The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as the
ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has
been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network
architecture for military command-and-control that could survive
disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact,
ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to get most economical
use out of then-scarce large-computer resources. Robert Herzfeld, who
was director of ARPA at the time, has been at some pains to debunk
the "survive-a-nuclear-war" myth, but it seems unkillable.
As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to
support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms
of distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic
mail quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research
labs and defense contractors early discovered the Internet's
potential as a medium of communication between humans and linked up
in steadily increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of
academics, techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The
roots of this lexicon lie in those early years.
Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The
typical machine/OS combination moved from {DEC} {PDP-10}s and
{PDP-20}s, running {TOPS-10} and {TOPS-20}, to PDP-11s and {VAX}en
and Suns running {Unix}, and in the 1990s to Unix on Intel
microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable, most
notably in the move from NCP/IP to {TCP/IP} in 1982 and the
implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983. It was around this
time that people began referring to the collection of interconnected
networks with ARPANET at its core as "the Internet".
The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation guidelines --
connected institutions had to be involved with a DOD-related research
project. By the mid-80s, many of the organizations clamoring to join
didn't fit this profile. In 1986, the National Science Foundation
built NSFnet to open up access to its five regional supercomputing
centers; NSFnet became the backbone of the Internet, replacing the
original ARPANET pipes (which were formally shut down in 1990).
Between 1990 and late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major
telecommunications companies until the Internet backbone had gone
completely commercial.
That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture discovered
the Internet. Once again, the {killer app} was not the anticipated
one -- rather, what caught the public imagination was the hypertext
and multimedia features of the World Wide Web. Subsequently the
Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol
stack favored by European telecoms monopolies) and is in the process
of absorbing into itself many of the proprietary networks built
during the second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. By 1996 it
had become a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a
globally-extended Internet would become the key unifying
communications technology of the next century. See also {the
network}.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {the network}]