Net History

The Atlantic cable of 1858 was established to carry instantaneous communications across the ocean for the first time. Although the laying of this first cable was seen as a landmarkevent in society, it was a technical failure. It only remained in service a few days.

Subsequent cables laid in 1866 were completely successful and compare to events like the moon landing of a century later... the cable ... remained in use for almost 100 years. Sputnik has launched ARPA in 1957 The organization united some of America's most brilliantpeople, who developed the United States' first successfulsatellite in 18 months. Several years later ARPA began to focus on computer networking and communicationstechnology. In 1962, Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was chosen to head ARPA's research in improving the military's use of computer technology. Licklider was a visionary who sought to make the government's use of computers moreinteractive. To quickly expand technology, Licklider saw the need to move ARPA's contracts from the private sector to universities and laid the foundations for what would become the ARPANET. The Internet as a tool to create "critical mass" of intellectual resources To appreciate the import ante the new computer-aided communication can have, one must consider the dynamics of "critical mass," as it applies to cooperation in creative endeavor. Take any problem worthy of the name, and you find only a few people who can contribute effectively to its solution. Those people must be brought into close intellectual partnership so that their ideas can come into contact with one another. But bring these people together physically in one place to form a team, and you have trouble, for the most creative people are oftennot the best team players, and there are not enough top positions in a single organization to keep them all happy. Let them go their separateways, and each creates his own empire, large or small, and devotes more time to the role of emperor than to the role of problem solver. The principals still get together at meetings. They still visit one another. But the time scale of their communication stretches out, and the correlations among mental models degenerate between meetings so that it may take a year to do a week’s communicating. There has to be some way of facilitating communicantion among people wit bout bringing them together in one place. The first LOGs: UCLA in 1969 Around Labor Day in 1969, BBN delivered an Interface Message Processor (IMP) to UCLA that was based on a Honeywell DDP 516, and when they turned it on, it just started running. It was hooked by 50 Kbps circuits to two other sites (SRI and UCSB) in the four-node network: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The plan was unprecedented: Kleinrock, a pioneering computer science professor at UCLA, and his small group of graduate students hoped to logonto the Stanford computer and try to send it some data.They would start by typing "login," and seeing if the letters appeared on the far-off monitor. First public demonstration of ARPANET in 1972 In late 1971, Larry Roberts at DARPA decided that people needed serious motivation to get things going. In October1972 there was to be an International Conference on Computer Communications, so Larry asked Bob Kahn at BBN to organize a public demonstration of the ARPANET. It took Bob about a year to get everybody far enough along to demonstrate a bunch of applications on the ARPANET. The idea was that we would install a packet switch and aTerminal Interface Processor or TIP in the basement of theWashington Hilton Hotel, and actually let the public come in and use the ARPANET, running applications all over the U.S ....