service offering.

All these providers now make a buisness of building out the Internet backbone by upgrading the infrastructure of their own networks, making money by providing access to other small and large regional Internet Access Providers such as Merit, Applied Theory etc. These regional providers still provide connectivity for public school systems, colleges and other public and private institutions. Still other companies connect either to these regional providers or connect directly to one or more of the backbone providers, and provide direct-dial access to the Internet for individual users. Such direct-dial companies are called Internet Service Providers. Earthlink, Netcom and dozens of others provide such access for home users. New technogies such as DSL and cable modems are now allowing private users ever-higher speed access to the Internet, allowing local phone companies, and cable television companies to cash in on the Internet.

As the Internet grows and matures, other services are being offered. Today, it is possible to make long distance calls over the Internet for free, Video Conferencing is a reality for anyone with a computer and the right equipment. Other applications such as Multicasting (sending data from a single source to multiple locations simultaneously) and Voice Over IP guarantee that the Internet will continue to expand and merge with other technologies and media.
ADDITIONAL LINKS

* RAND and the Origins of the Internet
* Hobbes Internet History